Ankur kept up Starnium until his sophomore year of high school, and after he graduated, in 2007, he entered Wharton's undergraduate business program at the University of Pennsylvania. He immediately wanted to start a business, but his father told him he was there to get an education. He could start a nonprofit if he wanted.
Ankur's first idea was to create a group that would foster a Silicon Valley ethos at Penn, connecting members of the engineering department to Wharton students interested in start-ups and innovation. But it seemed most of his Wharton classmates were interested in getting banking jobs.
Jain went for advice to his father and to a friend who had stuck with the family, retired Navy Admiral William Owens. Owens had begun work on something called the Sanya Initiative, a program designed to foster communication and trust between elite retired military officers in the U.S. and China.
Jain already knew, deep down, what he wanted. It wasn't money, although he certainly liked money. It was access. He felt there were people who had knowledge and influence even beyond the sort he'd glimpsed at his father's parties. "There's a little top circle," Jain says. "And I want to be in it. Not for the power, but for the sake of knowing shit."
Kairos is Greek for "the right moment." Owens agreed to help Jain get the organization off the ground, the first of many éminence grises to extend a hand. He liked Jain's youth and energy. "When you see somebody who's going to take the bone and run with it, it's a great experience," Owens says. "He's someone quite special; for me, that's a rewarding thing to watch and to help." Jain saw Kairos as another win-win, giving young entrepreneurs access to advice, and potentially capital, from established players in business. In return, these older executives, many of them retired, would be back on the cutting edge, exposed to the best and brightest and in many cases to new investment opportunities. And Jain would be right in the middle of it all.
Jain enlisted Medwell, with whom he had grown up in Seattle, as well as Pourbaba and Shriftman, Medwell's fraternity brothers at USC, to help him found a national organization. Together, they wooed existing entrepreneurship clubs at a few schools. But Jain wanted to grow faster. He decided he would show students what a national entrepreneurship society could do. He would throw a major event for Kairos, in New York City, in early 2009.
Owens introduced Jain to Bill White, at that time the head of the USS Intrepid Museum, a retired aircraft carrier permanently docked on the Hudson. White agreed to let Jain host his dinner on board, gratis.
Then, through White, Jain got Bill Clinton to agree to speak. He got Phil Condit, the former CEO of Boeing. Bill Gates Sr. recorded a video message. Before he knew it, 500 students wanted to attend, and Jain had run up a $140,000 tab for the dinner and other aspects of the summit. His father told him he needed to fundraise.
Again, Jain turned to the family network, starting with his dad's lawyer. He asked for $5,000. The lawyer agreed immediately. Jain's father didn't.
"I hung up the phone, and my dad was like, 'You're an idiot! He clearly would have given you $10,000 or more!'" Naveen made him call the lawyer back. Ankur sheepishly got him to donate $2,500 more. "That was my first lesson in fundraising," Ankur says.
In the end, Jain arrived at the event with the flu, sick from working around the clock—something that would happen to him the next two times he hosted Kairos events. But he'd raised enough money to pay for it all.
Today, Kairos is a centralized organization, with an executive team of undergraduates (in February, in anticipation of his graduation, Jain announced that Reid, as CEO, and Victoria Schramm, as president, would run the organization) and regional heads who oversee networks of fellows.
Kairos has become an adviser to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (Jain helped put together a group of young immigrant entrepreneurs to help the chamber lobby Capitol Hill to change visa regulations.) Jain is involved in a program called Startup Chile, which is intended to foster innovation in that country. He is also involved with Startup America, but he hasn't met with President Obama. Not yet.
Here in The Hague, there are 100 Kairos fellows in attendance at the World Foresight Forum, a conference on topics as diverse as the future of terrorism and global energy demands. There is a separate set of smaller gatherings that Jain is calling Kairos Europe. That program is headed by David Wyler, son of the forum's organizer. The hope is that the student entrepreneurs will bring a fresh, bright-eyed perspective to the event (a win-win, if it even needs pointing out).
One morning, before the forum programming begins, I listen as a Kairos fellow plays a video of a speech Jain gave at a Kairos Summit. "What if the world's most influential people were best friends 20 years ago, working to change the world? That's the purpose of the Kairos Society," Jain tells his audience.
The core of the gang—Jain, Medwell, Pourbaba, and Shriftman—prefer to travel together, and, when they are abroad, to hang out together. So they try to figure out ways to get everyone into events. This stretch in Holland was easy, given that the gang has long been part of Kairos. Other times, they have been more clever. Shriftman and Medwell entered their idea for Solé Bicycles into a business plan competition hosted by Alibaba.com (it was co-sponsored by Inc.) and won $15,000. The following year, they called Alibaba and pitched another win-win. They proposed that Kairos fellows make a trip to China—and Jain, having learned his fundraising lesson, proposed that Alibaba fund the $150,000 trip. Jain got his wish, and they all went together on the tour, with several other Kairos fellows joining them. This summer, they're all going to the Youth International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg.
In a sense, the lives of Jain and his friends are a phenomenon of the early 21st century, when so many barriers to starting a business and traveling all over the world have vanished (likewise the barriers to doing both simultaneously). Most of Solé Bicycles is outsourced: The company has a contract manufacturer, a customs broker who manages the importing, and a logistics manager who stores and ships the product. Medwell and Shriftman started Solé with the $15,000 they won from Alibaba, plus loans they took out against their cars. Once they sold out their first run of bikes, Medwell and Shriftman each persuaded their parents to lend them $50,000 to restock. Now, they say, they're able to restock using profits from sales, and most of their responsibility has to do with answering customer inquiries and building buzz. The business also gives them an excuse to travel. They're thinking about opening up pop-up stores for a few months at a time in cities in Europe soon, and maybe one in Cape Town.
Pourbaba's business is less sexy: a mattress company, which he started as a way to find himself and the other guys in his fraternity cheap mattresses. He gives USC's fraternity presidents a kickback to refer their brothers to his website, and in the fall, during college move-in, the company generates $40,000 a week in revenue. Now, he essentially runs the company from his phone. "I don't really do anything, to be honest, except market," says Pourbaba. "And it pays for my life."
These are what the guys call their cash-flow businesses. The margins aren't fantastic, because they outsource so much, but the overhead is low, and more to the point, so is the effort. They have entrepreneurial ventures designed to enrich their social lives, too. For example, the Snowball music festival in Vail. The bill attracted crowds large enough to book out every hotel room in the area, and the festival made money. The guys spent the weekend partying together in a big cabin they rented. They'll probably do it again in 2012.
Their parents are willing to help out financially when their children do constructive work like this. In other words, they'll drop $50,000 on a bike company but not on a vacation. Or in Jain's words, "Parents will pick up the tab for trips if it's educational—not if it's other stuff." That's why they will foot the bill for him to go to St. Petersburg and not to Cannes, where he was hoping to meet up with Wyler at his vacation home.
