Re-printed from an article in the March 19, 2008 edition of PAW:

The Young and the Restless
For these youthful alumni, the startups can’t wait

By Brett Tomlinson

The face value on tickets for Super Bowl XLII in February ranged from $700 to $900, and in resale markets, the average cost jumped to about five times the initial price tag. But what were the tickets really worth? Is there any way to know?

Gerry Wilson ’00 and Hagos Mehreteab ’99 have a way to find out. In 2004, the former high school classmates from Piscataway, N.J., sketched out a plan to sell futures contracts for tickets to major sporting events, creating a company called Yoonew (as in, "You knew the Giants were going to the Super Bowl"). Last year, they launched the first market for ticket futures, to allow fans, traders, and ticket brokers to buy and sell contracts throughout the season.

In their system, each contract is worth one championship ticket, provided the designated team reaches the big game, and the contract price rises and falls as traders evaluate the team’s prospects. For example, New York Giants futures bottomed out in mid-December, when a loss to Washington threatened to keep the team out of the playoffs, but the price soared in January as New York won three straight postseason games. With users buying and selling in real time, the final prices of contracts for Super Bowl-bound teams should provide an estimate of what fans think the tickets are worth. This year, the value was between $2,500 and $4,900, depending on the seat location.

"We want people to trade tickets and ticket futures like they trade bonds and stocks," Mehreteab says. "We use technology to give true price discovery in an industry where price discovery is the whole point of the game."

Yoonew’s office in midtown Manhattan seems an unlikely hub for a new stock exchange. About a dozen 20-somethings, dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, tap and click away at computers in two connected bullpens. A leather couch sits against one wall, facing a pair of flat-screen TVs, and in the corner, a dorm-room refrigerator stocks the necessities — cans of Red Bull, regular and diet. But on the Web, in the space that matters, Yoonew.com looks as professional as any online brokerage, with price graphs, stadium seating maps, and a scrolling ticker that shows the up-to-date prices of futures contracts for teams vying to play in the NCAA Final Four.

Ticket futures are catching on, according to Wilson, and investors have given Yoonew a solid foundation. As in any startup, there are risks, from technical glitches and market fluctuations to the entry of new competitors, but the founders are unfazed. "Do I feel like I’m being risky?" Mehreteab says. "Not really, in the traditional sense. As an entrepreneur, I feel like I’m the master of my destiny. And I don’t think you could say that about any other type of business."

Self-reliance is just one of the factors that drive Princeton alumni like Mehreteab and Wilson to strike out on their own and try to turn innovative ideas into profitable companies. Daily challenges, a steep learning curve, and a chance to make a difference in the world contribute as well, according to a handful of Princeton’s young entrepreneurs — mostly engineers — who spoke with PAW.

In the high-tech world of medical devices, Chris Loose ’02 has found a job that he says "could never get boring." Loose developed a method of making new antibiotics while pursuing his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at MIT, working with a small team that initially included colleague Joel Moxley ’02. Backed by a successful run in business-plan competitions and support from venture capitalists, Loose’s company, SteriCoat, is applying the technology to ward off bacterial infections on medical devices like catheters.

Robert Moore ’06, a self-described "serial entrepreneur," relishes any opportunity to combine his creativity and his technological skills. As an undergraduate, he created a hand-held Texas Hold ’Em odds calculator at the height of the online poker craze. His latest venture is a loyalty program that enables online shoppers to help their favorite nonprofits raise money by ordering from participating retailers.

Darren Hammell ’01 says that running a startup, or even just working for one, is filled with "intangible benefits" like understanding exactly how you’ve contributed to the final product. Hammell and co-founders Mark Holveck ’01, Erik Limpaecher ’01, and John Lerch ’01 launched Princeton Power Systems more than six years ago, aiming to develop a low-cost way of making "clean" power, with minimal fluctuations in current. Today, the company’s power converters produce energy that is both clean and green, operating in wind turbines and solar arrays.

While most of these alumni entrepreneurs developed their ideas outside campus labs, their experiences at Princeton helped to shape their interests. Loose, for example, worked on peptide design with chemical engineering professor Chris Floudas, building a strong scientific foundation as he learned about finance and markets by pursuing a certificate in operations research and financial engineering. But his entrepreneurial drive surfaced after college, when he was working as a researcher at Merck. The environment, he says, was not dynamic enough for his taste, so he enrolled in graduate school at MIT, joining a lab known for developing innovative technologies.

After spending four years working with antibiotics and publishing a paper in Nature, Loose began devoting more attention to applications, and he realized that he could improve on the antibiotics currently used to coat medical devices. Loose has developed a long-lasting, nonleaching antimicrobial coating that, in theory, could be used on everything from needles to artificial joints. "If you want to think of an analogy, it’s like we’ve created a bed of nails on the surface [of a medical device]," he says. "Bacteria run into it, they explode. Human cells run into it and they’re unharmed."

With a small team of collaborators, Loose first pitched the idea at a business-plan contest, a sort of warm-up for startups. Win or lose, he figured it would be helpful to interact with venture capitalists and experts in science and medicine. At MIT, known as a hotbed for new technologies, the annual 100K Entrepreneurship Competition starts with more than 100 teams and whittles down to a handful of finalists. The rule of thumb is that you want to come in second or third place, Loose jokes, since runner-up teams traditionally have fared well in the real world. SteriCoat exceeded his expectations, capturing the $30,000 top prize in the venture category. The group went on to collect more prize money in contests at Harvard, Columbia, Oxford, and Cambridge.

SteriCoat’s well-practiced pitch soon drew attention from venture capitalists, including two Princeton alumni at 5AM Ventures, a firm that supports early-stage life-science companies. Kevin Forrest *05, a molecular biology Ph.D. who works in the firm’s Boston office, says that SteriCoat met all the requirements of a promising startup: strong intellectual property, based on rigorous science; an application that could fill an unmet need; and a solid, forward-thinking management team. In August 2007, 5AM Ventures agreed to back SteriCoat. Since then, Loose, who completed his Ph.D. last year, has been the company’s chief technology officer, working to develop its first real-world application: an antibiotic catheter that he hopes will reach hospitals by 2011.

John Diekman ’65, a managing partner at 5AM Ventures, says that Loose’s refreshing mix of intelligence, confidence, and a willingness to listen to advice helped seal the deal. "He has the brains and the creativity to be an extraordinary academic if he wanted to," Diekman says, "but he also realizes that he has an entrepreneurial instinct."

The same entrepreneurial instinct was part of Robert Moore’s makeup even before he came to college. He had started a Web design company in high school, building sites for the businesses that his friends’ parents owned. But his first big success as an entrepreneur was born in the summer after his sophomore year at Princeton.

Like many other college students, Moore got caught up in the online poker craze, playing in Texas Hold ’Em tournaments in his free time. But he wasn’t content just to play the cards he was dealt and hope for the best. Moore wanted an edge, so he created a software application to calculate his odds of winning each hand, based on the cards he had and the community cards at the center of the table. He eventually started selling the software online, and it caught the eye of a developer from The Sharper Image, who asked Moore to help him create a hand-held version. Translating his program proved challenging, given the limited computing power available in an inexpensive hand-held gadget. But Moore and his new collaborators got the device on Sharper Image shelves in time for the holiday season, providing what he calls "a nice income boost, for a college student."

Moore’s knack for gadgets also helped in the classroom at Princeton when he took an entrepreneurial engineering course co-taught by A.J. Khubani, founder of TeleBrands (and "king of the infomercial," according to ABC’s Nightline). The class project was to engineer a product within a challenging set of parameters: It had to be light, compact, and inexpensive, with a minimum of moving parts. Moore’s team developed a wet-vacuum attachment that earned a marketing deal with TeleBrands, which sells portable staircases for puppies and collapsible, pocket-sized fishing rods, among other things. But as-seen-on-TV success proved elusive: An infomercial for the "Wetter-Vac" never aired, after flopping in the testing phase.

After Moore’s experience with TeleBrands, which included a trip to China for an inside look at the development process, he became interested in the venture-capital side of entrepreneurship, which is now his day job. But he has continued to develop ideas of his own. Spurred by one of his former high school teachers, Moore created SmartRaise, an online fundraising tool that he says is "basically a giant loyalty program." A nonprofit, like the local PTA, can ask its members to enroll for free, and each time they shop online at a participating retailer, the retailer donates a small portion to the nonprofit. Retailers draw more customers, nonprofits raise money without much effort, and SmartRaise gets a tiny transaction fee. SmartRaise is a volume business, Moore says, and there are no guarantees that the concept will catch on. But regardless, he is confident that this is not his last startup. "I have no doubt in my mind that there will be a next thing," he says.

Like Moore, Hammell and his co-founders at Princeton Power Systems got a boost in their work from a course at Princeton. In their case, it was "High-Tech Entrepreneurship," a perennially popular offering in electrical engineering taught by Ed Zschau ’61, a technology pioneer, former IBM executive, and onetime congressman. Hammell’s friends, Limpaecher and Lerch, built a business plan around a patented technology for power conversion created by Limpaecher’s father. The basic idea was to provide a more efficient way to produce "cleaner" power, evening out fluctuating current with novel circuit designs.

Limpaecher, who now serves as Princeton Power’s lead controls engineer, recruited Hammell and Holveck to expand the idea for Princeton’s student business-plan competition. When their plan won the top prize in 2001, the four classmates decided to stay on campus for the summer after graduation and see if they could turn it into a real company.

That was where Hammell expected it to end. He had a job lined up at Microsoft — his dream job, he thought at the time — and starting a com-pany with three other 22-year-olds seemed like an uncertain career path, at best. But Hammell’s plan changed shortly after graduation when Greg Olsen, a local technology entrepreneur, agreed to pour more than a half-million dollars into their startup.

In the months that followed, the original business plan changed significantly. Instead of serving utility companies, Princeton Power turned its primary focus toward alternative energy. To export wind and solar power to a public utility grid, alternative-energy producers have to meet strict standards for clean power. Princeton Power provides the technology to make that possible, and the market for its products is growing.

Princeton Power’s devices don’t look all that impressive — most consist of a large metal casing, a little smaller than a refrigerator, with an intricate collection of circuits and connected wires at the center — and the company’s quarters at Princeton’s Forrestal Center are spacious but frugally decorated ("no Persian rugs," Hammell says with a smile). But in two key measures, Princeton Power is a success: The company has grown steadily, thanks in large part to grants from the Department of Energy and contracts with the U.S. Navy and NASA; and in each year since 2005, it has turned a profit.

The path to profitability had its rough spots, Hammell admits, including two months in which the company could not cover its payroll, but the last three years have provided a sense of stability. Princeton Power now employs 17 people — 12 full-time and five part-time — including three of the founders (Lerch left a year after graduation), and the long, draining hours of the group’s first summer — building a technology startup from a dorm room without air-conditioning — seem like a distant memory. "We work a lot less but accomplish more," Hammell says.

Long hours are still part of the job for Wilson, the CEO of Yoonew, partly because the company’s online market for ticket futures is open 22 hours a day (it used to be 20, but West Coast traders complained that they needed more time). Wilson may sleep a little later than most of his friends, arriving at the office around 10 a.m., but he makes up for it by staying until midnight a few days each week and working weekends. Even when he’s not at work, Yoonew is on his mind. "As much as I try to focus on other stuff, I can’t," he says.

Wilson’s story since college has been one of lemons-to-lemonade. His first job, with the business-software com-pany MicroStrategy, consisted of two months of training, one day in the main office, and a severance package — the dot-com bubble had burst and there was no room for the new trainees. So Wilson took what he had learned in those two months and became a consultant for companies that used MicroStrategy software. A few years later, while attending business school at MIT, Wilson tried but failed to get tickets to see a Boston Red Sox playoff game. His disappointment became part of his motivation to start Yoonew. And a couple of years after that, when hyper-inflated ticket prices at the 2005 NCAA Final Four threatened to sink Yoonew, Wilson dipped into his retirement savings, fulfilled every ticket contract the company had, and used the experience to revamp his approach to risk management. Yoonew now makes deals with ticket brokers to buy tickets well in advance of big events, avoiding some of the pregame inflation.

Mehreteab, like Wilson, attended business school at MIT after running his own company, a marketing and promotions group. He thought he was ready to join the corporate world, in either investment banking or consulting, but when he heard Wilson’s ideas for Yoonew, he signed on without hesitation. "I had the bug — the startup bug, the entrepreneurial bug — and I couldn’t shake it," he says.

Courses at Princeton, Wilson and Mehreteab say, taught them practical things that helped them launch Yoonew, from technical knowledge in computer programming to an understanding of markets. Wilson also credits the University for teaching him to think big — a necessity for a successful entrepreneur. "[Princeton] opened up my eyes," he says. "There’s so much more that you can do, so many new ideas. ... We’re only really limited by our own imagination."

The next generation of Princeton entrepreneurs is getting a head start on campus, developing their ideas through student-run initiatives like the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club and its TigerLaunch business plan competition (see sidebar). The Center for Innovation in Engineering Education (CIEE) also provides opportunities for students to explore entrepreneurial paths through internships and courses. Engineering Dean H. Vincent Poor *77 established a visiting professorship in entrepreneurship, currently held by Julian Lange ’65, a professor of entrepreneurship and public policy at Babson College; and Olsen, Princeton Power’s initial financier, was named the University’s first entrepreneur-in-residence last year. He meets with students during monthly office hours.

CIEE hosts occasional entrepreneurial-themed lectures, panel discussions, and networking events for students, faculty, and alumni, designed to increase opportunities for "creative collisions," according to Bob Monsour, CIEE’s associate director for external affairs. But one of the best resources, Monsour says, is simply the chance to see what’s possible, by meeting entrepreneurs like Loose and Hammell, both of whom spoke to students at CIEE events last semester.

Princeton students, Loose says, have a chance to succeed as entrepreneurs because they tend to be well-rounded, well-spoken, and ambitious. Hammell agrees, but he adds that it can be difficult to convince students that the startup route is as rewarding as some of the other career paths open to Princeton graduates.

"When you’re sitting in those chairs in the classrooms, it’s hard to imagine how much fun it actually is when you get to this stage," Hammell says. "The most important part is to just try. Once you’ve stepped off that cliff, [you’re forced to] learn so quickly that your chances of success go up and up. That’s the advice that I try to give, whenever anybody will listen."

 

Re-printed from an article in the March 10, 2008 edition of The New York Times:

Giving the Outsiders a Say on Movies

Brett Icahn, left, and Kenneth Woo, cofounders of Massify.com, a bottom-up movie developer.

By Charles Lyons
Published: March 10, 2008
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

Film enthusiasts vote at the box office on which movies succeed or fail. The idea behind a new Web site, Massify.com, is to give them a vote on which films are made in the first place, along with some say in the script and the casting.

Massify members (membership is free and anyone can join) are offered a platform to promote themselves and whatever current projects they are involved in, and are also eligible to vote on other users' film ideas through online competitions in which members vie for financing and distribution from Massify and its partners.

And after granting money to winners of its online competitions, determined by popular user vote, the investors in Massify will maintain a financial interest in the films that originated there, and help produce and bring them to market.

Massify aims to encourage collaboration, but it is not a philanthropic enterprise. Like most Web sites, Massify wants to attract advertisers even as it faces the challenge of proving itself as a practical place for the film industry and the public to discover new talent. ''We're building an audience before the film is made,'' said Kenneth Woo, one of Massify's two founders.

Brett Icahn, Massify's other founder, said: ''Online networks should apply a democratic process to the creation of content, not just the distribution of it,'' he said. ''The Massify community crowdsources the best ideas, and elects the best actors. It's more a production network than a social network, because it's driven by a creative purpose.''

Massify's 10 full-time staff members, most of them under 30, occupy a loft office on Cooper Square, near New York University.

Mr. Icahn is the son of the financier Carl C. Icahn, who is backing the venture, giving Massify an edge on many start-ups noted for their ebullience and optimism, not their cash flow.

And among aspiring filmmakers, cash can be highly alluring. Mr. Woo said that Massify has already offered members the chance to win a student grant, awarding Ryan Bemler, a Columbia film student, $10,000 toward a short film after Massify users chose his project in an open competition.

Massify's second online competition is co-sponsored by an independent horror film distributor, After Dark Films, which will present the winning film as part of its ongoing series ''Eight Films to Die For.'' Massify members will develop the film using the Web site's online tools; they are invited to participate in a pitch round, after which 10 semi-finalists will be chosen by popular vote.

Once a final idea wins the competition, a round of casting allows actors registered with Massify to upload audition videos and vie for the film's four leading roles. Users select 10 male and 10 female semifinalists for each role; these actors are flown to Los Angeles for screen tests.

The top four male and female vote-getters win principal roles in the film, which will be produced by After Dark Films and directed and written by established professionals.

In theory, the notion of empowering people who are trying to break into the movie business by allowing them to contribute to the filmmaking would seem to provide a crack in a long-closed Hollywood network, where entrance is not always predicated on talent but access.

''It's a new way of thinking,'' said Eugene Hernandez, co-founder of IndieWire.com, the independent film Web site begun in 1996, who said he had only recently become aware of Massify. ''It's exciting -- all these things happening at the same time. Maybe the dream of democratization can become a reality.''

Practice is another matter, however. It remains to be seen just how effective a cluster of people in their 20s can be at reinventing what the French critic Andre Bazin once called ''the genius of the system,'' referring to Hollywood films made during the classic studio era, roughly the 1920s through '50s.

During those years, and still today, power flowed from top to bottom in vertically integrated studios. But Massify wants power to flow the other way around, to give the people at the bottom of an organization an opportunity to be involved in the decision-making.

Not everyone registered on Massify appears to be looking for that sort of responsibility. The site's key tabs lead to areas for film pitches, roles, people, and competitions. Many users have posted their photographs and just want to be attract Internet friends, not necessarily collaborate on a film.

Not yet, that is. Some Massify members have also begun posting short video clips or trailers teasing feature films they are trying to make. Others have uploaded full-length screenplays, effectively circumventing traditional gatekeepers like agents, managers and studio executives.

''There will come a point,'' Mr. Hernandez said, ''when the dominant generation will have emerged -- and they won't be wedded to traditional models of success.''

Re-printed from an article in the February 13, 2008 issue of PAW:

Above, Cruz Blanca Initiative volunteers receive a traditional welcome in a rural Mexican community where they were building a water well. From left: Alexandra Connell ’07, Jevon Harding ’06, Owen Fletcher ’08, a community elder, and Kush Parmar ’02. (Courtesy Kush Parmar ’02) Hunter Woolley ’98 and Ann Ellis Woolley ’01, center, with students at the RAFIKI school in Kibera, Kenya. (Courtesy Ann Ellis Woolley ’01) Julia Neubauer ’07 with children who live at the home for street children she and other students started in Pune, India. (Courtesy julia neubauer ’07)

Dream builders
Think writing your senior thesis was tough? Try creating a clinic or school — abroad — at the same time

By Katherine Federici Greenwood

It was not an enticing lecture that lured Kush Parmar ’02 away from his classroom and toward McCosh Hall on a cold, sunny November day in 1999; not an appointment with a professor. It was, instead, a project that Parmar and his sister Sheila ’01 had begun planning six months earlier — a project that was now in serious trouble.

The Parmars had formed a student group that would kick-start construction of public facilities in poor, remote Mexican communities not far from where they grew up. The first project was to be a middle school in Cruz Blanca, a small mountain village in the coastal state of Veracruz, where youngsters typically finished their formal education at age 10 to begin picking coffee beans in nearby plantations. But the plan was about to fizzle, unless the students could raise what seemed like the monumental sum of $15,000. The Parmars recruited their musical friends to perform at a concert in the Chapel, and Kush Parmar opted for some low-cost advertising: He skipped his classes, donned a sandwich board, and stood by the busy path near McCosh, shouting as he promoted the students’ concert and their dream. Among the passersby was Parmar’s art history professor. “Kush,” he said, “you should be going to class.”

Parmar learned several lessons that afternoon — including the challenge of balancing academic work with an all-consuming extracurricular activity, and the fact that he and his sister would need to master much, like fundraising, that is not taught in Princeton classrooms.

Eight years later, the Parmars have learned those lessons well, and their project, called the Cruz Blanca Initiative (www.cbinitiative.org), is thriving. A Princeton Township resident who wandered into the chapel concert later that evening made a donation, introduced the students to his affluent friends, and taught them how to go about raising the cash they required. The Student Volunteers Council showed them how to arrange student travel, including how to deal with issues of liability and legal waivers. Others helped them learn the ins and outs of IRS paperwork when they formed a nonprofit organization. “We knew we were in over our head sometimes,” says Sheila Parmar, but at the same time, she notes, the students were like sponges, learning from anyone who had something to teach.

It used to be that college volunteerism meant after-school tutoring or weekend environmental cleanups. While those good works go on, today’s students often have more ambitious, long-term projects in mind. And so Ann Ellis Woolley ’01, then a junior majoring in engineering, opened first a school in Kenya, then a clinic nearby.

Julia Neubauer ’07 co-founded, with other college students, a home for street children in a slum in India.

“You can’t stand there and stare — you want to do something,” says Dan Kelly ’03, explaining what prompted him to set up a feeding center for malnourished children in 2006, while he was in medical school. By then, Kelly had volunteered as director of a student-run free clinic in New York City, and spent a summer in Cuba working on public health. He went to Sierra Leone on a fellowship and found himself treating children who were starving to death. “Mothers would run back to the village to try to get some money [for hospital admission] from the community, and the child would die while the mother was still out and about,” Kelly recalls. On an average day, at least one child died.

The experience “almost immobilized me,” says Kelly; instead, he teamed up with a Kenyan colleague to establish a feeding center at the Sierra Leone hospital. Today, the UNICEF-funded center regularly cares for more than 40 children and also trains women to go back to their communities to teach mothers about malnutrition and keeping their children healthy. (Later, Kelly began a medical clinic serving amputees.)

Like Kelly’s feeding center, the projects of other Princeton students were born of the extreme need they witnessed when living abroad. Woolley began to think about starting a free school in Kenya after traveling there in the summer after her freshman year. She lived with a host family and volunteered at an orphanage run by the sisters of Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Mother Teresa, in Kibera, a slum near Nairobi; she met mothers who lamented that even the low fees charged to attend government schools were beyond their reach. The Parmars’ Cruz Blanca project has its roots in the many days they spent as children, distributing rice and cans of beans to families living in the poor village near their own, more affluent, community in Mexico.

Neubauer attended high school at the Mahindra United World College in Pune, India — part of an international high school system that requires students to serve in the community. She volunteered at an orphanage with six caretakers for 200 attention-starved children. After her freshman year at college, Neubauer and another orphanage volunteer, then at Emory University, returned to India to live and volunteer in a home for 30 street children in Mumbai (formerly called Bombay), where they met 4-year-old drug addicts and 7-year-old prostitutes. “If there’s one place I would describe as hell for a kid, it’s the Bombay railway station,” says Julia. A year later, in June 2005, the two women, with help from five other high school friends, opened a small, less institutional home for six children, aged 6 to 14, in Pune. The rather daunting goal: Change the children’s lives, so they would not end up on the streets again.

Students who tackle such intractable problems as poverty and lack of education in developing countries “are not only able to see the problems or the challenges but to envision solutions and to come up with these remarkable new ideas, which at first for many of us sound like they might not be feasible — and yet they can find ways to make things happen,” says Princeton’s vice president for campus life, Janet Dickerson. Some students — encouraged by funding from Princeton-affiliated groups such as Project 55 — are prepared to become CEOs of nonprofits even before they graduate, she says. Dickerson admits to having “discouraged students from taking on such major projects too early in their academic careers,” but says she generally supports the students in what they are attempting to do. In any case, she says, “usually our discouragement is ineffective.”

Noticing student interest in “social entrepreneurship,” the Pace Center, which promotes community involvement, offered a noncredit fall seminar, “Social Entrepreneurs, Innovators, and Problem Solvers,” led by Scott Sherman, founder of the Transformative Action Institute in Los Angeles. Its 13 students considered case studies of leaders in the for-profit and nonprofit worlds and learned about conflict resolution, fundraising, leadership, and networking. They developed grant proposals and presented business plans at the end of the semester. Amanda Mazur ’08, for example, created a project called “Don’t Let It Go to Waist.” She hopes to combat hunger and obesity by organizing a coalition of restaurants in her hometown of Chicago that would offer agreeable customers smaller portions while charging the regular price; the restaurants would then contribute the savings — in either food or dollars — to food banks or other organizations that work to alleviate hunger.

Sherman’s course did not exist in the late 1990s when Woolley, then a sophomore majoring in engineering, set out to determine what opening a school in Kenya would require, and how she might accomplish it. The sisters of the Missionaries of Charity permitted Woolley to use their buildings at no charge. The sisters also agreed to run the school’s day-to-day operation and oversee the teachers. “It would be seen as the sisters’ school,” says Woolley, who was intent on making sure that it would be a partnership, not a handout. Using contacts she made through her Kenyan host family, the Princeton student met with lower-level employees at the Ministry of Education and at nongovernmental organizations, seeking advice on Kenyan education and curricula. Her host mother, a trained teacher, helped Woolley find teachers, gather materials, and train four Kiberan mothers as instructors. An American company donated uniforms for the students. Woolley says she did not feel intimidated in her meetings — she was enthusiastic, expecting to succeed, and “there to learn.”

But how to pay for the school’s operation? Her break came after a conversation with the pastor of St. Paul’s Church in Princeton, though she didn’t go into the meeting with him with “the fundraising mentality that I need to have and use now,” she says. Still, the pastor, Walter Nolan, was impressed by her organization and the detail of her plans, and the parish finance committee, which has a twin parish in Uganda, felt sympathetic. It offered $10,000 in seed money, along with its blessing. “I can’t imagine that you, being a junior in college, can really open a school,” Nolan told her, Woolley recalls. “But good luck. I hope you can. And if you can, this money will go to good use.” It did: Classes began in January 2000 for 520 students ages 5 to 15, some of whom had never been to school before.

Social entrepreneurs learn quickly that shyness has no place in such an endeavor. And so the students asked for help wherever they could find it: from parents, schoolmates, professors, and complete strangers who had cash or expertise. Kush Parmar admits to trolling the TigerNet alumni directory for potential donors, at one point searching for anyone with “president” in the job title. He came across Barry Simon ’64, the former vice president of Continental Airlines, and wrote a letter asking him to donate roundtrip tickets for students to work in Mexico. “I heard back! I was shocked,” Parmar says. For two years, until Sept. 11, Continental gave participating students free flights.

Whenever they could, the students drew on their Princeton connections. The Parmars’ project received $2,000 from the President’s Fund to support student travel expenses (though it later ran into trouble for violating a University policy on student-group fundraising) and is now associated with Princeton in Latin America. Woolley got grants totaling $6,000 from the Office of Religious Life and the President’s Fund to support herself and three other Princeton students who were teaching at her school in Kenya during the summer. She also connected with Joseph Woods ’81, a plastic surgeon in Georgia and volunteer in Kenya, who was instrumental in helping Woolley open a primary-care clinic near the school the summer after she graduated. And the University provided a forum for Neubauer: She has given talks at the International Center and the Pace Center, and has mounted photo exhibits that led to contributions from Princetonians.

After classes, the students morphed into part-time fund-raisers, publicists, event planners, and even lawyers-in-training. Neubauer drew on the presentation skills she had used in her Princeton classes to put on donor-friendly PowerPoint and video presentations in the city hall of her hometown in Austria, among other places. With no attorney or accountant, she and her fellow students got an on-the-job crash course in the fine points of registering and managing a nonprofit — theirs is Ashraya Initiative for Children (www.ashrayainitiative.org). She took time out from work on her economics thesis last spring to revise materials that would go to the IRS. “I was running regressions for the analytical part of my thesis and working on answering the IRS questions” at the same time, she recalls. “I thought, ‘I should probably be working on my thesis right now!’” Her internship at the Princeton University Investment Co. helped her understand the financial spreadsheets she had to prepare. As treasurer of the nonprofit, Neubauer tracks the donations, compiles the financial statements, and sends the donors receipts and personal thank-you notes. There was an unanticipated bright side: All that writing “helped my grade in courses where I had to write papers or reports,” she says.

Some of the questions the students faced had no parallel in the classroom. Neubauer and her co-founders had to decide whether the Pune home should accept children who were drug addicts or prostitutes — as some of the street children were. The students decided that they could not. “We’re not therapists, we’re just college students,” Neubauer says.

Occasionally the social entrepreneurs struggled with how to make adults take them seriously. In the Cruz Blanca Initiative, Princeton students volunteer to work in the Mexican villages during spring break; the villagers volunteer to finish the construction; and local government officials are expected to kick in a share of the costs and find contractors, teachers, and other professionals. No one coached the Parmars on setting up meetings with community leaders or convincing small-town mayors to match funding; instead, they had groomed their people skills as they grew up by watching their parents interact in an area where “bargaining is huge in the market and everything is about a relationship,” Sheila Parmar says. They arranged their first meeting with the mayor of rural Cruz Blanca through family connections.

At their first fundraising meeting with affluent Princeton residents, the Parmars aimed to look professional and ended up feeling overdressed. But in Mexico, they tried to gain credibility by meeting with community leaders wearing Princeton T-shirts and jeans. “Pretty much we’re always wearing Prince-ton garb” at meetings with people in Mexico, says Kush Parmer. “As a young person, it’s difficult to get these big guys to take you seriously, but the Princeton name was a helpful thing.” Partly to convince the mayor that they were up to the job of building a school, the students brought design plans that had been prepared by a family friend who was a mechanical engineer. But a promise and a Princeton T-shirt don’t always cut it, especially in a “more urban, more savvy environment,” Parmar acknowledges. Indeed, they have struck out with other government officials, most recently last year in Boca del Rio, where “the mayor wouldn’t even see us,” he says.

Of course, one of the bigger challenges has been balancing the demands of starting and running a nonprofit with those of a Princeton undergraduate. “While my roommates were doing their problem sets, I was writing donor letters at 4 a.m.,” says Neubauer, who managed the fundraising, publicity, and administrative tasks of the children’s home while Emory students lived at the home. Freshman year she rowed with the crew, but quit because “the orphanage and varsity crew were not going to mingle very well,” Neubauer says. She bickered, but ended up not joining an eating club. The hours she says she would have spent lingering over meals she put to good use setting up her nonprofit organization and making donor calls. “I was never hung over on a Sunday,” she says. “It was, like, sleep in or feed the kids.”

The Parmars figure that they each spent about 15 hours per week working on Cruz Blanca Initiative projects while at Princeton — about the same amount of time some busy students put into their extracurricular activities — though the initial planning period was more intense. “At times, I felt overwhelmed trying to do so much,” Sheila Parmar says of her work contacting potential donors, setting up meetings with alumni, and speaking to partners in Mexico to make sure logistics were in place. “I resolved this by becoming more organized. ... Several times I remember hanging out with my friends, watching TV, and writing donor letters on my laptop.” Kush Parmer squeezed in Cruz Blanca work between lab experiments, and dropped out of his eating club in his senior year because it demanded too much time. School breaks meant extra time to travel to their projects abroad, the alumni say — not days on the ski slopes or a Florida beach.

“It cut through every part of my life,” explains Woolley, “and continues to direct what I want to do in life and who I am.” She took courses in medical anthropology and African history and politics to inform the work she was doing at the Kenyan school. Doing this “made my life more fulfilled,” she says. “It became part of who I was, rather than taking away from the things I loved.”

Today, though these students have graduated from Princeton, the projects they created continue to grow. Neubauer works full-time as an analyst at Princo, using the skills she has learned there to help manage the finances of the Indian children’s home, and spending her vacations on fund-raising trips and visits to Pune. Ten children now live in the home; Neubauer, called “Juli Didi,” or “older sister,” by the children, used a $10,000 Princeton Projects of Peace grant to set up a computer center for them. She and her student co-founders also established a tutoring program for area children, health screenings at a local hospital, and literacy classes for women. The India project, she says, has been the “best decision of my life.”

Woolley remains in Africa, where she works for the Clinton Foundation’s HIV/AIDS initiative; she plans to return to medical school at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where she completed two years and earned a master’s in public health while building the Kenyan school. She says she now has a “behind-the-scenes” role at the school and clinic she established in Kenya. The school buildings also serve as a community center: The children eat lunch and dinner there, and their mothers use the site to make crafts to sell and to learn microfinance skills. In 2002, the Kenyan government abolished school fees; today, Woolley’s school works to prepare students to transfer to government schools in fourth grade. Woolley, who plans a career in global health after finishing medical school, continues to fundraise for her foundation, RAFIKI (www.therafiki.org) — the word means “friend” — and oversees the school and the clinic as others handle day-to-day duties.

The Parmars’ project, the Cruz Blanca Initiative, has grown into a popular break trip for Princeton students. So far, the organization has helped to build a well, a community center, a sports complex, and two schools, and helped to install sanitation systems, stoves, and roofs. Kush Parmar, an M.D./Ph.D. candidate at Harvard Medical School, and Sheila Parmar, who works at the consulting company McKinsey and Co., are grooming current students to take on some of the duties they once handled. Today, students write annual reports and run campus fundraisers, and get involved in raising money off-campus. Two Princeton alumni are spending the year in Mexico, managing logistics and preparing for next year, when a Harvard medical professor and four students and residents will run a mobile medical and dental clinic while Princeton students build a two-room kindergarten in another village.

“What drives you is the satisfaction that what you’re doing wouldn’t be done if you were not doing it,” says Kush Parmar, expressing a sentiment that surely would be echoed by the other social entrepreneurs. “It broadens my relationship with the world.”

Katherine Federici Greenwood is a PAW associate editor.