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The founders of our favorite MBA startups of 2015
It was a massive year for MBA-founded startups. Unique ventures were launched. Established startups had Goliath-like seed rounds. Others grew and scaled at breakneck rates. And Poets&Quants covered much of it.
We thought we’d take the time to go back and look at the entirety of ventures we covered in 2015 and compile a list of the ones that stood out to us. One thing is for sure: there is probably no boundaries to the entrepreneurial use of an MBA from a top school. From organic juice to a dating app to shower caps, the list represents a diverse set of interests, passions and problems MBAs possess and set out to solve.
These MBA entrepreneurs are in various stages of growth, but they all have grit, determination, intelligence, bravery and have poured much of themselves into their ventures. And for that, they’ve made our 2015 list of favorite MBA startups.
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Pierce Schiller
10. TarDisk, Founder: Pierce Schiller, Harvard Business School
Pierce Schiller is a builder. He’s also incredibly intelligent and savvy. Before embarking on his highly valuable and equally expensive Harvard Business School MBA, he came upon a frustration. Months after purchasing a brand new MacBook, he ran out of space. So he looked for micro SD memory cards for MacBooks and was disgusted by the prices. He could do it for less, he thought, a lot less.
So Schiller created his own micro SD memory card for $2. To see if anyone wanted it, he tried to sell it on Ebay. It sold. Schiller began outsourcing production of his micro SD cards to China and charging $6 per card. They didn’t sell. His girlfriend reminded him of his market. “These are people buying Apple products,” she told him. “They don’t spend $6 on anything.” So he charged $20. They sold. He raised the price to $30. They sold even more. Before beginning his MBA, Schiller had raised enough money to pay for his MBA (with some financial assistance from the school) and had a plausible business idea that he calls TarDisk.
9. TripWeave, Founder: Daniel Valenti, Chicago Booth
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Daniel Valenti
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Harvard, Daniel Valenti had no idea what to do. He stumbled upon high-end travel guide service, Rustic Pathways. Soon Valenti was rubbing shoulders with some of the wealthiest travelers from around the world. He spent nearly four years exploring some of the most remote regions on the planet. And then it wasn’t enough. Valenti wanted to call the shots and work for himself.
Entrepreneurship and specifically, Mark Tebbe and the Polksy Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, brought him to Chicago Booth. Early on in an entrepreneurship class, Tebbe told the class of his idea to do a Rustic Pathways-sort of venture for incoming MBA students. At 10 a.m. on the Saturday after that class, Valenti received a phone call from a random Illinois number. It was Tebbe and he wanted to help Valenti hatch out plans to create the venture, which ended up being TripWeave.
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Fahim Naim
8. SneakPeek, Founder: Fahim Naim, Northwestern Kellogg
The world of online dating is a crowded but vulnerable market, Fahim Naim, a Northwestern Kellogg grad believes. So he’s set out to create SneakPeek, another dating app for MBAs and young professionals. But before laughing off the venture off, consider recent successes of other MBA-founded dating apps such as Coffee Meets Bagel and Hinge.
Where Naim belives his startup differs is instead of swiping left or right, users give info about themselves and what they’re looking for in a suitable date or partner. They are then emailed potential times to meet for a two-minute online chat via webcam. Users spend two minutes answering a random question in front of another user and then can vote “yes” or “no” on the conversation. If both parties say “yes,” contact info is exchanged.
7. RelishMBA, Founders: Sarah Rumbaugh and Zach Mayo, Virginia Darden
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Darden MBAs Sarah Rumbaugh and Zach Mayo – photo by Andrew Shurtleff
As Sarah Rumbaugh and Zach Mayo were working through their MBAs at Virginia Darden, they noticed something: they were spending as much time with their post-graduation employment as academic work. And it wasn’t like they couldn’t find a job—MBAs from top schools have very little problem finding employment. The problem was the amount of time, energy and resources spent on something that would work itself out eventually anyway.
So Rumbaugh and Mayo created RelishMBA—essentially a dating app for employers and MBAs to meet. Instead of trying to find the ideal partner, RelishMBA helps MBAs find their perfect employer and an employer find their perfect MBA. The app allows companies and MBAs to create profiles, search using filters and then set dates to meet about potential employment. It’s a streamlined and efficient twist on the job search.
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Britt Danneman (left) and Julia Senior (right), current Harvard Business School students and founders of Sports Ketchup. Courtesy photo
6. Sports Ketchup, Founders: Julia Senior and Britt Danneman, Harvard Business School
“Peyton Manning sucks in the snow,” were the words spoken by Julia Senior to Britt Danneman on a snowy Boston day. The two roommates and fellow MBAs at Harvard Business School were itching for an entrepreneurial startup. A combination of Danneman’s inability but desire to talk sports and Senior’s obsession with sports news led the duo to create Sports Ketchup.
Users who sign up for Sports Ketchup receive a weekly e-newsletter with all of the latest sports topics and headlines. The best part is, the topics are presented in quick, one-hitters that people can drop in the office or at the bar to help with that awkward small talk. And it’s not just the basic headline, there’s thoughtful analysis like, you know, that Peyton Manning sucks in the snow.
5. WeTravel, Founders: Garib Mehdiyev, Johannes Koeppel, Zaky Prabowo, Berkeley Haas
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Pictured left to right are Garib Mehdiyev, CTO, Johannes Koeppel, CEO, and Zaky Prabowo, CMO, of Wetravel.to.
Photo by Thor Swift for the Financial Times
If you end up in a room with Garib Mehdiyev, Johannes Koeppel and Zaky Prabowo, it’s likely no matter where in the world you’ve been, one of them have been there. Between the three, they cam speak a combined 15 languages and have travelled to more than 100 different countries. Koeppel and Prabowo, who describe themselves as “serial travelers,” met on the first day of classes in the Berkeley-Haas full-time MBA.
They both came to the startup and venture capital rich California Bay Area hell-bent on making good on the tech culture. Soon, Koeppel came up with the idea to create a website where individuals can plan, organize and pay for global group travel. The site is called WeTravel and Koeppel worked on it throughout his time at Haas. He was even able to score some seed funding from Haas entrepreneurship professor and VC senior advisor, Rob Chandra.
Image may be NSFW.
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4. Lumi Organics, Founder: Hillary Lewis, Virginia Darden
Hillary Lewis kicked off her Wall Street career a week before Lehman tanked. The company filed for bankruptcy and its employees were left scrambling. Lewis learned something about herself as she worked the Barclay’s acquisition of Lehman: she thrived in the pressure-cooker.
And it’s the cool, calm and collected mentality Lewis possesses that led to her pursing an MBA at Virginia’s Darden and eventually starting her own fruit juice company. Lumi Organics cold-presses two pounds of fruit and vegetables into each 16-oz. bottle of juice. The high-pressure way of processing fruit juice is key in preserving enzymes and nutrients that are often lost in other competitor fruit juices. Lewis has battled through a competitive and crowded market to establish Lumi Organics.
3. Cotopaxi, Founders: Stephan Jacob, Davis Smith, Jordan Allred, The Wharton School
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Cotopaxi founders and Wharton MBA grads, (from left) Stephan Jacob, Davis Smith and Jordan Allred. Courtesy photo
The son of a traveling engineer and Mormon missionary, himself, Davis Smith spent nearly as much time in Latin America as he did the United States growing up. It’s no surprise he named his newest venture after Cotopaxi, a near-20,000 foot active volcano deep in the Ecuadoran Andes.
Cotopaxi, founded by Smith and fellow Wharton MBAs, Jordan Allred and Stephan Jacob is a Salt Lake City-based outdoor gear company with a social impact side. It’s “Gear for Good” movement provides upscale clothing and gear—similar to Patagonia and The North Face—for the socially conscious-minded outdoors enthusiast. Revenue from purchases is used to invest in more than 11 global nonprofits focused on health, education and job creation. Cotopaxi also hosts pretty cool scavenger hunts in cities across the United States.
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The Virtuosa team. Pictured from left to right are Tamara Zagorovskaya (CFO),
Caitlin Palmer (CEO) and Alexandra Holtzman (COO and President). Courtesy photo
2. Virtuosa Beauty, Founders: Tamara Zagorovskaya, Caitlin Palmer, Alexandra Holtzman, Harvard Business School
It probably doesn’t take three Harvard MBAs to create a luxury shower cap. But if you’re in the market for a high-end shower cap, it’s hard to think of one better than what Virtuosa Beauty offers. Tamara Zagorovskaya, Caitlin Palmer and Alexandra Holtzman met at Harvard Business School and formed a team together for the entrepreneurship project in their FIELD course.
The trio, which have an impressive background in investment banking, private equity and consulting, set out on solving the problem of shower caps. Specifically, that they don’t work. The result was Virtuosa Beauty and a $34 shower cap that actually works and a placement on our Favorite Startups list.
1. Earnest, Founders: Louis Beryl and Benjamin Hutchinson, Harvard Business School
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Louis Beryl of Earnest. Photo courtesy of Earnest
When Louis Beryl decided he wanted an MBA from Harvard Business School he quickly realized a problem: a Harvard MBA is incredibly expensive. Despite working for Morgan Stanley and living within his means, he needed to take private student loans to foot the cost. And he couldn’t get a loan without a co-signer, which ended up being his mom. Beryl saw a huge problem that he was sure was not exclusive to him. He was a low-risk borrower but private loan companies viewed him as high risk.
So Beryl snatched up banking guru, Benjamin Hutchinson and founded Earnest, one of the latest of a growing amount MBA-launched loan refinancing startups. But Earnest is growing at turbocharged clip. They can’t seem to hire enough people, in November they closed a $275 million Series B funding round, and were the subject of Poets&Quants’ reporting on the MBA startup craze this past summer.
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