Lessons Learned From a Failed Ivy League Entrepreneur

A "Case Story" By Chris Cononico
 

Chapter Three

Smith’s class required students to form working groups, come up with original business ideas, and submit business plans by the end of the term. As class finished for the day, we gathered our belongings, while looking around the room for familiar faces. Unfortunately, I only saw one person I knew.

It’s amusing for me to recall my first impression of George Cohen, because it’s nothing like him. George spoke about how he wanted to get an “A” in the class, so he refused to work with slackers. Ironically, George couldn’t have cared less about his grades. In fact, he was a poor student, because he barely attended classes. Only recently he considered he might have to get a job, so he resolved to salvage his GPA. It’s not that George couldn’t have been a stronger student, only he expected to become self-employed, so grades didn’t matter to him as much as networking did.

I also didn’t know George came from a family of self-starters. His father had been an entrepreneur in the real estate market and his mother owned and operated a restaurant. In a way, George felt he needed to follow in their footsteps, but on a more grandiose scale. Back then, his ambitions were a little aimless, much like my own, but he was determined to make it big on his own terms.

As George and I agreed to work together, my former teammate on Penn’s water polo team, Jake Kim, spotted me and made his way over. Although Jake and I had been on the same team, we both quit after our freshman year, so we didn’t know each other well. George pulled me aside to ask if I would vouch for Jake, but I couldn’t make a recommendation. “Okay, I say we take him! Asian people work hard.” George said. And with that, he walked back over and welcomed Jake onto our team.

Wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and a baseball cap, Mark Vargus looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week, had been drinking heavily the night before, and woke up right before class. Mark talked with a hint of a Pennsylvanian accent, and usually seemed grumpy. He walked over and asked if we had room for another person on the team, and we instinctively said “yeah,” as a statement of fact. Mark took our response as his acceptance to the group, which made George uncomfortable because we hadn’t had a chance to confer about Mark.

George kept asking me if we should drop Mark, because he might not be smart enough. Ironically, Mark was a Joseph Wharton Scholar, which was the honors group within Wharton. Fortunately, despite George’s grumbling, no one tried to kick Mark off the team. The four of us walked out of the classroom brainstorming potential business ideas.

There was nothing about our group that identified us as a strong management team. We weren’t academic geniuses. We had no prior business experience, nor did we have a business idea. We were pretty typical students, but there was one way random chance had assembled us in an improbable manner. George, Mark, and I each hoped to become entrepreneurs as soon as possible. Smith’s class wasn’t just something we were taking to fulfill a graduation requirement. We each had the “balls” to turn away jobs in corporate America for the chance to run our own company. That’s what made us unique.

It took weeks for some groups to come up with their ideas, but we stumbled on ours within the first five minutes. Jake muttered something about a concept one of his friends came up with during the prior semester, but had decided not to use. The idea was to create an off-campus meal plan for students that used local restaurants.

As we continued to discuss the “restaurant meal plan,” we reasoned students could have an account similar to a debit card, which could only be used at local restaurants for food. It would work the same as the cafeteria meal plan, except you could eat at the restaurants. Penn's mascot was the "Quaker," so Jake dubbed the idea “QuakerCard” as a placeholder name, so we wouldn’t forget the idea.

Even though George liked the concept, he wasn’t completely sold on it. We agreed to think it over some more. Ultimately, no one came up with a better idea. I think the runner up was some financing company that leased “change counting” machines to supermarkets. As students, the college market was the only market we really understood, and QuakerCard became our new business idea, largely by default.

 

Copyright  2005 by Chris Cononico
All rights reserved. No part of this manuscript may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.