Paypal co-founder critiques pitches, talks entrepreneurship
PayPal co-founder and Affirm CEO Max Levchin visited Rice to discuss entrepreneurship as a part of his University Tech Tour in an event organized jointly with the computer science club.
Levchin, a serial entrepreneur, said one of the main reasons he was drawn to Rice was its diversity.
“We’re looking for far-flung places to find talent,” Levchin said. “One of the things that I care about is gender diversity, and Silicon Valley is not exactly a haven of women in computer science.”
He cited the relatively high percentage of women studying computer science at Rice as an impressive achievement for a top-tier program, and said he may be interested in hiring them for any of his projects or companies.
Although Levchin was scheduled to attend a student pitch competition prior to his talk, flight delays caused him to miss the presentations, which were recorded for later viewing.
“I’m hoping to be blown away by a few pitches,” Levchin said.
Several representatives of Levchin’s company Hard, Valuable, Fun, also known as HVF, were in attendance, including Chief Technology Officer Benjamin Jun and Head of Investments Eric Scott. HVF provides seed investments for emerging projects centered on data and is responsible for producing companies such as Yelp, Slide and financial tech company Affirm. Jun and Scott were in the pitch room critiquing teams as they presented their ideas.
“Some of these students walked in with companies that they are going to execute and for those ones I hope they take the plunge and take them as far as those ideas go,” Scott said. “There’s others that just came to talk about some cool ideas [and] for those, hopefully they’ll take it to the next level.”
Duncan College junior Philip Taffet presented his venture, a communications software for the automobile communications industry. Will Rice College sophomore Jake Nyquist, Lovett College junior Brett Gutstein and an automobile journalist who is not a Rice student are also members of the team.
Taffet said the team, which they named Steward Technology, hopes to see their startup out to the fullest.
“We’re in a very niche market,”he said. “We know we won’t be the next Facebook. Max is a famous entrepreneur; we [hope] to get feedback on our idea and keep our momentum going.”
Their team has previously won Owl Open, a startup competition with the Jones Business School.
Jones School student Alexander Wesley and his team created the Spontaneous Pop-Up Display, or SPUD. It is a 24-inch portable computer screen that can be connected to a phone or laptop. Duncan junior George Zhu is also a member of the team. Wesley said he felt Levchin’s visit and the pitch competition presented a good opportunity to learn.
“These guys have a lot of years of experience in the startup world,” Wesley said. “It’s incumbent upon you as an entrepreneur to try to learn more every day.”
SPUD is planning to begin their pre-sale campaign soon and may ship units as early as February 2017.
Ziel Solutions, the team with Sid Richardson College junior Alex Dzeda and Will Rice senior Senthil Natarajan, presented their device for reducing the risk of injury from repetitive physical activity, especially for baseball pitching injuries.
Jun said he and Scott can bring in another pair of eyes, and spoke specifically about Taffet, Nyquist and Gustein’s proposal for the automobile communications industry.
“They figured out how to measure a level of information that’s valuable to the industry, but there’s all sorts of other related information around that,” Jun said. “I hope that we were able to encourage them to look at some of the broader things there.”
Although Scott said he was unwilling to pick favorites, Jun said he felt the baseball pitching device was an excellent product in terms of not requiring major education to create a need and for taking advantage of Bluetooth technology on smartphones.
“The hardest part about a new technology is it’s easy to convince yourself that the technology is useful and valuable,” Jun said. “But it’s often hard to do it in a way that’s demonstrably better than the existing product, and it’s very interesting when you look at [products] that can do that.”
Jun and Scott said they encouraged students to recognize the value of simply building.
“The one thing I would impart on any organization that’s trying to encourage entrepreneurship and leadership is to not underestimate the power of a builder’s ethos,” Scott said. “There is true value in just making something–and that value is evident everywhere. The most impressive pitches we saw today were the ones who had built the most.”
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