Vision Quest: Rice Alliance

Vision Quest: Rice Alliance

BY MARGOT DIMOND
Rice News staff

It was the summer of 1997 and the person asking the question was Steven C. Currall, associate professor in the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management. Currall had just read a Fortune magazine article on the role of Stanford in the development of Silicon Valley, which helped create such companies as Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems and Yahoo. He had an idea that Rice could play the same role in Houston — spurring job creation, startup companies and education. But it wasn’t until he ran into Rice alumnus Dan Watkins that he began verbalizing the idea that in 1999 became the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship.

Watkins, a 1984 Rice graduate in material science, was an investment banker working on his MBA at the Jones School. He and Currall had a similar interest in building such an alliance.

Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Five years after its creation, the Rice Alliance has helped launch more than 150 new technology companies and attracted $4.5 million in external funding. The success of the endeavor has far exceeded the expectations of founding director Steven C. Currall, center, the William and Stephanie Sick Professor of Entrepreneurship and associate professor of management, psychology and statistics, and has been made possible by Alliance team members, from left, Brad Burke, managing director; Amy Barnett, staff assistant; Liz Crawford, coordinator for the Rice University Business Plan Competition and for the Technology Entrepreneurship Workshop; and Mary Sommers Pyne, director of operations and event planning.

“We talked about how much the university could contribute to the local community and how that might be driven inside the university — how Rice could be more involved in startup companies,” Watkins recalled.

Today, five years after its creation, the Rice Alliance has become the university’s flagship initiative devoted to the support of technology entrepreneurship, helping launch more than 150 new technology companies, which have raised more than $118 million in early stage funding. It has also attracted $4.5 million in external funding, including donations and pledges, as well as two grants from the National Science Foundation to promote entrepreneurship and education.

Is this the level of success that Currall expected? “It has turned out even bigger than I envisioned,” he said.

The path to that success began in earnest with a series of Friday meetings with faculty of the Jones School, the George R. Brown School of Engineering and the Wiess School of Natural Sciences, as well as with local venture capitalists. Together, the group developed a strategic plan for how Rice might play a role in developing “geographical clusters of high-tech companies,” Currall said.

In the summer of 1999, they presented the collaborative plan to the deans of their respective schools, and then Currall received the approval of the president’s office and the interest of several trustees, including Burt McMurtry and Bob Maxfield. One of the trustees most enthusiastic about the new venture was William N. “Bill” Sick, chairman and CEO of Business Resources International, an investment firm specializing in early stage growth companies. With his background, he clearly saw the Alliance as an opportunity to benefit both Rice and the Houston community while enhancing the university’s capabilities and reputation as a leader in entrepreneurial business education.

Sick has been an adviser to the Rice Alliance since its inception, but he made another key contribution as well. To institutionalize collaboration between the schools, he and his wife established a professorship. In 2002, Currall became the William and Stephanie Sick Professor of Entrepreneurship in the George R. Brown School of Engineering, a title added to that of associate professor of management, psychology and statistics in the Jones School.

“It was an interesting approach,” Sick said. “Placing the chair in the School of Engineering and having the holder of the chair in the Jones School forms a nice bridge for collaboration between the two, plus the School of Natural Sciences, and it provides resources for all of Rice’s technical innovators, faculty, students and alumni, as well as Houston-area entrepreneurs, investors and business leaders.”

Currall agrees. Establishing the chaired professorship was a major step toward promoting entrepreneurship across the university, he said. “Although there are numerous entrepreneurship programs around the country, the Rice Alliance is very unusual in that it has collaborations across three schools, and they are deep collaborations, not just in name only.”

The Rice Alliance helps technology-based companies by providing entrepreneurs with a collaborative network and access to the human and financial capital needed for success. To that end, the Rice Alliance has conducted more than 60 programs attended by 12,000 individuals. Its e-mail newsletter, “Rice Alliance Digest,” has 11,000 individual subscribers.

The Technology Venture Forum, held four to six times per year, features presenters with ideas for business ventures and an audience made up of advisers, investors, mentors, entrepreneurs and service providers offering feedback, suggestions and support. The forums concentrate on Houston’s areas of strength: energy, nanotechnology, life sciences and information technology.

Rakesh Agrawal, president of Snapstream Media Inc., a home entertainment products company for personal computers, presented at one of the early forums when his company was very new. Agrawal had only a few people on staff — all with engineering backgrounds — and he hoped to get specific feedback on improving his marketing efforts.

“It was great,” he recalled. “The Rice Alliance events have always been very good from the standpoint of networking and bringing together all the constituents of the high-tech community in one place.” His firm has gone from two people to 25, and his products are now sold in major retail outlets. “Directly and indirectly, all of these things were helped by the Rice Alliance through the contacts we met there.”

Another former forum presenter is Fred van der Neut, vice president and general manager of the RPM division of Autobytel, Inc., who in 2000 co-founded a customer database management firm for automotive dealerships, which was bought in 2004 by his current firm.

“The Rice Alliance helped us enormously, more than any other organization in the Houston area,” he said. “They made the effort to get the right audience, the right mix. It made for a very comfortable environment.”

Rice President David Leebron said that serving as a catalyst for high-tech job growth in Houston helps Rice in its mission.

“The Rice Alliance enables Rice to make a significant contribution to Houston’s entrepreneurs, and through them to the economic prosperity of our city,” President Leebron said. “The success of the Alliance helps make Rice both a practical and intellectual bridge between the development of ideas and their commercial application. In turn, this supports Rice’s commitment to provide the very best business education, and most especially entrepreneurial business.”

April is a big month for the Rice Alliance, as students from top MBA programs around the country come to campus to compete in the annual Rice University Business Plan Competition, co-hosted by the Jones School. The competition boasts the largest number of teams competing on a single campus and is widely recognized as one of the best such competitions in the country.

This year, 36 teams will be selected to compete for over $200,000 in prizes, including an investment opportunity of $100,000 for the grand prize winner.

Larry Ciscon, president of Trelligence, a software company he helped found three years ago, has been a judge of the competition for the last two years. He is amazed at how quickly it has grown.

“The professionalism of the Alliance personnel in putting [the competition] together gives it a lot of credibility,” he said, “and the quality of the judges they have been able to attract from the local and national community makes it exciting for the participants. After all, they are in front of real venture capitalists, and they know that one of the judges could come up to them after their presentations, talk to them, and even invest money in their companies.”

Sick noted that the business plan competition is bringing Rice recognition from the faculty in other universities as well. “Steve Currall is building a body of knowledge for business education related to entrepreneurship,” he said.

Concrete evidence of this came in November, when the Rice Alliance was awarded the prestigious Price Foundation Innovative Entrepreneurship Educators Award during the Roundtable on Entrepreneurship Education for Scientists and Engineers held at Stanford. The recipient is selected by the faculty and staff of The Stanford Technology Ventures Program, the entrepreneurship education and research center located within Stanford University’s School of Engineering.

Sick gives credit to the agility of the Alliance’s people, from founding director Currall to managing director Brad Burke to the entire team.

“The Rice Alliance has been a huge success — well beyond what people visualized in the early meetings, and that’s thanks to Steve Currall, Brad Burke and the staff,” Sick said. “The Alliance has been successful in almost everything it has tried because it adjusted as the needs changed and as new needs were recognized. Steve has provided the outstanding leadership and creativity to make that happen.”