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Campus
News: Week of October 16, 2000
Alumni
Entrepreneurs Share Tips for Success at Venture Forum
Next
week: Advice from venture capitalists
With an estimated
$12 billion in successful startups between them, three Rensselaer
entrepreneurs treated more than 200 students to advice about seeking
venture capital funding at a free, on-campus Venture Forum.
Paul J. Severino
'69 said starting a high-tech company and seeking venture capital
funding is both an "art and a science." Mukesh Chatter
'82 recommended surrounding yourself with great people. And Martin
Schoffstall '82 says do it while you're young.
The daylong
Venture Forum at the Heffner Alumni House was sponsored by the
Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship. Severino and
President Shirley Ann Jackson hosted the luncheon, and State Senate
Majority Leader Joseph Bruno (R-Brunswick) attended as guest speaker.
To read more
about some of Rensselaer's entrepreneurial alumni, read "Pioneers
of the Internet" in Rensselaer magazine.
10/16/00
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Advice
From Rensselaer Entreprenuers
"Understand
the DNA of a startup company," said Severino, a
Rensselaer trustee who was founder and chairman of Bay Networks.
"Take the Incubator, for example. It's like the
Hewlett Packard garage here on campus. No one wants to start
up in a luxurious environment. One of the worst things you
can do, in the eyes of investors, is to invite them to an
office filled with mahogany furniture. That doesn't exactly
scream 'We need money.' "
Severino
said there is a mantra in the venture capitalist community:
"You
can't raise enough money or build a strong enough management
team," he said. "I've heard VCs say 'I'll take
an "A" team with a "B" plan over a "B"
team with an "A" plan anytime.' "
"You
need people with passion about an idea," Severino
said.
"People who'll stay up 24 hours a day, live on hot
dogs and pizza, and drink JOLT."
Schoffstall,
who co-founded PSINet, suggested humility and trust are
paramount.
"If
every sentence starts with me and I, you're well on the
way to failure," Schoffstall
said.
"The only appropriate sentences that start with I or
me are: I'm sorry, and I'll fix it. You don't need to be
perfect, I never was, but you had better be trustworthy.
Your word must be your bond. If you can't be trusted, you
can't play."
Schoffstall
also stressed never to play fast and loose with someone
else's money. "OPM (other people's money) is a covenant.
If I have 100 bucks in my own pocket I can do what I want
with it, but when I take someone else's money there is higher
standard with regards to how use it."
Chatter,
who was recognized by Red
Herring as one of its Top Entrepreneurs in
1999
and
as one of the wealthiest 40 people in the U.S. under 40
years old, said believe
in yourself and your idea above everything.
"The
kind of questions you get asked as you seek venture funding
can really give you knocks on your ego," Chatter
said.
"I was asked, for instance, 'why you? What makes you
think you're so smart… Cisco has hundreds of millions
of dollars in R&D, what makes you think you can come
up with a better idea?' "
"I
kept saying why not me, why couldn't I be so smart?"
Chatter said.
Chatter
emphasized the importance of carefully managing ego out
of the equation with a pop culture reference.
"In
The Dirty Dozen one man relies on the other 11,"
he
said.
"Startups are exactly like that. There's no room for
ego. Be very careful of the amount of damage that can be
done by large egos."
Mary
Bayly Skevington '79, vice president for marketing at Flow
Management Technologies, summed up the entrepreneurial lifestyle.
"There's
an old saying, 'Is the glass half full or half empty?"
she said. "In the life of an entrepreneur, your glass
is always overflowing."
10/16/00
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Lingering
Cough? New Technology Can Help Diagnose Lung Diseases
Michael Savic,
professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering, and
his graduate student, Thrasos Axiotis, are developing computer
technology that will diagnose lung disease using signal processing.
Working with
a professionally made database of sounds of about 50 lung diseases,
Savic and Axiotis have programmed a computer to use features of
these sounds to identify lung diseases, such as pneumonia, asthma,
and bronchitis. Lung sounds from the database, which is used to
train doctors, are transformed into electronic signals and brought
into a computer, which then analyzes the signal and determines
if the lungs are healthy or not.
"If
you want to find someone with blue eyes and a big nose, you look
for those features, not for toes or hands or hair," Savic
explained. "Pulling features of particular lung diseases
works in the same way."
 If
the lungs are not healthy, a graphical display on the computer
screen indicates the nature of the disease with a specific color,
called a cluster. There are presently a few clusters that overlap,
indicating that those diseases share some of the same features,
Axiotis explained. These will require more refined signal processing
to separate, he said.
The researchers
plan to test their system on real patients in the near future,
and anticipate slight obstacles. "The data we currently have
is clear and nice," Savic said, "but in the exam room
we don't have as much control over noise interference. Noise from
an air conditioner or even movement from the patient could distort
the signals, giving us an inaccurate reading." But he is
confident that with a bit of refining, the system will work.
10/16/00
Ting-Leung
Sham Named Fellow of ASME
Ting-Leung
(Sam) Sham, associate professor of mechanical engineering, aeronautical
engineering, and mechanics, has been elected a fellow of the American
Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
Sham's field
of expertise is in solid mechanics with a special emphasis on
fracture, finite element methods, computational methods, and viscoplastic
modeling. He also is conducting research in the area of thin film
lubrication. Sham is recognized for his contributions to research
on stable crack growth in elastic-plastic solids.
Sham received
a B.Sc. degree, with First Class Honors, in mechanical engineering
from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, in 1977. He earned his
M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanics of solids and structures and
an M.S. degree in applied mathematics, all at Brown University.
He started
his teaching career at Rensselaer in 1982 and is currently on
leave of absence to Knolls Atomic Power Lab in Schenectady.
While at
the University of Glasgow, Sham was recognized with numerous awards
in thermodynamics and mechanical engineering. He is a member of
ASME, American Society of Testing and Materials, American Academy
of Mathematics, American Ceramic Society, Society for Industrial
and Applied Mathematics, Society of Engineering Sciences, and
ASM International (formerly the American Society for Metals).
10/16/00
Fending
Off the Flu
Due to an
initial shortage of flu vaccine, the first round of vaccinations
given by Student Health Services will be for students only beginning
in early November. Vaccinations will be given to students on a
first-come, first-served basis.
Student Health
Services will receive additional shipments of the vaccine in late
November and early December that will be available to students,
faculty, and staff. The vaccine is administered free to students;
faculty and staff will be charged $5.
Katrin Wesner,
health systems manager, says the flu vaccine takes about two weeks
to kick in but waiting for the later rounds shouldn't cause any
problems, as flu season generally runs from December through March.
She advises faculty and staff with any concerns to make alternative
plans for receiving the vaccine.
Richard Many,
associate director of the Student Health Center, says, "Everyone
should take advantage of this terrific opportunity to fend off
the 2001 version of the flu."
Stay tuned
for more details on the dates for the vaccinations.
10/16/00
E-Business
Course Examines Impact of Technology
Every Tuesday
night in the renovated MBA classroom in Rensselaer's Lally School,
more than 100 students and industry executives log on to Jack
Wilson's eBusiness class to virtually tackle a major industry
case study dealing with the alphabet soup of eBusiness (B2B, ASP,
ERP, etc.).
The class,
titled eBusiness:
The Hope, The Hype, The Power, The Pain, challenges
students to examine the sweeping changes technology has dealt
to the business world.
More than
half the class is learning at a distance and are executives at
leading American corporations. The other half are local executives
and full-time Rensselaer MBA students who come to the physical
classroom. Each student is linked by a laptop running software
called LearnLinc,
which is a live, online learning system developed by Wilson and
two MBA students, Mark Bernstein '94 and Degerhan Usluel '94.
Wilson is the J. Erik Jonsson Distinguished Professor and co-director
of Rensselaer's Severino
Center for Technological Entrepreneurship . LearnLinc
allows the students to talk in real time, watch and give presentations,
electronically collaborate on documents, and browse the Internet.
For instance,
a discussion of the Ford/GM/Daimler Chrysler joint B2B portal
might be led by students from Ford Motor Company, financial executives
from J.P. Morgan, eBusiness technology experts from IBM, and full-time
graduate business students from Beijing, China. That discussion
spills over throughout the week in online discussions facilitated
by Rensselaer's WebCT (Web Course Tools), a Web-based learning
management system.
"I want
students to pretend they're working for an investment firm,"
says Wilson. "In that respect, they need to provide a balanced
analysis of the company, its business model, its competitors,
its strategy, its finances, and its prospects. Balanced means
that you have to ferret out the hype, as well as the hope and
the pain to find the power of the business model."
Wilson calls
it "eBusiness by day and eLearning eBusiness by night."
10/16/00
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