While many of their friends don suits to go to their jobs on Wall Street or tote heavy technical volumes to prestigious graduate school libraries, Kyle Jasey and Dave Preston are taking a less traditional post-college route.
After graduating from Duke in 2004, Jasey and Preston started their own business. They design humorous posters that reflect the college experience.
The nascent stages of their company, College Flavor, Inc., began in a dorm room during the second semester of their senior year.
“Looking up at the wall at their Scarface poster, their Bob Marley poster and their beer-helping-ugly-people-have-sex poster, we were like, ‘Wow this could be anybody’s dorm room anywhere in the country,’” Preston said. “It’s the same 15 to 20 posters that are on everybody’s walls. So we just started brainstorming it and kicked around ideas for posters.”
It was just the beginning of what has been an ongoing adventure for the Duke graduates.
Their first line of posters is available from several retailers nationwide, including AllPosters.com, Art.com, Spencer’s Gift Stores and Beyond the Wall’s college poster show. The company’s second line will be similar to the first and target the college-age demographic.
Preston and Jasey are among a handful of Duke students and graduates who are proving that street smarts and book smarts are not mutually exclusive.
They are using skills honed at Duke— where economics is the most popular major and an increasing number of students are pursuing the markets and management certificate—to start their own commercial ventures.
“I feel like so much of what I learned is helping me with the business,” Jasey said.
Preston agreed, noting that the resources available at the University helped them win the Duke “Cross-Quad Challenge,” an entrepreneurial competition that gives winners seed money.
“Duke’s an amazing place,” Preston said. “There are so many talented people. I mean, when we needed a graphic designer... [and] there was a guy in our fraternity who was going to be here during the summer and would help us out.... There are professors, money, anything you need.”
Senior Garrett Bean, whose company, Gourmet Dining and Bakery, LLC., will begin delivering food on campus through Blackboard in the fall, emphasized the helpfulness of Duke administrators, singling out Matt Drummond, director of information technology working with the DukeCard office.
“I called him probably 15 to 20 times on a Saturday, and he was returning calls until eight at night,” Bean said. “I don’t know how many administrators at other colleges would do that.”
Bean, who has worked to make online ordering through GDB a reality for almost two years, said he hopes the lessons he has learned starting a business at Duke will be helpful as he pitches his delivery system to other schools across the country.
“I’d really like it to spread to other colleges,” Bean said hopefully. “I don’t really want to work for other people.”
But not all entrepreneurs who graduated from Duke attribute their business savvy and achievements to their college experiences.
Jeremy Zeretsky and business partner William Gerba, the president and CEO of the software company Wirespring Technologies, respectively, spent hours every Tuesday and Thursday in The Perk formulating innovative entrepreneurial ideas before they graduated in Spring 2000. Zeretsky said they knew they wanted to go into business even before they knew what they were going to sell.
He added that though individual faculty members often serve as excellent mentors for students interested in business, he does not think the University as a whole inspires students to pursue unique commercial opportunities.
“I don’t think the University is a very entrepreneurial school, whereas places like Harvard and Stanford are known for producing that entrepreneurial spirit,” he said.
But Zeretsky’s mentor Connel Fullenkamp, visiting associate professor of economics, said the academic environment at Duke allows students interested in business to flex their entrepreneurial muscles.
“I think one of the things we can do here is help students find out if they are entrepreneurs,” Fullenkamp said. “Everybody thinks about working for themselves at some point, and giving them the opportunity to figure that out is a big service.”
As part of the markets and management certificate program, Duke offers a handful of courses on entrepreneurship, including a capstone course in which students prepare a business plan.
This fall, the economics department will offer a course on entrepreneurship and innovation taught by Jon Fjeld, adjunct professor in the Fuqua School of Business.
Fullenkamp said the courses offer the decision-making tools and analytical skills unique to entrepreneurship—and necessary for students who want to start their own businesses.
“Entrepreneurs are different from most Duke students who will enter the corporate world, rise normally and be extremely successful, and that’s perfectly fine for vast majority,” Fullenkamp said. “[Entrepreneurs] tend to be experiential learners and figure it out and learn from their own mistakes. They have a vision and a sense that if other people can do it, so can they.
“I would call them risk-takers, but I think they don’t really think they’re taking that big of a risk because they’re confident in their skill and abilities.”
Jasey and Preston also emphasized patience and persistence as the two skills needed for success in the business world.
“It’s about having the guts to do it and then being able to stick it out and ride out the ebbs and flows,” Preston said.
Although they admit they still live on a budget and have other means of income— namely throwing beer pong parties at Divine’s Restaurant and Bar during the summer—they remain optimistic about the future of their company.
They also hope to diversify their business and venture into T-shirts and retail clothing.
“We’re not that unique in that we’re the only ones that could leave Duke and start a company,” Jasey said. “Tons of people could do it. But it’s about actually doing it and not being afraid to go that route.”
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