as a skin-care line and a renewable energy source, but their shared experiences are countless. No matter the product or service, the funding source or company structure, entrepreneurship is a roller coaster that these graduates say they would ride over and over again. “There’s something about being an entrepreneur that’s great and wonderful,” Miller says. “You have a vision, and with your education and your tools, you have an idea how to get there.”
C
Robert Houser
Tapping Phone Frustration
raig Walker (MBA ’91), cofounder of GrandCentral Communications Inc., always knew he wanted to create his own business, but he didn’t know what or how. “I’d sit there in college and come up with, say, the best onion peeler,” he says. “Entrepreneurship has always been inside me, but trying to figure out something that makes sense is really hard. It’s got to be something you personally experience.” Or, in Walker’s case, something that personally drove him crazy. Walker was tired of not having control of his phone setup. When traveling, he would get off a flight and have to check three voicemail systems. He would call the phone company and get billed $20 to turn on or off any feature. He had no way to archive important messages. “I was personally frustrated,” Walker says. “It seemed like a broken system.” Walker’s fix was GrandCentral, a Webbased voice communications platform that helps users manage all their phones through one single, lifetime number that forwards calls to all of an individual’s phones. When he started GrandCentral, Walker was armed with his Georgetown MBA and a law degree from UC Berkeley and had spent years working in Silicon Valley’s startup telecommunications industry, largely on the venture capital side. He worked with one venture capital firm that invested in DialPad Communications, a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) company that provides worldwide phone communication using the Internet. The company grew like a weed, Walker says, but it began losing $4 million a month as the Internet bubble grew in late 2000. So Walker was placed in the role of CEO and also served as chief financial officer Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
and general counsel. One of his first tasks was cutting down the staff of 150 to 15. He went on to guide the company through Chapter 11 bankruptcy and turned it into the most profitable VoIP company in the industry. In 2005, Yahoo acquired DialPad, and Walker stayed for a few months until he got the entrepreneurial itch again. From the get-go, GrandCentral created a lot of buzz, as Walker apparently had tapped into a global frustration. The product gave users just one phone number and one voicemail and also allowed them to listen in as voicemail messages were being recorded and to switch a call from cell phone to desk phone. The company received coverage in The Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times. And in
Walker’s fix was GrandCentral, a Web-based voice communications platform that helps users manage all their phones through one single, lifetime number that forwards calls to all of an individual’s phones. 2007, for the second time, a Silicon Valley giant came calling when Google presented an offer Walker could not refuse. “On my 42nd birthday, June 2, 2007, we joined Google,” Walker says. “I’ve been at Google since then.” Walker serves as group product manager for real-time communications. His department includes GoogleTalk, and he oversaw the March relaunch of GrandCentral as a Google product called Google Voice. Walker says Google is very entrepreneurial for a large company and encourages experimentation. But for now, he dedicates a significant amount of time to management tasks, whereas he used to spend every waking hour on the product. Still, the hours are only slightly shorter than they were when he was working as an entrepreneur. On an average day, Walker wakes up at home in Danville, Calif., at 6:30 a.m. and catches
Find out more at www.google.com/voice/about
the 7 a.m. WiFi-equipped Google shuttle, aboard which he works until the shuttle arrives at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View 75 minutes later. He’s on his computer through meals (provided by Google), hops on the 5 p.m. shuttle, gets home at 6:30, plays with his kids, eats dinner, and picks the computer up again from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. Walker has learned that many business dealings boil down to common sense, which makes him especially appreciative of his Georgetown education. “Georgetown is a Jesuit school, even at the business level,” he says. “There’s that embodiment of common sense, and it’s helped me get through things, from foreign investors to raising money to getting acquired.” Although he was not the most dedicated student, Walker says, he is making up for it now. Out of the blue, he is discovering a lot of material he did not think he fully digested in school. “What’s surprising and really delightful is that later in life, what I learned became useful,” he says. “I didn’t even remember what I learned until I needed it; then it came to the forefront.”
A
Developing a Thick Skin
da Polla (MBA ’04), founder of Swiss antioxidant skin-care line Alchimie Forever, was no stranger to entrepreneurship when she arrived at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. Her parents, both doctors, opened a medical spa in Geneva in the 1990s, and Polla wanted to expand their limited line of skin-care products. But she and her father had differences of opinion on the path she should pursue. “He encouraged me to take the more traditional route,” says Polla, speaking from her office at 25th and M Streets in Washington, D.C. She says her father thought she should first work for Estee Lauder or L’Oreal after graduation. Instead, Polla decided to start her company while she was a student to see if it was a viable business she could run full time after graduation. Polla had the confidence to take the plunge before she had acquired all of her business tools, in part because of the entrepreneur-friendly environment in the United States. “The mindset here is, ‘Just try it, and if it doesn’t work, you’ll be stronger. Or you 17