CURT HOPKINS MSMGT95 NOVASTONE MEDIA LTD. LONDON, ENGLAND When Curt Hopkins graduated from Georgia Tech with his master’s degree in management, the Internet was taking off globally—especially the use of email and basic web browsing. With a background in telecommunications, he was recruited to take a look at a new joint venture opportunity in Kazakhstan, a relatively new country formed when it declared its independence from the Soviet republic in 1991. “There were 15 million people living in the country,” Hopkins says. “And it was a very educated populace eager to find out what was happening around the world. But its telecom network was shockingly bad.” The venture, called Nursat, was a collaboration with Lucent Technologies—which itself had just split off from AT&T—as well as the U.S. government and Kazakh investors. Hopkins was hired to help bring the Internet and other telecom services to consumers and corporate networks in 25 cities using satellite technologies. “Over a span of four years, we built up Nursat to $10 million in annual revenue and then sold the business in 2000,” Hopkins says. Though he enjoyed being part of a startup in a place with so much growth opportunity, Hopkins decided to look for a role with a larger, more stable corporation in a larger, more stable location—London. For the next several years, he held positions overseeing business units for major companies such as Marconi, Fujitsu, Nortel and Vodafone, among others.
JASMINE BURTON ID 14 FOUNDER, WISH FOR WASH, AND GLOBAL HEALTH CORPS FELLOW LUSAKA, ZAMBIA Two years ago, just before she “got out” of Georgia Tech, Jasmine Burton and her team of students won Tech’s InVenture Prize—the largest undergraduate invention competition in the United States—with their design of an inexpensive, portable toilet called SafiChoo. She’d been inspired to do something about the global sanitation crisis after learning as a freshman that nearly half of the world didn’t have access to a toilet, and that women and girls were disproportionately burdened. “Pubescent girls in the developing world frequently drop out of school because their schools lacked toilets,” Burton says. Such realities angered her as both a designer and a woman,
“But then I decided I wanted to get involved with startups again,” Hopkins says. He acquired with private equity a company called Redeem that focused on recycling trade-in mobile phones and other electronic devices, growing the business to $45 million in annual revenues before selling it to financial investors. And then he began looking for other new, small- to medium-sized technology-related businesses to help lead, fund and grow to scale. “I’ve been a serial entrepreneur and investor ever since,” he says. Today, Hopkins is the COO for Novastone Media, a software business that provides secure mobile messaging for private banks and wealth management firms. “It’s like a secure form of WhatsApp, allowing users to talk to high-value customers in a safe way but also compliant with financial regulations,” Hopkins says. “Email phishing and spoofing is a big threat in this arena.” In addition, he is heavily involved in tech startup incubation through the Alacrity Foundation in Wales, where he’s so far helped launch five startups with 10 more in the pipeline. “Silicon Valley may get all the attention, but London has a very vibrant startup scene, especially in FinTech,” he says. “It’s a dynamic ecosystem and there are a lot of Georgia Tech alumni who are part of it.”
and she decided to dedicate her life to solving such problems. After graduation, Burton went to Africa to further development of the SafiChoo and to work on a number of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure initiatives. She launched Wish for WASH, a social impact startup that seeks to bring innovation to sanitation. Through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, her team raised nearly $26,000 to support their efforts. Burton simultaneously serves as a design specialist at the Society for Family Health, a reproductive health organization in Zambia, via her Global Health Corps fellowship. “Similar to WASH, reproductive health is often seen as a taboo topic in Africa, with people uncomfortable or afraid to talk about it,” Burton says. “I believe that if you can’t talk about something, then you cannot improve it. I want to help normalize this conversation and empower people to make educated decisions for themselves.” GTALUMNIMAG.COM VOLUME 92 NO.1 2016
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