Distinguishing Ideas Move Businesses Forward

Several UW graduates recognized this year by the Wisconsin Alumni Association are showing students how entrepreneurship works.

By Wisconsin Alumni Association Staff

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Interest in entrepreneurship continues to grow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. As more and more students come to college with dreams of starting their own businesses, several UW graduates recognized this year by the Wisconsin Alumni Association (WAA) are showing them how it’s done.

“It’s exciting to honor so many grads this year who have translated their UW experience to business success,” says Paula Bonner, WAA’s president and CEO.

This year, entrepreneurs are among seven graduates being honored with WAA’s highest honor, the Distinguished Alumni Award, for their professional achievements, contributions to society and support of the university. The Forward Under 40 Award, new in 2008, recognizes graduates under the age of 40 who are among the UW’s best and brightest innovators and citizens.

“We’re proud to recognize these distinguished alumni and young graduates as part of the worldwide community of 370,000 passionate, inspired Badger alumni,” says Bonner.

Entrepreneurial success comes early for some students, such Kenny Dichter, who got his start during his freshman year, when he opened a retail shop called Bucky’s on State Street. After graduating in 1990, Dichter returned to his native New York, where he’s founded three companies, including the recording label Alphabet City, which produces music compilations for sports leagues, and Tour GCX Inc., which offers area customers access to private golf clubs. Dichter’s most recent venture is MarquisJet, a $750 million company that offers prepaid access to private jet travel.

With a wardrobe that is “about 50 percent Badger gear,” he says, he also maintains an avid interest in the university, working with young alumni in New York and California to raise $1.5 million to remodel the university’s football offices. WAA honored Dichter’s success and devotion to UW–Madison with a 2008 Forward Under 40 Award.

West Coast entrepreneur Stephen Turner, who graduated in 1991, enrolled at UW–Madison knowing he wanted to start his own business. He found the training he needed in the applied math, engineering and physics program in the College of Letters and Science.

Today Turner is the founder and chief technology officer of Pacific Biosciences, a Menlo Park, Calif., company that is developing a DNA sequencing machine that will eventually make it affordable to unravel an individual’s entire genome. It’s a process that now costs $200,000 or more, but Turner says his company’s innovations could drop the price to just $1,000. His 130-employee company expects to release an instrument utilizing the new technology in early 2010. Current research suggests that DNA sequencing diagnostics is a market worth an estimated $2 billion, but Turner estimates it could grow to 10 times that.

“This will transform the way we think about medicine and how it is delivered,” says Turner, recipient of a 2008 Distinguished Young Alumni Award. “Medicine will focus on wellness, keeping people healthy, preventing disease and personalizing medicine for specific individuals. Without this individualization, medicine is nearing all it can do for people.”

Anand Chhatpar left India to pursue his entrepreneurial spirit at UW–Madison, and earned his degree in 2005. As a student intern, he was inspired to found BrainReactions, a company that puts creative college students to work to brainstorm innovative ideas for clients such as Bank of America, Pitney Bowes and Intuit.

When Chhatpar’s business partner, Darin Eich, who earned his doctorate at UW–Madison in 2007, conducts a typical brainstorm, it generates more than 500 ideas. Chhatpar then filters down to the most workable ideas for the client.

“Students are less cynical and less constrained by what is possible or not possible than somebody who is in the working world,” says Chhatpar, a recipient of a 2008 Forward Under 40 Award from WAA.

Chhatpar largely credits his UW experience and three contests — the Schoofs Prize for Creativity, the Tong Prototype Prize and the Steven G. Burrill Business Plan Competition — for providing him with the intellectual resources and a plan to start his new company.

But not all students begin their college education with entrepreneurial dreams. Neil Peters-Michaud, who received his BA from UW–Madison in 1993 and his master’s degree in business administration in 1999, began advocating for environmental sustainability long before he founded his Middleton-based business, Cascade Asset Management, a company that responsibly recycles surplus IT equipment.

As an undergraduate, Peters-Michaud’s efforts included encouraging University Residence Halls to accept and distribute reusable coffee mugs. After graduation, he continued his work, traveling through the Midwest with the National Wildlife Federation.

When he returned to Wisconsin, he focused on the growing environmental problem of computer waste. Today’s electronic equipment often includes toxic materials, making them difficult to dispose of safely. And yet, computers quickly become obsolete. Peters-Michaud believed much of this equipment could be safely — and profitably — recycled. He entered the Wisconsin School of Business’ Weinert Program for Entrepreneurship, where his MBA program included market research and business planning for his future company.

Nine years later, Peters-Michaud is a recipient of a 2008 Forward Under 40 Award. His firm employs more than 100 people in two states and has diverted more than 34 million pounds of electronic waste from landfills. In the last three years, the company has grown by more than 300 percent.

For Sheldon Lubar, what began as an original business theory turned into entrepreneurial success that allows him to give back to where it all began. Lubar, who earned degrees at the UW in 1951 and 1953, launched his career in Milwaukee, arranging venture capital at the first holding company formed by a U.S. bank since the Great Depression. Here, he began devising a theory he called “professional ownership.” Today he calls it “enterprise development.”

“Most companies [in the 1950s] were run by owner-operators,” he says. “The people who owned them were also the ones in charge of day-to-day operations. By separating these two functions, the company could gain total objectivity.”

During the following years, Lubar tested his theory by buying, improving and selling a series of companies. In the late 1970s, after serving as assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, he set up Lubar & Co., the private-investment firm he still heads today.

As Lubar & Co. has grown, Sheldon and his wife, Marianne, who earned her UW degree in 1954, have used their earnings to benefit their home city and state, and their efforts have been recognized with a 2008 Distinguished Alumni Award.

At UW–Milwaukee, the Lubars made the largest single donation in the university’s history, contributing more than $10 million to what is now the Lubar School of Business. At UW–Madison, their contributions include joining last year’s $85 million Wisconsin Naming Partnership at the Wisconsin School of Business, successor to the School of Commerce where Sheldon earned his first degree.

“The UW has been a huge influence in my life,” Sheldon says. “It made it possible for me to do all the things I’ve wanted to do.”
—WAA staff members John Allen, Kate Kail Dixon and Ben Wischnewski contributed to this report.

NOTE: The Wisconsin Alumni Association will honor the recipients of the 2008 Distinguished Alumni Awards at a program on Thursday, May 8, at 5 p.m. in the Wisconsin Union Theater. The program is free and open to the public. Learn more about the Distinguished Alumni Awards and the Forward Under 40 Awards at uwalumni.com.

Visit our archives to read articles from previous issues of the UW Business Wire.