At a university best known for turning out captains of industry and Wall Street hedge fund magnates, Yale is now focusing more attention on nurturing its entrepreneurs.

At last week’s inaugural Yale Entrepreneurs Conference, organizers put out a call to alumni to join the efforts of the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute and others to foster entrepreneurship at Yale, on campus, around the country and around the world.

The full day conference on Oct. 14 featured presentations and panels by student entrepreneurs as well as sessions with leading Yale alumni entrepreneurs.

The conference was the brainchild of Jim Boyle, founder of the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (YEI). He worked with Victoria Elenowitz of GoldenSeeds, chair of YEI’s advisory council, to bring together students from the YEI fellows program past and present, Yale entrepreneurs, investors, students, and others interested in promoting entrepreneurship at the university.

The Yale Entrepreneurial Institute is itself a startup, having been founded only in 2007, in part as an outgrowth of the university’s licensing activity. According to Boyle, “In 2006, we found ourselves awash with students who came to us with new ideas for new ventures. Then others began to surround us—board members, mentors, corporate partners, who were all willing to help.”

Currently, the YEI is completing the fourth cycle of its Fellows program, wherein about 25 student entrepreneurs are competitively selected each year by an operating board, then given small cash stipends and 10 weeks of a full-time summer mentoring program, followed by introductions to investors and other Yale alumni and community members who can help them grow their ventures into full-scale businesses.

YEI’s track record so far looks promising: over 47 ventures have been founded, creating over 160 jobs and attracting more than $45 million in investment capital.

A sampling of current and recent YEI fellow companies that made short pitches at the conference lunchtime session includes:

—Incendia Biochar: organic waste disposal technology

—Ancera: out to commercialize a rapid cell separation and pathogen diagnostics device from a Yale laboratory

—Desmos: virtual whiteboarding and teaching tools

—SilviaTerra: using satellites to survey timber holdings.

Other YEI graduate ventures of note include Hadapt, which has developed an adaptive analytical platform for big data, and Oasys Water, a water purification technology company backed by Flagship Ventures.

Profiles of past YEI fellows and their companies can be found here. Profiles of current YEI fellow teams can be found here.

Leading student entrepreneurs who have recently graduated and gone on to run successful businesses featured at the conference included Sean Glass (Y 2003), founder of the … Next Page »

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What are the top 10 mistakes made by entrepreneurs in starting and growing companies?

On January 24, I had the pleasure of serving on a panel organized by the Brown Forum for Enterprise that took on that tantalizing topic. The eight-person panel, held at Johnson and Wales University’s Culinary Museum in Providence, included three serial entrepreneurs, two investors, two lawyers, and a partner in an audit firm. To get to the answer, we voted, argued, swapped war stories, argued some more, and then voted again.

Here’s how it went down. Based on our experience with technology and life sciences companies, each of us was asked in advance to share our favorite candidates for the entrepreneurial miscue list. In a conference call we discussed the nominees, combined a few of the mistakes into one entry, then boiled things down to a single list of 10 mistakes (with no particular ranking) to present at the panel.

As an audience of roughly 80 people looked on, Christopher Graham, co-partner in charge at Edwards Angell Palmer and Dodge, moderated and asked us all to vote on each proposed mistake that was submitted. We voted 1 to 10 in ranked order (with 1 being our choice for the biggest or most important mistake). Then we proceeded to defend our positions vociferously, hashing out the final list in an invigorating intellectual scrum that included the aforementioned war-story swapping—dredging up personal experiences that were as painful as they were instructive—to buttress our arguments. As this was happening, panelists were asked to hold up green cards to show support for an idea and red cards to oppose it. While the cards did not affect the rank vote, they did add some interactivity and point-counterpoint dimension to the process.

In the end, the final 10 were ranked based on the scores that they garnered, with No. 1 being the item on the list with the lowest overall score and No. 10 the item with the highest tally, meaning it was the least important mistake on the list.

Here is the list of scrummates; I thank my fellow panelists for a rousing good time:

Rick Andrews, President and CEO, Thrasos Therapeutics
Rich Horan, Senior Managing Director, Slater Technology Fund
Jon Lourie, Partner, Edwards Angell Palmer and Dodge
Andre Marquis, CEO, Amplyx Pharmaceuticals
Edward Sullivan, Jr., Venture Partner in Charge, KPMG New England
Thayer Swartwood, Principal, ABS Ventures
Robert Valentini, President and CEO, Myomics, Inc.
Steve Woit, Publisher, Xconomy

And here’s our final list of the most serious mistakes made by entrepreneurs in starting and growing companies. What do you think?

1. Under-valuing the importance of your management team (i.e., staffing with friends or neighbors; delaying personnel decisions; devoting too much time to your technology or your product and too little to developing your team).

2. Attempting to build your business around rocket science (zealously pursuing your technology but overlooking the business opportunity; failing to address how the technology solves a real problem in a cost-effective manner; failing to focus on the needs of potential customers; failing to achieve balance between your technology’s primary function and advancing the broader value proposition of your business).

3. Assembling the wrong ownership group (choosing among potential investors based on highest bid; failing to understand investor needs in advance; choosing investors whose styles are dysfunctional or who do not bring added value).

4. Over-valuing the business at critical junctures (over-valuing when fundraising or selling; As a corollary, we noted that another related mistake was not fully evaluating term sheet provisions that affect the valuation).

5. Failing to communicate with important constituencies (over-promising and under-delivering; overlooking or not addressing the evolving needs of your investors, of those who regulate your technology, or of your customers, of the rest of your team).

6. Failing to tap knowledgeable advice (not seeking tax advice, accounting advice, or IP advice at the appropriate time; failing to properly utilize the Board; listening to the wrong people; selecting an entity structure not well-suited for the business or an unnecessarily complicated capital structure).

7. Fear of dilution or loss of control (raising too little capital; investing too many personal assets in the business).

8. Spending too much for too little (spending too much of what little you have on items that provide too little benefit).

9. Partnering too early (losing control of a business opportunity or your brand to a customer or strategic partner).

10. Failing to understand the changing roles of founders (recognizing the appropriate time to transition).

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…is coming soon.

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