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August 2005 New Ventures
As baby boomers age and accumulate more wealth, they want independent advice to help them invest. “There’s plenty of financial advice and information out there,” says John Heins, MBA ’91, “but much of it comes from sources with an ulterior motive; namely, they want you to invest with them.” Heins has joined his media background (he was president and CEO of Gruner + Jahr USA) with the financial expertise of professional investor Whitney Tilson to produce Value Investor Insight, a newsletter for sophisticated investors. You can check it out at www.valueinvestorinsight.com. Rajesh Navar, Sloan ’03, was one of the first engineers at eBay before he entered the Sloan Master’s Program. Last November he started his own online company, LiveDeal, which specializes in local classified ads throughout the United States. Except for auto ads, sellers pay nothing to list their products. Instead, LiveDeal charges a 5 percent fee for completed transactions. Two month after the company’s launch, its customers sold $80 million in goods; two months later, $155 million. Navar expects to expand to communities in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and India by the end of 2005. LiveDeal can be found at www.livedeal.com. If you’ve ever wanted to tour Greece as only a native Greek would do, you may have your chance, thanks to a company called TrueGreece, the true Greek who started it, and the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, which helped him develop his business plan. Christos Stergiou, MBA ’04, grew up in Greece, where he learned tourism from the family hotel business, and went to the GSB, where he founded his new venture. Stergiou’s company offers three different Greek island tours to groups of 4 to 16 people accompanied by a concierge, as well as customized trips. Reserve, or just daydream, at www.truegreece.com. Good things come in tiny packages for BinOptics cofounder and president Darius Forghani, MBA ’00. Based in Ithaca, N.Y., the company developed a proprietary process for etching the miniscule laser chips used in optical circuitry. Semiconductors equipped with BinOptics’ so-called integrated microphotonic chips will allow greater storage and faster transmission of data than is available from electricity-powered semiconductors. BinOptics received major second-round funding in February. You can read all about it at www.binoptics.com. The main reason an individual or a company incorporates is to place a “corporate veil” between the corporation and the owner that protects the assets of each from the other. But, says attorney Stanford Graham, “Be aware: Piercing the corporate veil is the most litigated issue in corporate law.” To help owners understand and comply with the rules of corporate governance that affect their protected status, Graham and Rees Jensen, MBA ’94, launched Bulletproof Veil. The service, offered on a subscription basis, reviews a company’s veil for flaws, suggests fixes, maintains appropriate records, and monitors compliance deadlines throughout the year. For more information, see www.bulletproofveil.com. |
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