February 2006

New Ventures

Ever get tired of plowing through dozens of listings looking for a refrigerator, a truck, or a condo? Craig Donato’s oodle.com searches upward of 4 million classified ads in nearly 50 metropolitan areas, sortable by location, price, color, brand, or whatever else is applicable. Oodle’s wares are also arranged by college campus, so that students can easily find textbooks, roommates, and other necessities of life. Oodle, founded in 2004 by Donato, MBA ’93, and two other veterans of Excite.com, helps you get rid of stuff, too. It lists recycling centers as well as local charities and volunteer organizations that can find a happy home for those once wonderful collectibles or any other bad buys one makes along the way.

Prepare to be dazzled. Palo Alto-based Zazzle, an online, on-demand manufacturing firm, has added personally designed postage stamps to its line of customized apparel and paper products. Zazzlers can go to zazzle.com and download a favorite photo or choose from Zazzle’s impressive collection of historical and brand images to create their own T-shirts, postcards, or stamps. Whatever the choice, Zazzle manufactures the order within 24 hours and ships it by priority mail.

Zazzle is the brainchild of Robert Beaver, MBA/JD ’72, and his sons Bobby and Jeff. The elder Beaver, who is president and CEO of the company, left the dotcom end of things to the kids while he spent six years in R&D to perfect an efficient technology to print T-shirts. He also developed partnerships with organizations like Disney and the Library of Congress to provide brand and historical images for use on Zazzle products.

But it was last year’s partnership with mail systems giant Pitney Bowes and the blessing of the U.S. Postal Service that paved the way for Zazzle stamps. Imagine little Kaitlyn’s or Aidan’s face adorning birth announcement envelopes, niece Lise and her fiancé decorating their wedding invitation. Snail mail may never be the same.

A dotcom built on reader reviews of local pizzerias, plumbers, and pool halls, Judy’s Book is unusually dependent on user input, but cofounders Chris DeVore, MBA Class of 1999, and Andy Sack found just the way to inspire it. For two months last year, any Judy’s Book member who submitted 50 reviews to JudysBook.com received a free iPod Shuffle. DeVore isn’t revealing the exact number of iPods distributed, but, he says, at the height of the promotion, the site was posting more than 10,000 new reviews a day.

The original Judy was Sacks’ mother-in-law, and her book was a little green-covered one in which she kept notes on the best shops and service people in the Seattle area. The digital book ranges far from Seattle and includes members and reviews in 50 states. “The only downside is we now have so much content it’s gotten harder to find the best single answer to any local need,” DeVore said shortly after the promotion ended, “but we’re working on improvements to our keyword search and ‘reputation systems’ tools to make that process easier.”

FiberTower didn’t come out of a Business School class in entrepreneurship, but its founding partners did. Scott Brady and Eric Botto, both MS ’00, and David Leeds and Harpiner Madan, both MBA ’00, worked together in the class Formation of New Ventures and decided to stick together afterward.

 “We felt we had a good team,” Madan says, but, deciding not to pursue their class project, they instead committed to spending six months in search of another idea. “We invested our own money and took an office. We were successful in finding something we got excited about that eventually got funded,” he says.

 That “something” is FiberTower, a specialist in the area of wireless network technology called “backhaul,” where voice and data from a remote site are sent to a central switch. “We provide transport solutions for wireless carriers to connect their cell sites to their switches,” Madan explains. “Basically, after traffic is aggregated from various wireless callers at a tower or rooftop site, we take it from there and drop it at a switch for the wireless carrier.” By last November, FiberTower had many of the nation’s major wireless carriers as clients and had raised nearly $225 million.

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