NBR: Why did you start BoxCo.?

Onsager: We started BoxCo. because we were dissatisfied with the current slate of storage options available on campus. We thought that NSH could both offer a better service and at a better price.

NBR: How did BoxCo. get started?

Onsager: We thought of the idea in January and developed it. Then, we pitched it to the NSH board of directors as part of the Business Idea Competition, which is a competition that they hold every year to start new NSH businesses; any student can propose an idea. It was considered along with a number of other business proposals and then it won out, it was approved, and it was funded with the largest amount of funding that any NSH business has ever gotten, actually.

NBR: What are your goals as a company?

Onsager: Our goal is to offer a great storage service that Northwestern students can use and to offer entrepreneurial experience to all of our members.

Katz: We have a big team too.

Onsager: There are many freshman and sophomores.

NBR: How many people are on your team?

Katz: Around 15 people.

Onsager: For NSH, it is a big group.

Katz: We have people from all different walks of life. Alex mentioned that we have a lot of freshmen and sophomores, of the three founders, one is a senior, and we are both juniors. We have also involved a lot of alumni NSH members in advisory roles; they will have a lot to do later in the year when we are doing operational stuff.

Onsager: It is very much an NSH effort.

NBR: According to a recent North by Northwestern article, the founder of Campus Solutions feels as if you copied their business model. How is BoxCo. different and what can you offer that is different than Campus Solutions?

Onsager: First off, we offer dramatically better prices. Second, we offer a simplified service; I think that if you go to our website that will be clear. Finally, we have BoxGuard, which is a great insurance policy and it also means that you will get your total [price] at pickup, rather than months later. These are all things we personally had experienced the negative side of in storing and we thought we could do better, so these are the innovations we added to it.

Katz:  Our business is designed to be similar to Campus Solutions; we entered as a competitor to perform a storage function. But what we feel strongly about is the fact that we observed some of their good qualities and some of their less good qualities and we designed a business that would emulate some of the better qualities and improve the weaker ones.

NBR: How does the business work? What is the process of registering and storing?

Onsager: How the business works is that you go to our website, there you sign up, you pay a $20 reservation fee, which entitles you to unlimited boxes and packing supplies. While reregistering and reserving, you sign up for a pick up time, many of them are in reading week and finals week.  Then we come pick up the stuff, it gets stored over the summer, and we will drop it back off at your new residence  from late august to beginning up September.

Let’s call it the Winklevoss dilemma. You’ve got it, the next big Internet sensation. The only problem is, well, you need a technical co-founder. Former Northwestern ASG president Neal Sales-Griffin (SESP ’09) thinks he can help. As the CEO of Code Academy, an intensive three-month programming course that attracts applicants from all over the world to their classrooms in Chicago, Sales-Griffin wants to equip entrepreneurs with the skills to make their ideas an Internet reality.

Sales-Griffin was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. Although he lived only thirty minutes away from Evanston, he arrived his freshman year at Northwestern sight unseen. That being said, he had little trouble acclimating to college life. After moving into Ayers CCI, a residential college centered on commerce and industry, Sales-Griffin found his way to some of the business organizations on campus.  As jobs in investment banking and consulting promised the economic freedom he had always dreamed of, Sales-Griffin naturally gravitated towards the groups that aligned themselves with these industries. In particular, he got involved with the “Nugget Group,” a collection of finance-oriented students who ran an on-campus investment fund, and then later became a founding member of the Institute for Student Business Education (Full Disclosure: NBR is a product group of ISBE). Having established himself in the student business community, he also gained attention for his work ethic in the classroom.

“I had never taken a real class before,” Sales-Griffin said, explaining the C- he received in Introduction to Macroeconomics in his first quarter at Northwestern. Undeterred, Sales-Griffin said he “worked three hours later than everyone in Micro and killed it.”

Two upperclassmen, Rishi Shah and Derek Moeller, took notice. Before Sales-Griffin knew it, Shah and Moeller had invited him to become a member of the venture backed start-up Context Media, a company that provides LCD monitors with patient-specific information to health care facilities. That summer, he worked in their office downtown in sales and marketing while taking night classes back at Northwestern. The success of the company – Context Media now operates in all fifty states – ultimately forced Sales-Griffin’s hand. By the end of the summer, Moeller had graduated and Shah had dropped out of school. Sales-Griffin was asked to do the same, but he opted to remain at Northwestern.

“It took a lot for me to go to college so I felt like I needed to finish,” he recalled over five years later.

He no longer worked for Context Media, but Sales-Griffin had been bit by the entrepreneurial bug. Back on campus as a sophomore, he “bullied” his way into an entrepreneurship class for juniors and seniors taught by Troy Henikoff, a person who would go on to become CEO of Excelerate Labs and one of Sales-Griffin’s professional mentors.

He also decided he was going to fix the barbershop industry. As a college student, even with some income leftover from his Context Media days, he knew that going to the barbershop twice a month, for twenty dollars a visit, was not sustainable. He also realized that being an entrepreneur meant “solving problems for people”, so he devised a business plan that would appease both profit-driven barbers and college students who wanted to look sharp without breaking the bank. He then began the process of peddling it to every barber he could find, eventually entering into a partnership with one of them. Helping manage barbershops on the South Side, however, soon became too demanding for a full-time Northwestern student, so as he did with Context Media, he gave up the venture in order to return his attention to his schoolwork and a more traditional career in finance.

After working the summer after his junior year at the Chicago venture capital firm OCA Ventures, Sales-Griffin spent his senior year serving as the ASG president and wrapping up his degree in Learning and Organizational Change. When graduation rolled around, the man who, for four years had to be among the busiest on campus, walked across the stage with no plans for employment. Instead, he spent that summer “working out and playing video games,” and that following fall, served as “the first alumni SafeRide driver in Northwestern history.” Nearly six months after graduating, the longtime videogame enthusiast had packed his bags for Seattle and was prepared to work at the intersection of education and gaming. A few weeks before he was to leave, however, he went out to lunch with Harper Reed, who at the time was the CTO of Threadless. The lunch soon turned into an ambush by a number of VPs from the Chicago innovation firm Sandbox Industries. They offered him a job in their incubator division and ultimately convinced him to stay in Chicago.

His experience with Sandbox taught him several things, but his biggest takeaway was the respect that coders commanded; they were the people putting ideas into action. Where the coders were coveted, he viewed an analyst like himself as more or less dispensable. Then it hit him. If he wanted to have the financially secure, independent, and impactful lifestyle he had always wanted, he needed to learn how to code. After this revelation, Sales-Griffin decided to leave Sandbox. He then called Northwestern’s 2010 ASG president, Mike McGee, a person who had a general background in graphic design, to share with him his plans. The two pledged to spend the next year teaching themselves as much as they could about web development with the hope of building a valuable product along the way.

“For over a year we struggled through anything we could get our hands on to learn these skills. After that we realized there had to be a better way,” recalls Sales-Griffin. And just like that, Code Academy was born. Well, almost. The two had to decline Harper Reed’s offer to join the Obama re-election campaign after he became the campaign’s CTO.

Code Academy operates at the co-working space 1871 in Merchandise Mart

Code Academy began taking applications, for both students and instructors, in March of last year. They determined that they needed fifteen students to cover their expenses for the first session; they ended up receiving applications from eighty-eight, and the classes have grown each application cycle since then. What’s more impressive is that sixty percent of Code Academy applicants are from prospective students outside Chicago, even though imitator programs have sprouted up in cities like San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C.

They are also not just aspiring entrepreneurs. Code Academy students boast professional backgrounds in real estate, finance, consulting, and even computer science. Sales-Griffin serves as CEO and McGee operates under the title of Chief Creative Officer. Looking back on everything that has become of Code Academy, Sales-Griffin emphasized that although the company has been “profitable from day one, we’ve also been impactful from day one.”

People who know Sales-Griffin aren’t surprised. Entrepreneurs solve problems, and Neal Sales-Griffin is an entrepreneur.

When Vancouver-born entrepreneur and engineer Eric Migicovsky thought of the idea for a new, “smart” watch, he went the traditional route, asking venture capitalists for help financing his investment.

Yet, even after multiple attempts, Migicovsky was unable to secure any funding for his new project—the Pebble Watch, or just Pebble.  But Migicovsky didn’t give up; instead, he turned to Kickstarter, a popular crowd funding website.

Less than two hours after the project was post on Kickstarter, Migicovsky and his partners at Pebble Technology raised $100,000, reaching their goal.

But the group’s fundraising did not stop at $100,000.  By the end of the first night, the Pebble raised over $600,000.  By the next morning, donors had pledged over $1 million to Mr. Pebble Technology’s new project.  By the end of the first week, the watch became the most funded project in the history of the crowd funding website.

By Thursday May 10, Mr. Migicovsky and his partners had “sold” 85,000 watches to 66,434 backers, raising more than $10 million in the process.  The Pebble Watch was so popular that Mr. Migicovsky decided to limit pre-orders to 85,000 watches, a number that was reached more than a week before the project’s original end date on May 18.

According to Pebble’s Kickstarter page, Pebble “is the first watch built for the 21^st Century.”  Pebble has an easy-to-read electronic-paper display.  Like that on the popular Kindle, Pebble’s e-paper display allows watch-wearers to read the watch in any light, both indoors and outdoors.  Pebble is also fully customizable, with dozens of different watch faces available—both digital and analog.  Changing watch faces is as simple as touching a button.

But Pebble is so much more than a watch.  Pebble connects to iPhone and Android smartphones via Bluetooth, alerting the watch wearer, via a silent vibration, to incoming calls, emails, and text messages and so much more.  Watch wearers can also control their music with the simple touch of a button.  The Pebble Watch also includes a number of built-in apps, many of which are internet-connected.  Cyclists, for example, can use Pebble as a bike computer, while runners can access speed, distance, and pace data right on their wrist.  Other apps are in development and will be available via download in the future.

The watch comes in four colors: Artic White, Jet Black, Cherry Red, and a forth color, to be voted on by the project’s backers. In September, the Pebble is set to hit stores. But without Kickstarter, the largest of a number of “crowdfunding” websites, turning the Pebble concept to reality would have been immensely difficult.

The Wisdom of the Crowd

Kickstarter’s premise is simple.  Entrepreneurs upload a brief business plan or description of their creative project—a summary of their idea, usually accompanied by a brief video—and set a goal as to the amount of money that they hope to raise. (For example, Pebble’s Kickstarter page can be viewed here). People can then view others’ proposals and choose to pledge funding.

Unlike traditional forms of investment, individuals who pledge funding on Kickstarter do not receive shares of the company’s stock, nor do they see their initial investment returned.  However, companies on Kickstarter do offer users rewards for pledging specified amounts of money.  In the case of Pebble, for example, backers who pledged $115 or more received a Jet Black Pebble watch, which will retail for $150 when it is released to the public.

Kickstarter is also based on the idea of “all or nothing funding.”  Unless an entrepreneur reaches his specified funding goal, he or she receives no fund.

Projects found on Kickstarter range from technology to film to food.  While the most popular products on the website are music or film related projects, hardware projects, like Migicovsky’s Pebble Watch, have been the most successful.

Other notable projects that received their start on Kickstarter include the Printrbot, the “world’s first 3D printer,” and the Elevation Dock, the “best dock for your iPhone.”

To date, more than 20,000 successful projects have raised over $200 million using Kickstarter.  The 20,000 successful projects represent approximately 44% of the total number of projects uploaded to the website.

While Kickstarter launched back in 2008 by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler, the crowd funding website gained real polarity this year.  In February, Kickstarter had its first million dollar projects: the Elevation Dock, Double Fine Product’s new action video game, and the Order of the Stick.  The Elevation Dock is a new and innovation iPhone manufactured by ElevationLab.  The Order of the Stick is comedic webcomic, satirizing role-playing games and medieval fantasy.

The Kickstarter Founders: Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler

Kickstarter provides entrepreneurs with so much more than an outlet to seek investment.  The website also provides inventors and businesspeople with a medium through which they can float ideas a test if there is a market for their new product.  If members of the public (the consumers) won’t invest a few dollars to help a product reach shelves, they probably won’t purchase the product if and when it does appear in stores.

Uploading a campaign to Kickstarter is free.  However, if the campaign is successful, Kickstarter takes a 5% service charge.  Amazon, the company responsible for processing the payments takes between from 3% to 5% of the final amount.

Legalizing Crowdfunding

Currently, federal and state securities laws prohibit companies from offering equity to investors via crowd funding websites.  That may soon change, however.  Last November, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act by an overwhelming majority.  The bill has yet to pass in the Senate, however.

The Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act, which would allow companies to offer securities to investors via crowd funding websites like Kickstarter or social media websites such as Facebook, would mean a lot more than fuller pockets for a few hundred or so investors.  Many believe that the Act, now being pushed through the Senate by majority leader Harry Reid, would cause explosive growth in crowdfunding.  Consequentially, the nations economy would experience substantial growth, as increased investment spurs innovations and creates jobs.

Check out our exclusive video interview with Nobel Prize Laureate Dale Mortensen, the Ida C. Cook Professor of Economics, as he talks with the Northwestern Business Review about search theory and its implications, the current state of the United States economy in an increasingly globalized marketplace and ongoing economic trends.

This video was filmed by NBR videographer JJ Pollack and edited by Alison Ho. The interview was conducted by NBR editor-in-chief Jackson Siegal and finance editor Sophia Hsu.

Photo Credit: Northwestern University

What’s standing in America’s way of returning to the top of the world’s economic pedestal? According to Dr. Yaron Brook, it’s government regulations and our own conscience. Brook, President of the Ayn Rand Institute, gave a lecture introducing a case for pure ideological capitalism called “Capitalism Without Guilt: A Moral Case for Freedom” that captured the ideas of pure capitalism that can derive only from economic freedom and a redefinition of morality.

A Framework for Capitalism

The Basis of Brook’s argument stems from the results of the “two-hundred year experiment” in which different countries have experimented with political and economic systems running the gamut from Communism to almost pure capitalism, and the results are clear and yet systematically ignored. It is clear that the Communist countries have failed across the board; poverty, death, stagnant economy, and destruction are all common side effects of a Communist regime. As the political systems run closer to pure capitalism, the results are much more positive. The United States, from the time it began as a newly independent nation with a new economic system called capitalism, rose steadily until, by the end of the 19^th century, it was the powerhouse of the world. Incomes doubled and doubled again, constantly on the rise. Even the poor in any economically free country like the US are much better off than the poor in unfree countries. Yet, in the last 100 years (starting with the Woodrow Wilson administration) America has drifted from the clearly most efficient economic system. In fact, economic freedom indexes have dropped the US from third on the list to tenth, and falling. Why do we ignore the signs that free markets are more efficient?

A Look at Financial Markets

Unsurprisingly, Brook says, the three markets that were in the most trouble in the economic downturn of 2008 were the most regulated: housing, mortgages, and banking. Government regulations incentivized taking mortgages on houses as opposed to buying outright, which helped form a bubble that burst in a big way. To add to this, there is not a single bank that is regulated by fewer than five agencies. But the most important regulation is the interest rate, the one rate that should be the most free from regulation; but this most important aspect is controlled by the Federal Reserve’s board of directors, which goes against the most basic “Econ 101” principle—price controls do not work.

Brook vehemently defends that the Federal Reserve should be abolished and that those who defend the Federal Reserve’s role to prevent frequent economic downturns are misguided. Recessions that occurred without the Federal Reserve, such as those in the 1800s, were a product of banking policy, not the absence of a governing body. In the 1800s, the US was absorbing millions of poorly educated and broke immigrants as well as banks subject to strict state regulations such as not being allowed to loan out-of-state and constantly flopping between the gold and silver standards. These constraints caused economic downturns, not free markets. So why don’t we just accept free markets and pure capitalism?

What’s Standing in Our Way: Morality

According to Brook, the biggest obstacle we as a nation face is morality. There is something about capitalism as a way to make people better off, to create for his or her own financial benefit without considering “social utility,” that is inherently greedy to most people and goes against basic moral principles. To illustrate, Brook issues a comparison between the paradigm of virtue (Mother Teresa) and a capitalist success (Bill Gates). Most children were taught to be selfless, to think of others first. So, when people see someone with money, their natural reaction is that he acquired all that money without thinking of others, by being selfish instead of selfless. People will of course think of Bill Gates as, at least on some level, morally reprehensible for making and keeping all his riches. Why can’t Bill Gates be more like Mother Teresa, who rejected all material possessions? In reality, Bill Gates should be respected for his financial success and his ability to revolutionize our world (no disrespect to Mother Teresa).

“Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the moral heroes when it comes to people caring about their own lives and taking care of themselves,” he said.

The road to prosperity begins with the realization that traditional morality and capitalism are not compatible.

What We Should Do

What we need to do now, Brook says, is rid ourselves of that traditional view of morality. There is nothing wrong with acquiring money, to enter into a marketplace in which we make ourselves better off while simultaneously making those around us better off.  Moguls like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs should not be looked down upon simply because they made lots of money, they should be revered because they made their own lives better while simultaneously revolutionizing the world.  Self-interest is the new morality; it is the way we revolutionize the world through the great regulator of capitalism that rewards good self-interest and punishes those in for an easy buck (citing people like Bernie Madoff). Giving money to the poor, Brook says, does not change the world; creating new products does. Brook argues that pure capitalism is the purest expression of controlling our own lives, of being proud of what we are able to earn as rational, thinking people.

Of course, this view is just one of a long line of political views on the spectrum. Whether pure capitalism is the end-all of ideological views is up to the decision-makers in Washington to decide, but the case for capitalism is clear. All we need now is to change our morality.

Photo credit: The Daily Northwestern

The concept of the social network has revolutionized the job search, personal photography, and the way people share music. The founders of Lore, formerly known as Coursekit, are hoping that the way that students interact, with teachers and among themselves, is social networking’s next disruptive innovation.

In 2010, Joseph Cohen, Dan Getleman, and Jim Grandpre withdrew from the University of Pennsylvania to build a “Blackboard replacement with a heavy emphasis on social networking.” Inspiration struck their freshmen year when the three became frustrated with Blackboard, the prevailing college student portal where professors post information relevant to their classes. In particular, they noticed that it lacked the sleek design features of popular sites like Facebook and Twitter. Three years after this original epiphany, Lore has built a student portal that is understated, organized, and aesthetically pleasing. Again, this is a stark contrast to Blackboard, which appears to be a remnant of the Windows 98 generation.

But effective design is hardly the only thing that differentiates Lore from Blackboard. Lore is a social network, and as such, its aim is to facilitate a conversation that goes beyond the classroom. With a course “stream” similar to a Facebook “wall”, Lore encourages students to share information related to the course that might not fit into a lecture. More specifically, students can post videos, articles, and study tips to the stream so that educators can capitalize on the sharing that is so deeply embedded in social networks. Lore imagines that these contributions would then be recorded to comprise one’s online profile, which they hope would follow students throughout their academic careers.

In an era when qualifying academic progress has gripped the educational community, a Lore profile could become a method by which both students and institutions measure progress in a substantive way. Academic achievements such as research papers and lab reports could likewise be made available to the public as potential credentials for graduate programs or potential employers. Lore, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other recent Internet sensations, is thus branding itself as a platform that gives individuals the opportunity to build their own brand.

Lore has also honed in on another key characteristic of the social network phenomenon: build a great product, and then worry about revenues later. Where Blackboard was adopted by entire schools en masse and at a discounted price, Lore is relying on implementation by individual professors. To say that professors have been responsive is an understatement. Since launching this academic year at thirty colleges and universities, which includes Northwestern, Lore boasts that there are now educators from over six hundred institutions using their product.

In spite of the growing demand, there are no plans to move to a subscription-based system. The service, according to the Lore website, is “free, and always will be.” Instead, they plan to generate revenues from advertising targeted at students and their specific, class-related needs. Those that have seen The Social Network know that Facebook followed a similar method in its incipient stages, and industry experts agree that such a strategy can work with Lore. Renowned venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who uses Lore in a class he teaches about start-ups at Stanford, and groups like Social+Capital and IA Ventures, have already poured $6 million in venture funding into the company.

Up until this week, Lore was known as Coursekit. The name Lore, which means knowledge shared between people, aligns better with their new more aggressive corporate philosophy. In a press release about the name change, Lore claimed that the rebranding effort “reflects the company’s ambition to be the global network of learners, instructors, and educational content.”

If their re-imagination of the school is to become a reality, new school branding techniques, ones that emphasize sleek design, user sharing, and a new approach to profit generation, will play an integral role in taking them there.

It has been a landmark few weeks for the markets. Although nowhere near the scale of the record breaking 400 point swings in early August, European debt fears have not yet fully loosened their grip on the world’s financial markets. Following a two month low a mere 10 days ago on April 10^th, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has made fitful jumps in the past few days, often starting out with good acceleration before posting large, sharp drops the opening of the next trading day. Most recently, it ended Wednesdays trading with a deficit of 82.79 from Tuesday, thanks to continued worried about the Spain bonds auctions as the beleaguered European country hopes to stave off partial collapse of their economy – one 5 times the size of Greece. Nor was the average helped by IBM or Intel, both leading the plunge after quarterly reports revealed lower-than-expected earnings from the tech giants.

In other electronics news, the ever watchful public eye has borne witness to a spectacular ride by Apple, as they weather the storms from the twin blows of the Department of Justice price-fixing eBook trial and the carrier conflicts. On Monday, for instance, the world’s most valuable company tumbled nearly 6% as news rolled in that AT&T was starting to get annoyed about the massive costs of subsidizing the iPhone. With phone costs hovering around 600 to make and selling for much less, Apple had been holding back substancial losses by splitting up that cost with the carriers. The shares rebounded to their current 608 thanks to investors attempting to time the market, but we’ll have to see where it goes.

On a similar note, Google had followed suit with Apple, a furor likely caused by the stock splitting they recently announced. Although stock splitting, in theory, does nothing to devalue holdings, since 2 stocks at 100 is the same at 4 at 50, shareholders are frustrated with the companies move to create a new class of stocks. With the new class, shareholders would have much less voting power, diluting one of the bigger points of holding stock to begin with.

For a more positive outlook, Morgan Stanley reported a very large hike in their bond and commodity trading. That particular area is something to be proud of, having seen 34% growth up from a year ago and more than doubling from Q411. As those beat out the estimates, Morgan Stanley shares were up 6.5%. Similarly, gas futures are down 6.3% from their year high on March 26^th, with 1% of that happening on Wednesday to end at $3.2027 a gallon. Although the consumer price of gas hasn’t seen quite as dramatic a slide, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that prices across the nation have been dropping steadily over the past 2 weeks.

It is widely known that the road to the White House is paved with dollar bills. Raising money is one of the most important tasks for any candidate and often the candidate with the most money is the one elected. With the upcoming Presidential race expected between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, the case is the same. Which candidate can raise the most money, and can he do it effectively?

The Rules

No candidate can raise unlimited money from unlimited sources. There are rules in place designed to limit the influence of single donors.

• $2,500 limit per individual per candidate for Federal office. This applies to primary, runoff, and general elections separately.
• $10,000 per calendar year to state, district & local party committees
• $30,800 per calendar year to a national party committee. This applies separately to a party’s national committee, and House and Senate campaign committee.
• $5,000 per calendar year to state, district & local party committee
• $117,000 aggregate total per two-year election cycle, consisting of:
  • $46,200 donation to individual candidates
  • $70,800 donation to national party committees/ PACs (Political Action Committees).
  • Married couples are considered different individuals, so the total amount per married couple is double these amounts

Companies are prohibited from donating to federal elections or PACs. However, many companies can set up PACs, which function as independent vehicles to raise money for a candidate, and the individuals at the organization can donate to candidates; the collective bundle of donations can create donations even beyond $500,000.

The Numbers

Thus far, Barack Obama has raised $172,704,222 compared to Mitt Romney’s $75,609,012. This discrepancy in funds is most likely due to the fact that there were at one time as many as nine Republican candidates vying for the Presidential nomination compared with the singular Democratic candidate towards which contributors can donate money. Obama also has the added support of the Democratic National Committee, which, since it is not part of a candidate’s campaign, does not operate under such strict limits on individual donations and can funnel maximum support towards him; this past March, Obama, with the help of the DNC, raised $53 million. Once Mitt Romney (or whoever the Republican nominee is) receives the backing of the Republic National Committee, the numbers will surely be more even.

The greatest difference between the funds raised by Romney and Obama to this point is the size of individual donations: Romney saw a majority (58%) of his funds raised by donors giving the maximum $2500, while a majority of Obama’s funds (53%) came from donors giving under $200. Obama is so successful in part by approaching individual donations in a revolutionary way, which his campaign began in 2008: instead of charging a fee to attend his speech, all Obama’s campaign required was an email address so his campaign could contact each person individually at a later date, harnessing the power of social networking to rake in large sums through small individual donations.

Mitt Romney has received over $500,000 from Goldman Sachs alone, while Obama’s largest corporate contribution came from Microsoft, with a mere $289,088. With such great discrepancy in the source of funds, it is easy to wonder if Obama’s grassroots support or Romney’s maximum-donor approach will yield the greatest results. Once Romney, if he is the eventual nominee, receives the backing of the Republican National Committee, his fundraising totals are sure to level out and compete with President Obama’s. The press has been quick to bring Romney’s campaign under fire, however, labeling such large corporate support as further proof he is out of touch with the average voter. All we know for now, though, is that Obama has thrived on the new networks of social media while Romney has excelled at securing corporate and maximum individual donations. The road to the White House is paved with dollar bills, but the question remains: the dollar bills of small individual donations, or the dollar bills of large-sum corporate contributions?

Photo Credit: Associated Press

Taking questions from USA Today technology reporter, Jon Swartz, Pincus looked the part of the Silicon Valley CEO, which is to say he looked very unlike the classical vision of corporate upper management. Wearing a short-sleeve checkered button down and high-top Nikes, with one foot dangling above the floor and the other crossed underneath his thigh, he laughed in approval when Swartz said that he personally “distrusted anyone in the Valley who wears a suit.” In fact, it was refusing to wear a tie at a venture capital firm in D.C. that ultimately convinced Pincus to become an entrepreneur himself.

Unlike Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs, Pincus was forty-one when he started Zynga, having first worked for six years in financial services. As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, Pincus described himself as being chiefly concerned with starting salary, a fixation that led him to lucrative jobs in investment banking. When he reached Harvard Business School, however, a creeping disinterest in financial services affected his performance in job interviews. As a result, after having job offers that made him the envy of his Wharton graduation class, he found himself, for a while, the only one in his HBS section not to have one upon graduation. He then begrudgingly worked briefly at Tele-Communications, Inc., which has since become AT&T cable, and the aforementioned D.C. venture capital firm, Columbia Capital.  A man sometimes haunted by his own ambition, Pincus had convinced himself that he was “washed up” even before he was thirty.

“People choose not to be entrepreneurs because they feel that the opportunity cost is too high,” he said, “at that point in my life, I felt like I had nothing to lose.”

In 1995, having left Columbia Capital, he built his first of four companies, FreeLoader, the first web-based push service. After selling it for $38 million, Pincus experienced the professional success he had long waited for. With his confidence restored, he moved to San Francisco to pursue entrepreneurship in what he described as the “Motor City of the Internet.” It was there that he founded Support.com, an automated tech support service, and Tribe.net, one of the first social networks. These both achieved moderate success, but Pincus’ desire to create a “forever brand” that would be more “recognizable than the Nike swoosh” remained. Since founding Zynga in 2007, he has felt as if he is on his way.

Pincus’ first piece of advice was to “know your goal.” His goal, since reading George Gilder’s Microcosm (about a revolution in economics that, as a result of the tech boom, values mental capital over physical capital) had been to create a technology that changed the world. The years he spent in finance, without this goal in mind, left him dissatisfied. But even when one has a goal in mind, he cautioned, lacking a strong conviction about it leads to compromise. After compromising his vision with some of his earlier ventures, Pincus has taken to reminding his team at Zynga that we “want to build a house that we can live in.” Evocative of Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” this mantra has both practical and ideological implications.

He urged his employees, for example, to bring their dogs to work, even if it meant sneaking them past the security guards hired by those who owned the building they were leasing. Since then, dogs have been central to Zynga’s work environment. In fact, they have always been central to the identity of Zynga; its name and logo were inspired by Pincus’ own American bulldog. The reminder to “build a house that we can live in” is also the driving force behind the company’s philanthropic bent. Pincus beamed with pride when he shared that Zynga was responsible for the first million dollars of relief to Japan after last year’s tsunami.

“Zynga is now kind of known for disaster relief, but we have plans to move onto something more in the future,” he said, mentioning Zynga.org, the company’s philanthropic subsidiary that has raised more than $10 million for nonprofits.

To the aspiring entrepreneurs in the audience, Pincus emphasized what he called being a “ninja product maker.” This means knowing what consumers want and then devising a way to give it to them. Zynga is cognizant of the fact that people want both games and the sense of being connected with friends; FarmVille, MafiaWars, and Hanging With Friends were all built with these two ideas in mind. “Loving data” is also key.

“By the time you launch your product, you should be counting winnings and not making bets, Pincus said. When asked about building a business team, Pincus compared it to dating in that, “you’ve got to be upfront,” something that will allow you to “reduce bad leads” and keep you from “getting stuck in bad relationships. It took me a while to figure that out,” he said, glancing towards his wife, Ali, who was in attendance. On leadership, he shared his belief that “it starts with complaining and dissatisfaction…followed up by solutions.” He cited the example of a twenty-one year old engineer who, in a meeting with Pincus and other new hires, challenged him on seemingly every point. Instead of becoming defensive, Pincus made him his personal technical assistant. The forum came to a head when Pincus was asked whether there was any sense in waiting until one is established in their field, as he did, before developing an idea that might have the potential to be the next Zynga.

“There are very few Internet treasures,” so unless the idea really is the next big thing, “you should be developing your game. Go join a pro ball team to see how pro ball is played.” That being said, Pincus assured the audience that “the biggest opportunity is ahead of us.”

Leo Melamed, 79 years old and a Holocaust survivor, gave a speech titled “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” at Northwestern University on Tuesday, April 3rd.

Today he is the Chairman Emeritus of the CME Group the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace, headquartered in Chicago. He is largely recognized as the principle founder of financial futures, getting his idea directly supported in writing from Milton Friedman for a mere $7,500 dollars in a deal made in the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City, thus launching a new line of business that catapulted the value of the CME to new heights. As of April 5th, 2012  shares of the company are trading at close to $300 dollars. The CME is part of a global industry growing by billions every year. Mr. Melamed spoke to commemorate the CME Foundation’s grant to the Harvey-Kapnick Business Institutions Program. The donation is being used towards an exciting new program at Northwestern University–”Risk, Markets, and Society.”

Mr. Melamed believes that business is the driver of societal change, and he believes that free market capitalism has greatly benefitted from the ability to trade financial instruments in a marketplace. Due to the changing rates between currencies, for example, the ability to have a floating exchange rate bought and sold in a regulated marketplace gives businesses with international operations the ability to hedge their input commodity risks more efficiently.

The positive nature of the market industry that Mr. Melamed built in Chicago is now creating thousands of jobs worldwide as other countries attempt to copy what the CME has achieved.  Mr. Melamed is now focussed on China and believes that they are Communist only in name. He cites the truly amazing fact that contracts of the CSI 300 index can be traded in large volume today in Chinese markets. In 1991, he founded his own consulting firm, Melamed & Associates, of which he is chairman.