September 2008
Big League Playmaker
Wharton Entrepreneurial Intern Fellow Makes Most of Summer at Sports Start-up
While many of his classmates spent their summers interning in traditional fields like banking and consulting, MBA student Devin Griffin spent his summer as a marketing manager at a start-up social networking Web site for high school athletes called TAKKLE. One of three recipients of the Wharton Entrepreneurial Intern Fellowship, Griffin says he wouldn't have traded a minute of his time this summer for a traditional internship.
His experience at TAKKLE in New York City enabled him to make an important course correction on his path to becoming an entrepreneur, one that he certainly wouldn't have made had he interned on Wall Street. Griffin, who also will serve as an Ambassador of Entrepreneurship this year and co-president of the Wharton Entrepreneurship Club, explains that he spent much of his first year at Wharton with a bit of tunnel vision when it came to entrepreneurship. He was focused solely on starting his own business, sometimes coming up with an idea a day. However, Griffin's internship at TAKKLE as well as opportunities to network with other entrepreneurial-minded alumni in New York broadened his perspective, showing him that there are many paths to becoming a successful entrepreneur.
"This summer, I've learned that entrepreneurship doesn't have to mean two guys in an apartment with a computer. You can be the person to find the innovators and bring business acumen to the table to grow a business idea," he says.
Griffin notes that even his family and friends have observed a change in his approach to entrepreneurship. "They have noticed that how I look at myself and entrepreneurship now is different from my first year at Wharton when I was only thinking about ideas for a new business."
Griffin says that were it not for the Entrepreneurial Intern Fellowship, this experience might not have been possible. While he is one of 10 Howard E. Mitchell Fellows at Wharton, which covers his tuition, he still has loans like most of his peers and interning for a start-up certainly wasn't going to pay as much as a traditional internship. "The $1,500 from the Entrepreneurial Intern Fellowship in addition to the monthly stipend from TAKKLE meant I wouldn't need to panhandle after work to get through the summer," he says.
He points out that pursuing entrepreneurship may mean it takes a few more years to pay down debt compared with students who pursue banking, but "trying to avoid those extra five or six years of debt isn't worth my sanity." Griffin recalls that a few years before coming to Wharton, he worked in a traditional job at a supply company in Illinois. "I was in the management development rotation program and was working in a warehouse wearing steel-tip boots and jumping over conveyor belts. I asked myself: If I'm going to be working for 40 or 50 years, what is the one thing that would help me wake up and be happy about what I'm spending my time on? Jumping over conveyor belts wasn't it."
At the time, he had just read the book Money Ball by Michael Lewis and learned how the sports world was beginning to open up for people with business backgrounds. "Even though I wasn't a professional player, I thought there might be room for someone educated like me to come in and make an impact so that inspired me to put my feelers out," he says.
He contacted someone he had worked with as a college intern at A.T. Kearney who had gone on to work at the NBA who offered him a job at the NBA. Griffin, who is from the suburbs of Chicago, says that he decided to leave the NBA to gain the "exposure and acumen" from an MBA that would allow him to choose any career path. After spending most of his first year at Wharton convinced he would start his own business, he recalls that by the winter his outlook for his own venture was beginning to look bleak.
Fortunately, a classmate tipped Griffin off about a posting for an internship at TAKKLE, which was founded by David Birnbaum and Michael Mortellaro, who earned their MBAs from Wharton in 2005. Learning that Wharton alumni founded the start-up made the position even more attractive to him.
Griffin says that over the summer, he spent a lot of his time at TAKKLE on a business development project designed to help the company increase its advertising revenue by expanding its advertising network as well as working on the agreement with those advertisers with company lawyer and Wharton lecturer Robert Borghese. He adds that his other major project involved researching competitors in order to validate or invalidate the business models used so far. And it wouldn't be a self-respecting sports related start-up without the occasional mini ping pong match or footballs thrown around the office.
He says that he's been extremely lucky to see a start-up first-hand at this more firmly-footed stage. "It's an intensive time. These guys have crossed the hump in terms of proving there is a market for what they do and are now in the chasm and trying to figure out how to get to the other side."
Griffin adds that he was fortunate to intern at TAKKLE at this crossroads. Being given work that actually impacted the business' health was "hands down the best part."
Now, as an Ambassador of Entrepreneurship, Griffin is looking forward to telling his story to other students. "I want to extend the branch to my classmates to encourage them and let them know... there are a lot of different avenues to pursue entrepreneurship."
See the video interview with Devin Griffin on our video page.
Posted September 2008