TEACHING & LEARNING
A lawyer and physicist
turned Wharton student find common ground in mentoring relationship
OUTREACH
More
Than a Pet Project
Plus: Follow up on 2002 WBP Competition winner
Plus: Learn more about the Grand Prize winning team, PAWS
Building Entrepreneurial Businesses
Faces of Wharton Entrepreneurship
RESEARCH
Venture Capital Syndication
Pays off — and not just for the VC
Newer Web Companies Aim to Change Consumer Buying Habits
Teaching
Lawyer and physicist find common ground
through mentoring
A lawyer mentored a team of Wharton students, helping them polish their plan to sell reconfigurable hardware. His advice helped make them runners-up in 2002's Wharton Business Plan Competition.
Vinny Natoli, physicist turned business student, was skeptical when he heard last spring about his mentor for the Wharton School's annual Business Plan Competition.
Richard Silfen is a lawyer at the firm of Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLC in Philadelphia, and Natoli says he's "generally very suspicious of lawyers."
But Natoli soon learned that Silfen isn't a typical attorney. Silfen had flirted with a career in science, majoring in physics as an undergraduate at Baylor University in Texas. After college, he worked for Texas Instruments. And Silfen's specialty is working with young high-technology firms, just the sort of company that Natoli and his teammates — Carl Adams, Dan Deeney and Robert Williams — wanted to start.
Each year, Wharton offers mentors like Silfen to participants in its Business Plan Competition (WBPC), which culminates with the Venture Fair in April. This year, 47 student teams — consisting of students from Wharton and a number of other Penn schools — were paired with mentors. They were able to tap into a non-traditional but valuable learning opportunity that yields multiple benefits.
"The program gives students a chance to speak with successful people in
their industry who can help them jump-start their business plans
and provide tremendous business insight," says Nicole Righini, who,
as associate director of Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs, oversees
the Competition. In addition to the WPBC, another way Wharton students gain
access to mentors is through selected entrepreneurship courses.
Whether they develop through a course or via the WBPC, mentors
and students' relationships
can be as simple as a meeting in which a mentor helps students polish
their business plans or presentations. Or it can grow into a collaboration
in which the students return repeatedly for advice. That's what
happened with Natoli's team and Silfen.
"We met three times, called a few more and e-mailed a lot," Natoli says. "The whole world of venture capital was a complete mystery to us, so having Richard as a guide was extremely valuable."
Their first meeting took place at Silfen's office in downtown Philadelphia. Natoli had e-mailed Silfen a draft of their business plan. "I could see that their plan had a lot of potential but it was very technical," Silfen says. "I think what Vinny and Carl didn't realize is that most investors don't understand technology. I helped them get their thoughts more in plain English."
The students envisioned a company that would use a technology called reconfigurable computing — also known as programmable hardware — to accelerate scientific and engineering software applications. They aimed to create circuit boards analogous to the graphics cards that allow PCs to run high-level games. "A graphics card accelerates a computer tremendously," Natoli says. They wanted to do the same thing for scientific and engineering calculations.
"Most people think of the market long after they think about the product," Silfen says. "They try to cram their product into a market. Vinny had developed a product for a market."
The science, though cutting edge, wasn't an obstacle. Natoli has a doctorate in physics and was enrolled in the Executive Master's in Technology Management Program (EMTM) joint master's offered by Wharton and the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science. He and Adams had met as undergraduates at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Their work with Silfen paid off. Their team won second prize in the 2001-2002 Wharton Business Plan Competition and was awarded $10,000.
Natoli recently started a new job — he works for High Performance Technologies, a consulting company in Washington, D.C. So for now, he and his teammates have put on hold their plans for their company. If they are able to launch the company, Natoli knows whom they'll want for their lawyer. Silfen, for his part, is happy to oblige.
In the meantime,
Natoli has become a mentor himself, offering
to advise both competitors in the Business Plan Competition
and other
students
in classes
offered by Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .