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
Price Fellow Fueled by Passion, Vegetables
Vikrant Vora aims to start a fast-casual chain to take vegetarian delicacies to American diners.
Pursuing the life of an entrepreneur means sometimes falling out of step with your peers. Take Vikrant Vora, a second-year MBA student at the Wharton School, for example. He is looking for a job in a restaurant while many of his classmates line up positions at investment banks and consulting firms.
Vora is one of two winners of the Price Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies Fellowship Award for 2002-2003. The $10,000 prize goes annually to one or two MBA students who intend to pursue careers as entrepreneurs. (For a story on the other winner, see "Custom Builder Has Designs on Future")
Vora, a native of India, aims to start a chain of restaurants offering quick, healthy vegetarian food, particularly breakfast and lunch. Think of it as McDonald's minus the fat and grease, or Starbuck's with spices and sprouts. His cuisine will be multiethnic because "every part of the world has something vegetarian that tastes awesome," he says. "I might offer Thai soups, Indian rice or Mexican wraps."
His motivation is a combination of passion — he's a lifelong vegetarian — and pragmatism — he sees an opening in the market. "I traveled to the U.S. from India while I was working at Sony Music and didn't find many eating options available. Here, vegetarian means tofu and salads.
" But I think it's just a challenge of packaging and presenting vegetarian food the right way. The American public is tremendously open to new ideas. If you had said 30 years ago that people would be eating raw fish, they would've said, ‘Get out of here.'"
His models are the
Cosi coffeehouse chain, Panera Bread and P.F. Chang's
China Bistro — a niche called "fast casual." It attempts
to combine high-quality food with quick service and moderate prices.
But before he can launch his chain, Vora knows he has to fill a hole
in his resume: his minimal experience in restaurants. Venture capitalists,
he fears,
will be
wary of investing with an aspiring restaurateur who has never toiled
at
commercial stove, puzzled over a menu or managed a kitchen staff. "I
need to be able to address their concerns."
While in school, he has worked two nights a week at a Mexican restaurant
in Bryn Mawr, Pa., called Marita's Cantina. "I've
hosted, bussed, waited tables, everything."
After graduation,
he's considering moving to San Francisco to manage a
Mexican restaurant. He wants to start his chain in California, figuring
Californians, often avatars of health and fitness trends, will embrace
it. "If I can't
make it work there, I'll have to go back to the drawing board."
At Wharton, he has loaded up on courses on entrepreneurship. He
has taken classes on starting and managing entrepreneurial ventures,
on venture capital
and on
business law as it relates to young companies. He's even
taking a Spanish class. "Spanish is the second language of
California," he says.
Vora was able to take four entrepreneurship electives during his first year, which many students devote to required core courses, because he came to Wharton with a master's in management. He's a graduate of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. He earned his bachelor's in chemistry at St. Xavier's College in Ahmedabad.
Between the Indian Institute and Wharton, Vora worked at Asian Paints India Ltd., Southeast Asia's largest paint company, and Sony Music Entertainment India Ltd. At Sony, he oversaw the first multi-country release of an Indian music album — a soundtrack for a movie called Lagaan — in March 2001.
He's also the first entrepreneur in his family. "Everybody else has straight corporate jobs," he says. "My father is a marketing consultant. My sister's a doctor. My brother's an engineer."
Spend an hour talking with Vora, and you get caught up in his enthusiasm. For him, as for many entrepreneurs, the idea of starting a company is as much a mission as a way to make money.
"My primary motivation is the growing consciousness of the impact of food on people's health. And I think the way you make your money is as important than how much you make."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .