Kyle Judah, Executive Director of the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie) at Rice University, and Sophie Randolph '22, join host Christine Dobbyn. They discuss programming at Lilie during the pandemic, Houston's startup ecosystem and resources for alumni entrepreneurs.
Owl Have You Know is Rice Business’ podcast created to share the experiences of alumni, faculty, students and other members of our business community – real stories of belonging, failing, rebounding and, ultimately, succeeding. During meaningful conversations, we dive deep into how each guest has built success through troubles and triumphs before, during and after they set foot in McNair Hall.
The Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of the business school at Rice University (Rice Business) and is produced by University FM.
David Droogleever:
Welcome into Owl Have You Know, this is your co-host David Droogleever, Rice Business Class 2012. This is a special episode before we get rocking here, we have a couple of folks I'd like to introduce. It does take a team to make all this stuff happen. So I'd like to introduce Tim Okabayashi class of 2005, and we also have Kyle Rowland on as well. Tim, do you want to say hello?
Tim Okabayashi:
Hey David. Really excited to be here. Thanks.
David Droogleever:
Awesome. Tim also, you're a member of alumni association as well. So as we've been working together for almost a year now, what is it that you're excited about with this podcast and what we're creating here?
Tim Okabayashi:
David, we're really excited to bring these audible stories from alumni to help engage with the broader Rice MBA community.
David Droogleever:
Awesome. And Kyle, we want to hear from you as well. Kyle is the assistant director of alumni relations. Kyle, you want to share a little bit about what you're excited about with Owl Have You Know?
Kyle Rowland:
Sure. My role is generally regional programming outside of Houston, and I'm always looking for ways to engage folks beyond just having events. So I've really enjoyed listening to the really great episodes that you all have been recording as well as interacting with folks on the backend, on the front end, just helping to engage a greater population.
David Droogleever:
Yeah, and I think engagement is really key here. And so as we're moving forward towards the alumni reunion getting together and we want to see people engage a lot more. And so we're running a special drawing and Kyle, you want to share a little bit more about how we're structuring the drawing and how people can cash in on the swag?
Kyle Rowland:
Yeah, we are running a drawing. For those of you who are listening to us, we'd love if you would leave a comment or review on Apple Podcasts, anytime between March 1st and March 15th, between anyone who's left a comment we're going to go ahead and select two winners to win a swag package that our office will send to you as a thanks for listening. There's some more details in the show notes. I don't want to bore you with all the details, but definitely check them out and go ahead and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
David Droogleever:
Awesome. Thanks, Kyle. Appreciate that. As most folks know, we're creating a platform here. We're covering lots of business management topics, trying to make this more and more relevant to everyone.
So leaving the comments there and subscribing was tremendously helpful to us to make this more relevant to the broader Rice Business ecosystem and beyond. So Tim, Kyle, thank you so much for chiming in here. Again, thank you in advance for leaving some comments and subscribing on Apple Podcasts and without further ado, onto the show.
Christine Dobbyn:
Today on Owl Have You Know.
David Droogleever:
When that bolt of lightning and inspiration strikes, we want to make sure they know I got to go do my market segmentation and customer development. They know exactly what to do, and it's like riding a bike because they built that muscle memory before. And it just comes naturally.
Christine Dobbyn:
Kyle Judah and Sophie Randolph both share a passion for entrepreneurship. Kyle, as the new executive director at the Lilie Lab, Sophie as a first-year full-time MBA who entered Rice Business already an entrepreneur, they talk about programming at Lilie during a pandemic, what drew them to the Rice ecosystem? And where does Houston sit on the startup map for the future? Joining us today on Owl Have You Know, Kyle Judah, the executive director for the Liu Idea Lab for innovation and entrepreneurship, and also Sophie Randolph, a Rice Business student who will graduate in 2022. Welcome both of you to the program.
Kyle Judah:
Thanks so much for having me.
Sophie Randolph:
We are glad to be here.
Christine Dobbyn:
Well, first of all, I want to start with Kyle. You are new to Rice and the Lilie Lab, coming on as executive director in August. What an interesting time to start this job? What has it been like and why Rice?
Kyle Judah:
It's a great question. And I think now more than ever higher ed institutions and entrepreneurs need more support, COVID has thrown the business development and funding ecosystems and resources really upside down these last 10 or 12 months now. And as a university, as the number one ranked university in entrepreneurship in the country, as Rice Business is, we have a responsibility to support and encourage entrepreneurs like Sophie and like so many of our students and our alums and support them at each stage of their journey from curiously dipping their toe in the pool of entrepreneurship and exploring it in the classroom or outside the classroom, whether it's about helping to connect them to personalize mentors, equity, free funding.
Kyle Judah:
Our responsibility as a university is to be there, to believe in them and support them before anybody else in their life or anybody else in their market is going to be willing to. And so it's an exciting time. We
have an opportunity to build something incredibly unique and incredibly special with respect to a university entrepreneurship ecosystem and an ecosystem of entrepreneurs and innovators in Houston and in Texas relative to anywhere else.
Kyle Judah:
I spent most of my career out in the Northeast, in the Boston ecosystem, the last three years before joining up at Rice in August in the Boulder Denver ecosystem in Colorado. And each of these different communities are unique and special and have competitive advantages relative to everywhere else. What I found so attractive and appealing about the opportunity at Rice was to build on the foundation that the team at Lilie has created over the last five years and help write the next chapter of the future for entrepreneurship at Rice and entrepreneurship in Houston, but do so in a way that authentic to the DNA of our community on and off campus.
Kyle Judah:
The thing I think that I'm most excited about is we have a much more diverse student base at Rice and obviously a much more diverse community in Houston than Boston, than New York, than certainly the Bay Area. And absolutely certainly more than Boulder. And we have the opportunity to create a much more inclusive strain of entrepreneurship and a more diverse strain of entrepreneurship at Rice and at Houston than I think anywhere else, while at the same time building off of the historical centers of excellence for Rice and for Houston and healthcare and energy and space and all the areas that are the grand challenges for humanity for the next couple of decades, Rice has been there and we have the infrastructure both on and off campus to support and encourage that next generation of entrepreneurs to get started and get started while they're at Rice.
Christine Dobbyn:
Sophie, you are an entrepreneur as you really entered the program, what is it been like? Your first fall and getting involved with the lab, what are some of the things you've done and experiences you've had?
Sophie Randolph:
From the get-go, one of my goals was to continue working on my business while in school, especially year first semester, it's loaded with year core classes and it's easy and justifiable to just focus on that. But I always had in the back of my head, okay, the amount of time that my peers are spending recruiting, that's the time that I want to spend building my own thing, even though it feels less urgent say than the external deadlines of recruiting. One huge thing that right out the gate, I got involved with the Venture Development Series, which was a three part series for folks who either had an idea and wanted to play with it, some with a bit of structure, or if you didn't have an idea and just wanted to exercise those muscles, something Lilie Lab has done a great job of is feeding you an idea to play with.
Sophie Randolph:
So you could work that muscle. But I came in with an idea and I remember before the very first one just sitting on the couch and being like, I just spent six hours on Zoom. I don't want to go and going just meant logging into a thing, but I still didn't want to go. And I'm like, okay, I'm just going to get on it for at least five minutes. And it was amazing. It was the best virtual programming of any of the extracurricular, virtual, adventures I've delved into. Lilies definitely thinking they're entrepreneurs, they're doing cool things in a new environment. They're in a really good spot to pull off innovative ways to deliver. So the
Venture Development Series was that was the very first taste of Lilie I got, and it has kept my creative juices flowing with my business idea.
Sophie Randolph:
And then I also took part in a six week program on customer research that was about two and a half hours per week structured. And that was the equivalent of adding on another class, which is a little crazy, but it's helped push me forward. And that set me up to be in a position where Rice and Lilie Lab just launched the Rice Experiment Fund, whereas student founders or folks with an idea who want to run an experiment and either get some market validation or just get to that next step in their experiment can apply for a grant. And I pitched Kyle and I was granted $500 to do some AB testing about which beachhead market I should go after. So once finals wrap up next week, I'll be really diving into that and taking advantage of the opportunity for some play money to further my idea in that way.
Christine Dobbyn:
Can you talk a little bit about your company, Crescendo Management, what you do, what you've learned so far and where you're trying to take it?
Sophie Randolph:
Yeah, absolutely. So Crescendo Management started a couple years ago. My boyfriend was launching his music career as a solo artist for the first time. He's been gigging for a decade in various bands and out in the Bay Area, he was in a duo, but he was back to Texas and hadn't been playing music here in his name ever. And he had the music part down, but was pretty caught up in how to market himself or how to get gigs. And putting himself out there was not that fun for him. I wanted to see him succeed. And it started in that way where I took on some of the marketing and management elements and was just doing it for fun to explore. I was working at a startup full time. I definitely had that entrepreneurial spirit and this was a new angle to apply it.
Sophie Randolph:
And then one of his buddies called him. He was like, "Hey, I see you've been doing well gigging in Texas. can you help hook me up with some gigs?" And he was like, "Oh, you need Sophie." And I was like, "Oh, okay. I do this now. Got it." That's part of how it started. And grew from there, whether it's doing websites or booking for other artists, that was the core of what I was up to for core clients for a while there. And then when COVID came around, music in person came to a halt and one of the first things we did when live stream started happen, you could see just a stark contrast and audio quality from folks. So we set out to figure out, okay, how do you do a high quality live stream through Facebook?
Sophie Randolph:
And like using predominantly free tools and turns out it's if you know what to do, it's not rocket science. So I put together a series of blog posts on that, and that was the first content of mine that spread beyond my immediate circle. And that was exciting to see. At the same time, I started thinking more broadly about what it was I liked doing with my clients. And it came down to the individuals who are super passionate about something, whether it's making music or making hats, but didn't necessarily have the business mind to grow that idea as well as they could filling in those knowledge gaps. So it evolved into small business consulting from there. And a couple of clients right now are a hat shop and a farm. And that's been a great experience to help people who are creating something and trying to make their life passion into something more than a hobby is exciting to be part of and really energizing.
Sophie Randolph:
And then as far as what I've learned, working in doing things manually as services, I think is the best way to discover the recurring problems. And that's when you get the ideas for what can scale, whether it's an app or a specialized service, if you're doing it manually and you feel the pain yourself and you become your own potential future customer, that's where good ideas come from problems, not from like, yeah, that'd be cool. No, you need to solve a pain point. So that's one of the ideas I'm working on now would be to intermediate payment between venues and musicians to simplify tax filing. It's not tax software, it's not the sexiest thing on the planet, but I know that there's pain there and it has an opportunity to grow in a variety of different directions. So that's the software side of my entrepreneurial adventure is headed in that direction right now.
Kyle Judah:
If I can just build on that, so yeah, you're singing my song. I love hearing that. And it's so timely because DoorDash went public earlier this week and I saw one of the early co-founders, who's now a venture capitalist sharing some of their lessons and learnings from the early days. And one of the things you said was exactly what you just repeated, which is you live in the problem and you do the messy manual work in the early days, because that helps you figure out where are the opportunities to automate and scale through software. And where are the opportunities that you still have to have a manual touch so that you ultimately create a great user, a great customer experience for folks. And they keep coming back time and time again. So whether you're doing distributed delivery for food and everything else or software for musicians living in the problem is the best place to start.
Sophie Randolph:
Absolutely.
Christine Dobbyn:
That's some good advice. Kyle, you started during an interesting time and you were saying that you've hardly even been to the physical lab. What kind of challenges has it presented in continuing the programs and the offerings and maybe what have you learned in the process?
Kyle Judah:
Yes, that I think is the thing that kept our team awake at night after I joined, but before the semester started, because the reality is everything is virtual or most of it is virtual classes, courses club meetings, you name it. And I think what we wanted to make sure was that we weren't just piling more Zoom lectures on top of more Zoom lectures on top of more zoom lectures that we had to create interesting and unique ways to make sure that our events or workshops or speaker series were interesting and engaging, and that they offered students and faculty and research staff or alumni at Rice, opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have in the classroom. And so, as Sophie mentioned we've run this Venture Development Workshop Series, which is like entrepreneurship 101, what should you be doing on day one from ideation to customer development and so on and so forth.
Kyle Judah:
And I think the opportunity for us was how do we make something that is really messy, ugly, legwork at the front end of creating a new venture? How do you make that fun and interesting and engaging when it is being delivered over Zoom and you don't get that same energy and same density of the entrepreneurial community in the Lilie space. And I think we were rightly worried about that. I think
what the semester has shown us is that now more than ever, people are looking for community, they're aching for community, and they're desperately seeking ways to connect with the other group of crazies who have raised their hand and jumped off the cliff and said, "I want to go down this non-linear, winding, messy path of figuring out how to be an entrepreneur and how to be an innovator."
Kyle Judah:
We've seen the numbers jump up dramatically in terms of the number of students, the number of first-year MBAs, the number of freshmen and undergraduate students who are coming and attending because it is that much easier. They don't have build in time to schlep to other side of campus or come from off campus to campus or not. The other thing is that it's really given us an opportunity to engage an entrepreneurial community that is global in nature. When everybody's on Zoom 24/7, that means we can leverage alumnus or entrepreneurs from Boston, from Chicago, from Austin, from the Bay Area, LA from Singapore and London and everywhere in between. And I think that's a really unique thing that you just can't get when you're doing everything in person. Nobody's going to hop on a plane and come over from the UK for an hour and a half speaker series, right?
Kyle Judah:
But this has given us the opportunity to have Eric Yuan. Who's the founder and CEO of Zoom actually do a fireside chat with Dr. Yale Schonberg, who's my boss and the head of the Entrepreneurship Department at Rice, and that otherwise never would have happened. And so I think we've tried to be entrepreneurial. We've tried to be creative, and we've tried to make sure that through our different events and our different programs, it's not just a rinse and repeat that we're finding different and interesting ways to engage students, to make sure that the education and the knowledge transfer that's happening is tactical.
Kyle Judah:
And that students are being given time to actually learn it and apply it in real time. And I think that's a big part of our philosophy of how entrepreneurship has to be taught on a college campus. Theory alone is never going to be enough and theory alone doesn't account for the harsh reality, sometimes of trying to do customer development when you can't get in front of your customers and all the various and sundry parts of this experience. But if you focus it on entrepreneurship, being taught by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs that I think helps make sure that this isn't something that stays purely academic, but that it is truly centered on what is the value and what is the experience that we can deliver for our customers who are student founders just like Sophie.
Christine Dobbyn:
Question for both of you, generally speaking about entrepreneurship, those who are at Rice and even beyond every business has been affected by COVID in one way or another. And we've seen businesses fold, there's been so much talk about pivoting and being nimble. Do you think that more people are fearful of becoming an entrepreneur after seeing what's happened? Or has there been such a disruption in every person's life that it's given them an opportunity to step back and say, "Well, wait a minute, where am I in my life and path and journey, and maybe I want to take a risk right now."
Sophie Randolph:
I'll start. I think I'm an optimist. So that definitely colors my answer, but I've seen a lot of my peers and other folks just overall re-evaluating what's matters to them. And in that entrepreneurship can become
more appealing. There's definitely some availability bias in that. I think that the makeup of the Rice MBA classes is shifting more and more towards entrepreneurship as we keep hold of that number one ranking. So and my boyfriend's Rice MBA class of 2020, so talking to him, he's like, "Yeah, there were probably two or three people in my class who are going to do their own thing when they graduated." Whereas for my class, I know that higher, that number, even as a percentage, feels a lot higher. And you also get a bunch of folks who are like, yeah, "I want to do something like semi traditional consulting, iBanking, yada yada for two to three years, and then maybe acquire a company and run it." So there's all different types of entrepreneurs.
Sophie Randolph:
And I think the folks who want to start their own thing, that's definitely growing in numbers at Rice. And I I think COVID makes people reassess their priorities so that either doubled down in one direction or the other, they're like, "Oh, I really like this work from home, build my own schedule, hustle to the beat of my own drum thing." You're going to get those folks. But I think a lot of people never got to try that because they went into a nine to five. But now that you work from home, even if it's for someone else, you start to get a sense of what it's like to have more full control of how your time is spent.
Kyle Judah:
Yeah, I totally agree. Color me an optimist too, but I think there's been no better time in history to try and be an entrepreneur than now there's certainly more capital and funding available than at any time in history, both for folks who are going to pursue the venture capital funding path. And for those who are pursuing a bootstrap capital and new funding sources, new opportunities and new paths to market are being created and explored now more than ever. I agree with Sophia, I think it has forced people to radically reevaluate their priorities in life, what their passions are. And I think unfortunately has shown that life can be really short and if you're truly passionate about something, and it's the last thing you're thinking about at night when you're laying awake in bed.
Kyle Judah:
And the first thing you're thinking about when you get out of bed in the morning, there really is no better time and no better flexibility than now to start down that path. I mean, if you think back to the last major kind of macro disruption of the global financial crisis, the companies that we're seeing today, going public DoorDash and Airbnb, Skype and so many others, those got started in 2008, 2009, 2010. That's when I started my company as well in my prior life as a founder before getting into academia. And yeah, there are certainly more challenges, but just because there's instability economically and in a lot of other ways going on right now, doesn't mean that it's a bad time to start a company. In fact, I think it shows that there's more opportunities and more industries and more customer segments that are right for innovation and disruption than ever before.
Christine Dobbyn:
You talked about Rice's ranking and they are known internationally for entrepreneurship. Why is that? What have you both seen so far, you're both relatively new to Rice. So what have you seen so far that you think contributes to that ranking and dominance that they have, and it looks like it's going to continue as they're growing the program.
Kyle Judah:
Yeah, I'm obviously heavily biased, but with Lilie being the home and center for entrepreneurship for the Rice campus, we have an opportunity while a lot of our peer universities and a lot of other universities in general are cutting budget and cutting programs and cutting back, in a lot of different ways we're growing. I mean, the MBA class that Sophia is a part of is close to fully one third larger than the historical average. And as she mentioned, I think the makeup and the mindset of that class is shifting quite radically from past years to being more entrepreneurial.
Kyle Judah:
The university is investing increasingly in entrepreneurship technology transfer and commercialization in a lot of different ways, because if we can invest now when others are cutting, boy, are we going to be in a really far and away advantageous position in a couple of years time when there is a reversion to normal budget constraints, normal budgetary opportunities, and that sort of thing.
Kyle Judah:
The biggest thing that I've seen honestly, and I've spent five years at MIT working in their Center for Entrepreneurship and their innovation ecosystem three years at CU Boulder doing much the same in the engineering college. The biggest difference for me at Rice is the faculty that are teaching entrepreneurship have been entrepreneurs themselves. They haven't just studied what other people have done. They haven't just read the books and the research they've actually lived it and breathed it. And that makes a world of difference because again entrepreneurship is not just an academic research pursuit and the realities that you face as a founder in this world. You get a lot of scar tissue and you learn a lot of hard lessons when you try and take what looks like a business in a business plan document, and try and make it a reality and will it into existence.
Kyle Judah:
But those who have been there know some of those life hacks, tips, tricks, how do you run a good fundraising process? How do you balance your mental health as an entrepreneur so that you don't burn out and you don't kind of prematurely have to wind up your venture because you just don't have the time energy or support anymore for it. And so, to me, I think that's the biggest differentiator for Rice versus any other university out there is we've been there, we started, we've sold companies, some have taken them public. We've been investing in and advising and companies for, I think something like cumulatively 80 years across our entrepreneurship faculty. And so that makes a world of difference versus just folks who have watched other people play the game on the field.
Sophie Randolph:
And you see that in the courses that are offered, it's not a lecture on entrepreneurial best practices or how to build a business plan. One of the courses I'll be taking in this spring is the new enterprise where folks can come in and pitch a problem space, or there's a menu of problem spaces to choose from. And you have to go through the process of figuring out who the customer is, who the target customer would be, what kind of product you might launch to solve that problem. But it's very much action oriented and an applied learning experience. You don't get to sit back and consume it. There's curriculum and structure to support it, but you're forced into action to become an entrepreneur. And I think that's a big, not only for folks like myself who are all in, on this path while doing their MBA, but folks who three, five years down the line might want to come out of consulting and into something more entrepreneurial, they've exercised that muscle before.
Sophie Randolph:
They're not doing it for the first time they're doing it for the first time for real. And that's something that I try to convey to my peers were like, "Oh, do I have to have an idea to do this? I don't know, like I liked the idea of entrepreneurship, but I don't know how it fits into my life." I'm like, that's okay. Just do it. First of all, you're at the number one ranked entrepreneurship school. You got to go take an entrepreneurship class. And number two whether you're starting a new department and an existing company, or launching a new project or a new arm of a super existing business, or you're going into energy, and they're going to have to figure out how to stay relevant when all the oil is gone you're going to need an entrepreneurial mindset wherever you go.
Sophie Randolph:
I think Rice does a good job of trying to convey the relevance of entrepreneurship across segments. We'll also doubling down and committing to founders and the money that they put behind it is ridiculous. I toured other schools and my key takeaway was that there was a lot of places talking about entrepreneurship, and there's a handful of places doing entrepreneurship.
Sophie Randolph:
And I did not feel as confident that anyone was doing entrepreneurship the way Rice was doing it. And then another elephant in the room, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, your salary is who knows what for the first couple of years? And Rice has a huge financial aid program, whether you want to be an entrepreneur or not, it's among the most generous for financial aid for full-time MBAs. And for me, a consideration of what kind of scholarship I could get coming to school was going to make or break how much I could commit to entrepreneurship confidently so that you can scream entrepreneurship from the rooftops, but if you're paying full price for an MBA, it's going to be rough. So they come in, they back that up with money, not only in the resources for founders, but the way they approach making an MBA financially accessible regardless of your goals.
Kyle Judah:
That's our philosophy. And that's our value that at Lilie because one is, we have to make sure that we're teaching people to fish, not helping them catch a fish. Right? Which means as Sophie's point, making sure that the students who come through our classes or our co-curriculars are leaving with both that entrepreneurial mindset and that kind of Batman tool belt skillset of what do you do, how do you do customer development? How do you go and raise venture financing? How do you test pricing and business models and all these elements? Because the reality is as much as we want an MBA to have four shots on goal one each semester of building that muscle memory and experimenting and giving it a shot, the reality is many might not be in the right financial position in their lives.
Kyle Judah:
Many might not be in the right point in their entrepreneurial journey of knowing what's the right problem that fits their passion areas and the need for the market. And that might only come three years, five years, 10, 20 years after they graduate. But when that bolt of lightning and inspiration strikes, we want to make sure they know I got to go do my market segmentation and customer development. They know exactly what to do. And it's like riding a bike because they built that muscle memory before. And it just comes naturally. And knowing that they can still come back to Rice and come back to Lilie and tap into our resources and our community to support alumni entrepreneurs as well.
Kyle Judah:
All of our workshops are open to alumni as well. And we have this phenomenal Rice alumni entrepreneurs and innovators group, which is now around 250, some odd alum entrepreneurs that have round tables around being a CEO, or ideating or acquiring a business or selling your business so that you don't have to go down this crazy, stressful journey alone and in a vacuum, you can have a community of peers that are dealing with a lot of the same sort of challenges at a lot of the same sort of times, even though they might be working in radically different industries and sectors, but that you have a peer group to go through this journey with that can help you along the way that can have that lateral learning and sharing of knowledge and lessons and experiences across from founder to founder and venture to venture.
Kyle Judah:
And that's incredibly powerful. And that's how you build a real community in a real flywheel for entrepreneurship happening on the campus, where then people are willing to come back and give back of their time and energy when they're an alumni to help mentor Sophie. Some of her classmates, the MBAs, and four or five, six years time. So we have to have the interconnected set of programs that ultimately allow people to cross that graduation stage and say, "Man, Lilie and entrepreneurship was a core element of my experience at Rice. And I'm going to carve out an hour a month to hop on a Zoom or hop on a phone or swing by campus and give a guest lecture or mentor a student entrepreneur who's going through exactly what I was a couple of years ago."
Christine Dobbyn:
We've seen a lot of major corporations essentially develop entrepreneurial arms or VC arms for development. Where do you see that going? And is that a great opportunity for maybe a student who says, "I don't know about being a startup founder all on my own, but I do have this entrepreneurial mindset that I feel like I could help the existing company that I work for."
Kyle Judah:
Yeah, absolutely. I think we're seeing more and more of that activity going on than ever, certainly almost every major technology company in every industry has a corporate venture or corporate innovation arm at this point, that's been certainly a trend over the last 10 years or so. And what we're hearing from those folks for recruiting and career development is they are all too aware that the growth opportunities for their business are not going to come from the same areas that it always has. It's going to come from growing the pie, not getting a larger slice of the existing pie that they're eating. And that happens through innovation inside of a big company. And that entrepreneurial mindset, that skillset is equally as valuable for a Google, Facebook, Twitter. Now, HP that they're going to be in Houston. So many companies actively need to bring in that entrepreneurial DNA from the outside, because especially if they're a legacy technology company, a lot of that DNA doesn't exist in the company as it's constructed today. And they know that they need to constantly refresh that talent pipeline and that entrepreneurial DNA stock by recruiting from places like Rice and students like Sophie.
Sophie Randolph:
Absolutely. I think some of my peers didn't quite realize how much of a thing that was the entrepreneurship. And I remember, you remember if it was over the summer or during the first week when we were doing some career development office orientation stuff. And I was talking to this one woman who comes from an energy background is interested in that, but she'd done one of the many
personality tests they have us take and it revealed that entrepreneurship was one of her top things and she was having this identity crisis of like, "Oh my God, I've never thought of myself as an entrepreneur, but now that I think about that more like, yeah, that is really exciting to me, but how do those two go together?" And I mentioned to her that a lot of the big energy companies have internal funding and branches that do exploration of new ideas. And she was just like that spoke to her on a whole different level than anything else she'd been thinking about. And Rice definitely sets folks up to take on those positions upon graduation.
Christine Dobbyn:
Let's talk a little bit about beyond the hedges of Rice, it's situated in the nation's fourth largest city. We know that there are efforts to give entrepreneurs more opportunities, even at places like the Ion and in different partnerships. Where do you see Houston as a city going? I've gotten the impression that some of the leadership within the city feels like we're a little bit behind in those efforts, but there's a tremendous focus on changing that.
Kyle Judah:
Yeah, absolutely. I've been blown away by the community that exists beyond the hedges. Not only how welcoming they've been to an outsider like me but how genuinely curious they are about what makes an innovation ecosystem great and supportive. And the most exciting thing for me is they're not looking to copy and paste what worked in Boston or what worked in the Bay Area, because there never will be another Bay area. Let's just be honest. If Houston was trying to be the Bay Area now, it would be a massive failure. I mean bay Area has got a 50 year headstart on doing what they do.
Christine Dobbyn:
Everybody's leaving.
Kyle Judah:
And everybody's leaving and coming to paces like Houston and Texas. But I think they've been really diligent at looking at what worked in Boston, what works in Boulder, what works in LA or the Bay Area or Portland, Oregon, or Nashville, and these emerging innovation ecosystems. My former Boston MIT an incredibly brilliant woman named Fiona Murray. Her whole body of research is around innovation ecosystems. And I am a true believer but she talks about there needs to be these five groups of stakeholders in any innovation ecosystem that all have to be working together, playing for the name on the front of the Jersey being Houston instead of Chevron or Rice or wherever. And those five groups are essentially venture capitalists and funders of innovators and an entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem, universities and academia that are talent and technology pipeline out into the world, big companies that can be both an incubator of talent, a customer for those entrepreneurs and startups, as well as eventually an acquirer of them and supportive local government.
Kyle Judah:
So that you get rid of things like non-compete agreements, which are horrendously anti innovation and suppress new startup creation to an enormous extent. Hi, Massachusetts, I'm talking about you on that one. So I believe that Houston has all the right ingredients. We really do, what we have to do, and what I've been incredibly excited by is that I see folks like Blair Garrou over at Mercury Fund and Barbara Burger at Chevron, and a number of other folks saying, "Great, let's figure out what makes Houston great. And what are our competitive advantages? Let's not try and be everything to everybody because
an ecosystem can't do that, but how can we be leveraging Texas Medical Center and Memorial Houston? How can we be the place for med devices for computational biology and therapeutics better than anywhere else?" Boston's got life sciences and biotech pretty well locked down. Great, good for them. There are a lot of other areas in healthcare that are in desperate need of innovation and improvement for the benefit of society.
Kyle Judah:
And I'm encouraged because we're playing our own game and we're creating something that's unique to Houston and authentic to Houston, rather than trying to say, "Oh, let's just do what Silicon Valley did, let's just do what LA did" figuring out what your unique value proposition is, what your unique differentiators are as an innovation ecosystem and doubling down there and really betting on the builders. That's what gets me so fired up about what I see going on in Houston quite frankly, was a big part of the draw to leave an incredible ecosystem like Boulder and Denver, and come on down there and help be a part and help Rice be a part of writing that next chapter.
Christine Dobbyn:
And Sophia, if you can speak to that and especially I think with your startup do you feel being in the music world is a disadvantage being in a city like Houston, as opposed to a Nashville or the West coast?
Sophie Randolph:
Yeah. What you might not know is I moved to Houston directly from San Francisco, where I had been for two years. And before that I had spent most of my life in Massachusetts. So when I came to Houston, I moved with the company I'd been working for in the Bay Area is a company called Zola and making booking software for tours and activities. And I was one of their, I think I was their last hire in the San Francisco office. And over time that office just shrunk and shrunk, and we built our Houston office more and more because it just is unjustifiably expensive to build a company in the Bay Area and we had such good lacks the wrong word, but it was successful building out a talented team in Houston that it just made sense to grow there. And I reached a point where I felt like I was done with the Bay Area, but not done with this company and asked my boss if I could move to Houston.
Sophie Randolph:
And he was like, "Yeah, absolutely. I didn't think I could ask you to, but you want to go, go." And I moved a couple of months to Houston by myself. Not really knowing what to expect. I'd visited enough to know that I'd like it, but wasn't sure that I love it and figured if I didn't love it, I would go onto my next adventure somewhere else. But something I did when I very first got here was I wanted to figure out what the entrepreneurship and startup ecosystem was in Houston, because there were so many meetups and events that I could go to in San Francisco. And that's how I'd met a lot of interesting people. And I wanted to figure out what that looked like in Houston. And I was so happily surprised and overwhelmed by the number of resources and events and meetups.
Sophie Randolph:
And everyone I met was it felt way less competitive and way more collaborative than the ecosystem in the Bay Area as well. Like this is my idea, and it's so great. And I'm so well awesome. And I'm going to be the next Facebook. And yeah. Instead it was like, oh my gosh, tell me about what you're working on. Like, this is what I'm doing. I think maybe I could help you this way, or like, you need to meet so-and-so. Have you heard of blah-blah-blah? I think it would be great if you talk to them and it just comes from a
really genuine space. Getting back to what Kyle said about finding that unique value proposition for the Houston ecosystem. I think everyone's on the same page of wanting it to be special and yeah, you don't want the non-competes because you want a healthy dose of competition for ideas, but collaboration beyond that is super powerful and I've felt that was starting my own company.
Sophie Randolph:
You asked music in Houston instead of Austin or Nashville. I think Houston is a really special place for musicians for a lot of the same reasons. It's a special place for entrepreneurs, because if you're good at what you do and are willing to work hard, you can actually make money. And Austin and Nashville, the supply demand of musicians is way too skewed. You get asked to pay to play instead of being paid to play. And same in the Bay Area, you might have a really great idea, but everyone goes there to launch their idea because it has this reputation of being where you go and for good reason, but I think that's shifting and changing and for the right ideas, Houston's a better spot. And it feels like there's more money to go around for the deserving ideas.
Kyle Judah:
And seeing what Rice and what the Houston ecosystem is doing and standing up space like the Ion, when that comes online next year, being able to build density of the entrepreneurial community in a place and have surface area for serendipitous collisions, between entrepreneurs, between entrepreneurs and investors, between entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 customers is a necessary ingredient. And I mean, I've been tracking this Ion project for the last several years since the, what is it, the old Macy's building or whatever got acquired before the Ion was ever really a thing and seeing what Yon and Reggie, the provost at Rice and Allison Thacker, who helps set up the Rice management and investment company, seeing what their vision is for it as being that space to have collisions occur, they get it, that shows me that they get it.
Kyle Judah:
And that you can have a million different coworking spaces scattered around a city, and maybe the city, the size and sprawl of Houston can and should have several different spots of entrepreneurial density, but a place that is a next natural landing spot for entrepreneurs and ventures coming out of Rice, to be able to go into participate in accelerator programs, have office space and be a part of a community again, instead of being a founder in a vacuum, I mean that's the secret sauce of what makes places like Cambridge in Massachusetts and Palo Alto and downtown SF and LA and the Manhattan beach areas. That's what makes it cook. And it's exciting to see. I can't wait to see when that space and the programs that are come online and what we can do to help make sure that they're stocked to the gills with Rice founders and ventures.
Christine Dobbyn:
You've talked to some about Massachusetts. So when you look at a Massachusetts, you pretty much have Boston. It's the core there in Texas. We have Houston, Austin, Dallas, San Antonio. How does Texas work together when there is some competitive spirit amongst cities? Whether it's trying to draw companies or founders in or VC funds?
Kyle Judah:
That's a fantastic question. I much like Sophie, I grew up in the Boston suburbs. And so my factory default setting is to always feel like the redheaded stepchild with a chip on my shoulder relative to a
place like New York, which was always viewed as the much bigger, the much better, the much more successful entrepreneurial ecosystem. The reality is it's not zero sum. And some people, some investors, some companies might be more attracted to what's going on over in Austin, or they might be a better fit for the kind of differentiated value proposition or the kind of industries that are thriving in a Dallas or a San Antonio. The beauty is the reality is what each of those places are two and a half, three hours, maybe four drive away from one another.
Christine Dobbyn:
For accent that's like for a barely a drive. It's the light snack.
Kyle Judah:
I did the 17 hour drive from Boulder down to Houston through all of West Texas and Southern Colorado. I now understand the expanse of this state, what a four hour drive is the same as from Boston and New York. Right? And we saw a lot of folks get started in Boston, but gravitate towards New York because they were doing ads or something that was consumer technology focused. And it was the right place for them in my mind, if we can help entrepreneurs get started at Rice and in Houston, and maybe they go to Austin, maybe they go to Dallas or San Antonio. That's great. We're keeping them local. They're still local enough that they can come on back to campus, come on back to Houston and contribute and participate to the growth of our ecosystem and vice versa.
Kyle Judah:
And I think as we see VCs flee from the Bay Area to elsewhere, Texas has already been one of the great recipients of that brain drain from the West Coast, with Joe Lonsdale and Elon Musk and a number of others already coming on over, if they want to be hiring at crazy scale, UT is okay if they want really high caliber islands that, hopefully they can hop on a hyper loop or a bullet train, or just make the usual three and a half hour drive on over to Houston and tapping into what we've got cooking at Rice because there's a reason why we're number one in entrepreneurship and have some of the most highly ranked engineering and MBA programs on the planet.
Sophie Randolph:
Well, we're on that train. I like to joke with my friends who are like, "Oh yeah, I've thought about moving to Texas. I like, Austin seems really cool." I'm like, yeah, Austin's a suburb of San Francisco of course you think you'll like, it's full of California. And I think it's really powerful and says a lot about Texas as a state and the value of places on business and small businesses and startups for making it an economically viable place to have a second office or shift your headquarters. And Austin was just what Californians knew. So they ended up there first, but like Kyle was saying with the unique value of Houston and Dallas and Austin each have their own. And I think one of the things that Houston has that I love is a gritty hustle that you'll see fewer so far second locations here and more things, there's plenty of startups starting in Austin as well, but that's like when Google start did their offices there, it's mostly sales and support which is great and you need to hire those.
Sophie Randolph:
But those aren't like the most innovative departments within a company. And I try to like my friends who are excited about entrepreneurship and think Austin by default, because those big names are there. I always encourage them to look at what positions they're hiring for in those locations. Is it just
the rinse and repeat operations of this teenage startup? Or is it truly somewhere where something innovative that you get to be a part of at this point.
Christine Dobbyn:
You both talked about your Northeastern roots, but where are your accents?
Sophie Randolph:
The Boston accent. First of all, I grew up two and a half hours from Boston. Yes. That's still in Massachusetts. And then the Boston accent is super specific to South Boston. And it's also much more of a socioeconomic thing than a location thing I think is what people don't realize. So I grew up in a fairly non accented place, and then I went out to school and in the Boston area, and you don't pick up an accent while you're at Harvard and then yeah, probably similar for you Kyle.
Kyle Judah:
Yeah, I grew up 30, 40 minutes outside the city in what is effectively the sugar land or relative to Boston. So no accent. My parents are South African, I'm first gen, my accents are much because I've just been moving around a million different places throughout my life. And I'm just happy that I can authentically use y’all now, because that is one hands down, one of the best words in the English language. It's-
Sophie Randolph:
So functional.
Kyle Judah:
Yeah.
Sophie Randolph:
You can be authentic and say it now, right?
Kyle Judah:
That's right y’all.
Sophie Randolph:
Do you have any boots yet?
Kyle Judah:
I don't.
Sophie Randolph:
Okay. When you get here, we're going boot shopping.
Christine Dobbyn:
Rodeo time. When the rodeo approaches we'll need to get you outfitted.
Kyle Judah:
I have two little girls in both of them are only two fired up about getting boots and hats and getting to ride horses like 24/7. So this a very good move for the whole family.
Christine Dobbyn:
Well, it has been a pleasure talking with both of you. You just both have so much insight and interesting conversation. Kyle and Sophie, do you have any final thoughts that you'd like to share as we look forward to a new year and hopefully putting the pandemic behind us?
Sophie Randolph:
I think what I would say if you're listening to this as an alumni or as someone considering Rice, the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well. And if you're thinking about getting involved as an alumni, know that as students we love hearing from you, whether you're just starting your entrepreneurial journey or have something to share. Many of those programs I was in did have alumni in it, just starting their venture several years out. And I loved the different exposure there. And if you're thinking about Rice with an entrepreneurial mindset as something you're interested in getting out of an MBA, then definitely coming to the right spot.
Kyle Judah:
If you're an alumni, entrepreneur or not, listening to this podcast, please feel free to reach out. My email is just Kyle.judah@rice.edu. I'd love to help connect you to the resources and the communities that we have to support alumni entrepreneurs, to bring you into the classroom, to help connect you to our next generation of founders starting and coming off of the Rice campus like Sophie. Please reach out. I love nothing more than hearing from alumnus who wants to come back, who are fired up about entrepreneurship, who want to help out, mentor, support, judge our competitions whatever it might be. It takes a community to build a community and we're lucky to have such a great, diverse and vibrant alum community from Rice Business and from Rice to support. Sophie support our team at Lilie and support really the next chapter in generation of entrepreneurs and startups coming from Rice, staying in Houston, consider this the gauntlet thrown down to any other Texas City or anywhere on the coasts we're coming for you.
Christine Dobbyn:
Thank you so much, Kyle Judah and Sophie Randolph. Thanks for joining us on Owl Have You Know.
Kyle Judah:
Thanks so much.
David Droogleever:
This has been Owl Have You Know. Thanks for listening. You can find links and more information about our guests, hosts and announcements on our website, business.rice.edu. Please subscribe to this podcast wherever you find your favorite podcasts and leave us a comment while you're at it. And let us know what you think. Owl Have You Know is a production of Rice Business and is sponsored by the Rice Business Alumni Board, the hosts of Owl Have You Know, are myself David Droogleever and Christine Dobbyn