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Welcome to The Pivot Point, a student-led podcast that shines a spotlight on the vibrant city of Las Vegas while exploring the transformative journeys of students, professors, and executives. My name is Bardia Eivazi, an MBA student at UNLV. Join me as I delve into the stories of those who have embraced change, overcome obstacles, and made significant strides in their academic and professional lives. We're more than just a podcast - we are a community dedicated to empowering student voices and inspiring the next generation of leaders. Tweet us @pivotpointunlv!
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You're listening to locally produced programming created in KUNV Studios on public radio.
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KUNV 91.5. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.
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Welcome to the Pivot Point where we talk about all things pivot, all things business, and all things Vegas. I'm your host, Bardea. Let's get the ball rolling. All right, let's get this show on the road. Hello and welcome, one and all, to the first episode of The Pivot Point. My name is Bardea, and I will be your host on these exciting adventures we have for you. A little about me, I'm an MBA student at the Lee Business School, currently launching a startup. I was born and raised in Las Vegas, and I thought, what better way to engage with students, professors, and executives than to start a podcast on my own campus? And maybe my listeners will be inspired by our stories along the way. But enough about me. I'm thrilled to toss it to our first very special guest the executive director of Blackfire Innovation Hub And Howard Hughes incubator. Dr. Robert Rippey. Thank you for joining me today It's my pleasure and thank you for having me on this inaugural episode. It's an honor to be here. It's my pleasure
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So, can you briefly describe for us a little bit about your background and your career story leading up to UNLV. I'd be happy to, so I'll do it in reverse order. So as you've mentioned, I'm the Executive Director for Blackfire Innovation and our startup incubator here at UNLV. I've been in this role for about eight years. Within that role, I work for UNLV's Office of Economic Development, which is a unique entity within UNLV that spans the entire campuses, that works with every college, every student, graduate, undergraduate, in many different ways. So one of the things I do is run our startup programs, which I'm sure we'll get into in a bit. At the beginning of my tenure here at UNLV, I was brought on board to teach a class in innovation. So I taught the first innovation lab class, which was designed for entrepreneurs who wanted to do a startup, much like you. And that expanded now into two facilities and full programs. Prior to that, I had retired from the private sector. I had my last role, I was Senior Vice President for Las Vegas Sands Corporation. We know that locally as the Venetian and Palazzo. And that was the culminating role in a 25 year career in hospitality, gaming, and entertainment. In addition to all of that, I did my MBA at the University of Georgia and I earned my PhD right here at UNLV, so I am a running rebel.
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Of course. Something that I've learned over the years is that UNLV never ceases to amaze me. When I learned about your department and that there are programs like yours dedicated to launching student startups on campus, helping students actually start companies. I was just blown away. So just really
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quickly, what are the incubator and innovation hub all about? So those are two separate entities, Blackfire and the UNLV incubator. So if you come up with an idea and you have this entrepreneurial spirit that you want to pursue your own path, so let's say you're graduating from UNLV, you have choices. You can go work for a company, you could continue your education, or you may decide you want to do something on your own as an entrepreneur. What we do with an incubator is we help you take your idea and formulate a business model around it. If you look at the research around why startups typically fail, it's not necessarily because they had a bad idea. It's because they didn't have a good business model. So lacking a business model is one of the key factors that could potentially affect the success of a student entrepreneur. So we launched the incubator a few years ago with the intent that we would give those entrepreneurially minded students kind of a next step, if you will. So upon graduation, faced with I want to try and do my own thing, I have an idea and I want to do a startup. The question begs, what do you do first? And that first step is an incubator. And what we do in an incubator is help you to understand what is a business model. So that includes things like business entity structure, which is actually quite easy to do in the state of Nevada, the value proposition, the customer segmentation, the market assessment, how big is the market for your idea? All of those sorts of things are baked into an incubator's syllabus, if you will, to help the entrepreneur discover what they need to know to be successful as a business. Now, notice I didn't say product. Product is usually something that remains relatively static during an incubator because we're really focused on everything around that. How do you form this business? What kind of intellectual property do you have, which is a very important point, which many entrepreneurs have little understanding of. So the incubator works as the first step. For those that are moving on and have now done all of those things and are ready to think about either A, raising investment capital, or B, actually entering the market, that's where accelerators come in. And Blackfire is an accelerator. So that's where we connect startups with the private sector, with investment capital, to allow them to actually go to market. So they work in a chronological sense of you start with an incubator, you built a business model, you've got all of these pieces put together, now you're ready to go actually do it. That's what happens in an accelerators. We help you then to, as I said, raise capital and then go to market.
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Yes, I think that's extraordinarily thorough. That's a great program to really help you through these steps because something that you touched on when businesses first start is like market analysis, intellectual property. Some of these things are just so difficult if you have no experience and I think that this program is truly amazing in helping students with that. So what excites you the most about working with these student-led startups?
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That's a great question. I think what excites me the most are the entrepreneurs themselves and that kind of moment when things click, those inflection points, we would call them. But one of them could be in realizing that the market you're trying to enter is actually bigger than you think it is, or that your product is a perfect fit for some major problem that is plaguing this industry or plaguing consumers. It's these inflection points where I see that sparkle and I see the ignition of that fire that is going to sustain them as they undertake this journey. That's why I do it. it's there's there's really that that you know that sense of fulfillment when you see someone acting on their dream and like really seeing that it's realistic now it's not just a project that I did in a class for my degree or it's not just something I've done on the side kind of thinking maybe one day it's that day and when those moments happen it's a great sense of self-satisfaction for me. Hopefully it's a great you know beginning for the entrepreneurs but overall I think you know that's that's the key. Ultimately you want success and you want to see them to enter a market have a successful product a successful launch and to scale their companies and we're beginning to see that you know we're still very young at this for UNLV but we're beginning to see those companies and that's I predict will be an entirely different level of satisfaction when you see one of these companies actually take off and really kind of bloom in their
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marketplace. I completely agree. I think UNLV has become a tremendous sort of breeding ground with all these industries really rising in Las Vegas, sports industry, entertainment industry, the landscape is really blowing up and changing. So what impact do you feel that your startups that you work with will have on Las Vegas community or economy?
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I like that question a lot because I have to answer it a lot. And the answer is really many fold. First of all, you hope to have an economic impact on the community. One of the things that we unfortunately learned with the pandemic is how highly leveraged our community was towards one industry. And when that industry felt the pain of that pandemic and layoffs happened and downsizing happened, that rippled through everything here. And so you hope that in the future, entrepreneurial programs and things like this can make the economy more resilient and more resilient because it's less tied to any one industry. So one is economic development. Two is workforce development, right? So we create a startup. They in turn hire 12 students out of UNLV. You've just created 12 jobs. So that workforce development, particularly great jobs, technology-related, marketing-related, whatever the case may be. Those are really important in this town to help create those new opportunities and hopefully create revenues that benefit the city as well through taxes and rents and other things like that. So all of those are the primary factors. I think that one of the big factors that I like to be measured on is just quantity. How many startups can we produce in a given period of time? We've gone from zero to now, I think in the incubator, we've had over 40 startups come through our programs. So it's scaling quite rapidly, but just in total numbers, it's nice to see those numbers grow because it's attracting attention. I get contacted from startups that are coming out of the Bay Area, from Austin, from the East Coast, and even from Europe who are saying, �Hey, we heard about your program. How do we get in?� So those are all great validation points for the underlying theory behind what we're doing.
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Yes, absolutely. I've heard the rumors that Las Vegas is becoming the next Silicon Valley or something, or for tech, and it's just really exciting to hear these kinds of things. I'm sure you've also heard of a program on campus called the Rebel Venture Fund.
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I have.
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So, for those who don't know, it's an entirely student-run university venture capital fund at the UNLV Center for Entrepreneurship. And the reason I brought it up, because like you said, it kind of goes hand in hand with what you do. It's kind of similar to Blackfire, except students run it, which I think is amazing. So something that startups, including mine, that have been difficult to, like a really big challenge for us, is what advice would you give a startup negotiating stake in their company for venture capital or investors?
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Great question. So it's a common one too. And I think Rebel Venture Fund, by the way, is an amazing student-run organization. And, you know, not uncommon in most universities. What is uncommon is that it's fully student-run. That makes it really unique. It's a great opportunity to be on the other side of the fence of the startup community. But if I was giving advice, it's the same advice I give to all startups that, you know, when I talk to them about fundraising. And it is to ensure that you have your deck together, not just in terms of a nice PowerPoint that's polished, but one that checks all of the criteria that they are going to be looking for. Speak to your audience. If you want to raise the possibility of you getting funding, you need to understand what are the criteria that they use to evaluate, because you're not the first startup they've seen. So what are they? And in fact, if you go online and you look like it's some of the most successful startups, incubators in history like Y Combinator. Y Combinator publishes guidelines on what they are looking for. They tell you what criteria that they want to see. First and foremost, what they want to see is what problem are you solving? Tell us about the problem. Don't tell us about the idea. Tell us about the problem. So my advice to any startup that is getting in a situation to pitch for capital is ensure that you have gathered all of that information you can external to your own idea that helps you to understand what they're looking for right and then format your presentation or your pitch deck in that same manner. Put your ego aside, I know you have a great idea but think about what they're looking for. Think about an investment firm that has looked at hundreds of pitches and they really are going to fund maybe 1% of them. What's common in those is their identification of the problem, their solution, and then all of the other components in a fairly standardized pitch deck. And where does the business plan fall into that? Good question. Generally, what we think of as a business plan, which is what you do in your MBA program, very long detailed document, well-researched, you do SWOT analysis, you do competitive analysis, you do pro forma financial statements, really doesn't belong in a pitch deck. It's too lengthy. Plus, if you're a new business trying to enter the space, if you were to even do pro forma financial statements, at best, they're guesses, and your investors are going to look at them as the variation on your projections is very high. You could be way off, you know, 50%, 75% error in your projections. So the business plan as we think of it plays less of a role in your capital pitches than a business model. So business model, some think of things like the business model canvas. That's a good template to use. It's a one-page summary of the components of a business plan, but adjusted more to the startup environment, where it really focuses on one key element, which is the value proposition. How do you connect your product to your customer segmentation, and what is your customer segmentation? These business models do a great job of helping you to orient your thinking in that manner because that's how the investors are evaluating the startups. They're looking for this business model, right? So they can compare my investment option A with investment option B, which investment option C, but if I have them all in the same sort of business model, it's easier to compare as opposed to you coming in with a 75-page business plan, A, not going to read it. I'll read the executive summary, but that's not going to tell me everything I need to know. So that's where I say, you know, I'm careful with the terminology to differentiate between business plan and business model. And in the entrepreneurial startup world, we tend to work more in business models and less in business plans. Granted, when you get to the point where you hopefully need to raise a million or 10 million, you're going to have to do a business plan because they are going to require it. But initially, when you're going to your angel investors or your Aunt Mary to kind of show her what you're doing that the business model is more relevant.
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Exactly. And just for those who might be in your program looking for further types of funding, I know that there's seed funding, series A, series B. Could you please describe those different, the pathway of the sort of going through these?
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Yeah, so in any startup, and we'll deal strictly with that. So one of the things that is important to understand is a differentiation. So let's say I'm graduating from the business school here and Lee, I'm gonna have a great degree and I wanna go start my own business and I wanna open a shoe shop. That's great, and I may have a secret to doing that. That's not startup in the sense of what we're talking about. What we're talking about when we talk about startups is potential for extremely high growth. So your shoe shop could be a lifestyle business, provides a good income for you, very stable, very successful. But a startup is one that my and I'll think of it. I'll give you an actual example. There's one startup I'm advising right now. Their first year revenues are a half a million dollars. Their second year, they're projecting them to be a million. And the third year, they expect to be around three million. So you can see that extreme growth in revenues. That is the pure definition of a startup. So, okay, you lost me on the question now.
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When a startup, how focused should they be on seed funding, Series A, Series B? Should they really even be looking to that right now or should they really focus on their product and business model?
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So we're assuming that right now we're talking about very early stage. Yeah, so a student who's got an idea, I've validated it in my capstone or in a project I'm working on and I actually wanna go do something. So those are very early stage concepts. They're not really startups yet. So what they need to be thinking about is what's called the seed or the angel round, sometimes called friends and family. And what that refers to is it's kind of a non-structured approach. It comes from typically somebody, you know, already could be a wealthy relative, a wealthy individual and all it is. And they typically take the form of a loan. They're going to loan you, I'll make this up, $25,000 to start your business. That's going to enable you to get your business incorporated, to get a logo, to get a website up, and then to get some basic product development. So that stage is typically referred to as the angel or the seed round. It's to get you started, done with a loan that can eventually convert to equity, but may not. It may just be a loan that you pay back. And that's typically how that's structured. Now you're not issuing stock at that point because to do that requires regulatory compliance. There are ways and that would include involve lawyers. So unless you want to spend the money to have lawyers do that for you it's probably best to avoid that. The other series that you refer to, Series A Series B, those refer to issuance of stock equity, right? And this is when you're raising serious capital. You already have a product or you're about ready to go to market and you need to raise money to hire people, to rent a facility, and to increase your production of whatever it is that you're going to sell. And so at that point, you need some serious capital. And that comes from issuing equity in a company. And at that point, you're a C-Corp. You've changed your, you've organized that way and you're ready to issue stock. And lawyers are handling this for you and you're typically not, you know, you're not raising $20,000, you're raising, you know, either high six figures or maybe seven figures because this is the real deal of investing in equity capital. The Series B are just subsequent rounds. So Series A, you've entered the marketplace, this enables you to hire your key people to start selling product. Series B, you've sold product and now you want to scale the company. You want to go in the example I gave from 500,000 to 3 million. So I need to hire 20 people, I need to expand my production by X, and I need to do X amount of sales and marketing activities in order to accomplish that.
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Got you. I have a hard-hitting question for you, and then I have some more fun questions afterwards. You touched on this a little bit already. How do you measure success in a company?
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So, for a startup, I measure success in a couple of ways. Obviously, there's economic success. You can't get around that, right? You got to make money in order to succeed. You got to have growth in sales. That doesn't mean you make a profit. You think of very large companies today, especially that have the product of startup incubators that are still operating losses, but have raised hundreds of millions and their valuation is in the billions. So they're making revenue, they're making sales, or they have some unique intellectual property. That's one, so economic success. Two is the passion of the founders. There's a big difference between someone who comes along and says, oh, you know what, I have a degree in fine arts, but I have an idea for chemistry. Great, what connects these two? Oh, I don't know, I saw something and I just thought of this great idea. As opposed to somebody saying, you know, I've been studying chemistry and I've been watching how we handle, you know, pharmaceutical and I have a better way for doing that, that I think will merely make people's lives better. So there's a difference in passion there. There's one that's connected to the actual person, right? And that is a big measure of success for me because it indicates the higher potential for success on their part. And then three is just how unique of a problem are they solving. Are they really doing something that's going to change the world? I've had a number of startups, I have a young woman who has a startup who's in the mental health and wellness area. She's gonna make a difference in the world. She's gonna make a difference in people's lives and to me those are big deals, right? Yes, it doesn't always have to be a social social benefit It could be economic benefit, but it's going to change things So I think those to me there, you know, there are other measures how much capital do they raise? What's their timeline look like their product development cycle? But ultimately for me as the kind of the guide in that that's what I like to see and that's how I measure my own success too.
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Absolutely. One thing I've been advised on just by speaking to random people is that the earlier you can show profitability, that more people will be on board with you. It's really important.
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They touched on economic. I would alter that just a little bit. I'd say the earlier you can show revenue, not profitability because profitability implies you're operating an operating profit. And investors at times would say, yeah, well, I'd rather see you reinvesting all revenues into the company, right? So increasing your expenses. So I think that the economic model is as soon as you can get to revenue. Worry about profit, it's important, but worry about it later. Right now, get me some revenue. Show me that your product can actually sell.
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Exactly. but worry about it later. Right now, get me some revenue. Show me that your product can actually sell." So let's talk a little bit about your startups because I know you have a few I think currently you have to correct me if I'm wrong you have a Consulting firm and one that works on UV technology in hotel rooms. Well kind of so The first one is my firm that advises startups. So I deal with a number of different startups
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I've got one that's in the location we're in. So, these are companies I advise, much like we're having this conversation only in much more depth. We talk about capital raising, et cetera. One's a very unique product. They're working on a performance improvement, AI-powered interface that happens across for runners or cyclists. Really great idea, really great product. And the other one I do is a betting company that's working in the sports betting space, and they have a really, really unique idea on how to approach it, something that I think most of the major companies have missed. And that's a key point I always see in startups that I get involved in, and that is, are they solving a problem that nobody else sees, you know, or have been unable to solve? So those are two that I'm working on right now. I have another technology that will probably spin into a startup at some point in the wine industry as well.
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Awesome. Has AI played a role in your business?
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Not.
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And how has it affected your business decisions?
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Not yet, but it's going to. And what AI represents, and I think in many different ways, it is prime ground for applications. Applications mean startups. How do you use AI? I did a panel at the International Conference on Gambling and Risk-Taking a couple of weeks ago with AI experts. It's easy to, as researchers, to understand how AI works, but that's not its benefit. Its benefit is how is it applied. How are you using AI to solve specific problems? So the athletic performance startup I was talking about before is looking at using AI to help performance improvement, right? So it's really the application of AI rather than AI itself. That's prime territory for entrepreneurs. How can you use AI to solve a specific problem?
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And in that area, I've had firsthand experience using chatGPT and I think it's very fun. I don't think, I mean it's just as a tool to do research has been invaluable for us. I think it's just, it's just, it's kind of understated the power of chatGPT and I know there's a lot of controversy around it but I do feel like it's a very powerful tool for startups. So moving on to something a little bit more towards your artistic endeavors. I know that you like to do photography, cello, and guitar, which are awesome. How important is it to pursue these endeavors to complement your technical skills?
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They're important for every human to do these. Our brain consists of two halves and the halves have slightly different functions in our cognitive endeavors. So the use of music and arts to help balance the, you know, the concentration on more logical functions is important for everyone. I was at the conference I mentioned before, I met someone at the end of the conference who came up to me and introduced herself. She was a researcher, happened to be a very well-known researcher, so a PhD at a very prestigious university. And she told me she was also a concert pianist. So I think that's exhibit A as to the power of being able to keep both parts of your brain contributing to your cognitive load, the appreciation for music and the participation in art photography is an art as Well as concentrating on that side of our brain that's working on business plans and proformas that together They make us whole and and that's why I think I do it. It's certainly I find expression in it I find enjoyment in it and you know, it helps me balance things like stress and you know my own personal workload.
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Absolutely. I think just getting out of the house for me is a pretty big deal. It's so cool just to go on a hike, just to air out your mind. And it really helps me with my studies, with my work and everything. And I think it's amazing to focus on the artistic side, which is often overlooked, I think. So my last question for you is, what's an important piece of advice you can give to an aspiring student entrepreneur looking to start their own company?
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Great, and I get asked that question actually quite a bit, and I usually tell the entrepreneurs, what's the problem you're solving? Don't tell me about your idea, tell me about the problem. How big is it, how frequent does it occur, how urgent is it to solve, how scalable is the solution? Why hasn't anybody solved it before? And what do you know in great detail about this? When I hear pitches from startups, the first question I'll ask them when they're done is tell me more about the problem. I'm not even asking about their idea. I'm just asking the problem because it represents the depth to which their solution solves the actual problem. If you know the many fold layers of the problem, then your solution will solve them. If you don't know that, if you've only picked off one or two on the surface, then your solution is really quite vulnerable to failure. So the biggest piece of advice is you have a great idea, focus on how well you actually know the problem. One of the things I recommend to all my startups is follow Dr. Clayton Christensen. He passed away a few years ago, but his book, The Innovator's Dilemma, first published in 1997, is an outstanding book for entrepreneurs. I would look at that. Look at a book from Sam Altman. There are books that he's written and his YouTube videos, particularly. Sam Altman was the former head director at Y Combinator. He's also the CEO for OpenAI, which is the owner of Chet GPT. So, great things to hear. And Guy Kawasaki, board member at Apple, terrific guy, books very easy to read. Art of the Start is a great book, helps you get moving, right? In his very plain language way, helps you understand what it takes to get your idea off the ground.
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Yes. Well, I wish that we had 30 more minutes to talk about the rest of this, but thank you so much for coming on today and talking about all these important things when starting a company. So, thank you so much and I encourage everyone to go onto the UNLV website, check out Blackfire Innovation and the Incubator as well if you're interested to learn more about Dr. R. Thank you so much Dr. Rippey. My pleasure. Thank you all for listening to the Pivot Point. You can follow us at Pivot Thank you all for listening to the Pivot Point. You can follow us at Pivot Point UNLV on Twitter, all one word, and hope you enjoyed the show.