MapQuest co-founder urges area to embrace startups
Chris Heivly, a graduate of West Chester University, spoke to business leaders on Wednesday
WEST GOSHEN >> Chris Heivly visited his alma mater this week to encourage West Chester University and the region’s business leaders to make the area a hub for startup companies.
For over 30 years, Heivly has worked for some of the world’s most recognized brands, including MapQuest, which was sold to AOL for $1.2 billion; Rand McNally, the world’s largest map publisher; and Accenture, the world’s largest multinational management consulting company. He has also directed over $75 million in investment capital.
The 1982 WCU graduate, who majored in geography, said area leaders should adopt the theme of his 2015 book, “Build the Fort,” to make the area a welcoming place to entrepreneurs.
“I was born and raised in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania,” Heivly told the crowd at the WCU Alumni & Foundation Center on Carter Drive, which included new university President Christopher Fiorentino who will be inaugurated on Friday. “When you were 10 you’d wake up and have the whole day in front of you.”
Often, he and his neighborhood friends would build a fort. They weren’t always the greatest forts, and they weren’t ever the same. But the friends worked together and had a fort by the time they were done, Heivly said.
“You must share the dream without inhibition,” Heivly advised. “As adults, we layer all this crap on top of it.”
Heivly, who has been dubbed “The Startup Whisperer,” noted how unlikely it was that one of the nation’s early high-tech successes came out of Lancaster.
In 1995, that’s where Heivly was working, putting out maps for National Geographic and Trip Tix for auto clubs. Using computers at Millersville University, the company eventually put the routing online.
“It morphed into MapQuest ... and we revolutionized the way we use maps today,” Heivly said. “It was an innovative culture. It didn’t matter that we were in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. We were perfectly naive.”
Out of a typical college student population, a little less than 10 percent will start their own companies, Heivly said. To become known as a startup hub, seed money must be available to the entrepreneurs, even though 75 percent will fail in the first two years, he said.
“There has to be a community attitude,” he said. “It has to be all-inclusive. It has to be about network, not hierarchy, and it has to be a long-term view. It’s a 10-to-20 year effort. Every conversation you have should end with, ‘What can I do to help?’”
That is how he operated as the managing director of a North Carolina accelerator program that is credited with transforming the Raleigh-Durham business community.
Heivly said he and his partner recently decided to close The Startup Factory, which worked with more than 300 new companies.
“After seven years I had to look at it and say, ‘maybe my business is not needed anymore,’” Heivly said, adding that he still has 42 investments to manage.
He recently joined Techstars, a “global ecosystem” that helps entrepreneurs build businesses.
Techstars is in more than 25 cities worldwide and puts on more than 800 Startup Weekends and more than 40 Startup Weeks.
“Every company is a technology company today,” he said, adding that Techstars will have an accelerator in Philadelphia with Comcast as its sponsor.
Heivly is the 2016-17 Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the Edwin Cottrell Entrepreneurial Leadership Center in WCU’s College of Business and Public Management. He was scheduled to judge the university’s Idea Pitch event on Wednesday night.
The breakfast event was sponsored by the Greater West Chester Chamber of Commerce, the Chester County Commissioner’s Office, the Chester County Chamber of Business & Industry, the Chester County Economic Development Council, Score, Vista.Today, i2n and the WCU Foundation.