Beedie School of Business helps launch careers, new ventures
>> GRADUATES INVOLVED IN SETTING UP EXCITING START- UP BUSINESSES OF LOCAL, GLOBAL ACCLAIM
Ideas and entrepreneurship are at the heart of the student experience at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. In recent years, a number of successful new ventures have been launched by students and alumni — startups that have gone on to local acclaim or global acquisition. A case in point is recent Executive MBA graduate Howie Wu, who founded Layerboom as a student. His firm, which helps web hosting companies build and sell virtual private server clouds, was acquired last fall by Silicon Valley cloud computing company Joyent. More recently, there is Metrolyrics, founded by an SFU alumnus and student pairing. The web venture was bought last week by CBS Interactive Music Group in what has been described as one of the bigger Canadian new media deals in recent memory. Metrolyrics is the flagship property of MetroLeap Media, a start- up co- founded by SFU Bachelor of Business Administration student Milun Tesovic and SFU EMBA graduate Alan Juristovski. Both were also active participants in SFU Venture Connection, which provides support to student entrepreneurs at the university. With words to more than 700,000 songs, the Metrolyrics site generates over 25 million unique users a month across the globe, with nearly 12 million of those in the United States alone. The integration of Metrolyrics into CBS Interactive Music will help the latter double its online audience and create additional revenue sources. News of the Metrolyrics deal was music to the ears of SFU’S business school and the extended entrepreneurship community. “As we are with so many of our students and alumni who embrace and excel in entrepreneurship, we are extremely proud of what Milun and Alan have accomplished — both within the Beedie School of Business and beyond, by taking Metrolyrics to an extraordinary level of success,” said Daniel Shapiro, Dean of the Beedie School of Business. Other student and alumni successes include Chilwin Cheng, who completed his EMBA at SFU in 2008, and co- founded the online legal company Paradigm Shift Solutions, producer of Contracttailor. com, recognized by BC
Business Magazine as one of the province’s 20 Most Innovative Companies. Terry Beech, who finished his BBA at SFU in 2005, is the co- founder of online graphic design and outsourcing firm Hiretheworld. com, winner of the 2010 New Ventures BC Competition. There’s also the Management of Technology MBA alumni tandem of Ben Sparrow and Joshua Zoshi, whose Saltworks Technologies start- up is described by The Economist magazine as “ingenious.” According to Dean Shapiro, the key to success for careerists and startups alike is the ability to think critically and transform innovative ideas into entrepreneurial activity. “Our obligation,” he says, “is to create the next generation of business leaders who are thoughtful, broad thinking, knowledgeable and capable of discerning future trends — what is permanent and what is transitory.” “We take the view that ideas and theory matter,” he said. “We like our students to take a deep- rooted, critical approach to ideas. The critical eye that researchers bring to problems finds its way into the classroom so that our students bring that same innovative eye to their workplaces — asking the hard questions and seeing the emerging trends just a little bit better and faster.” The embrace of entrepreneurship by students, meanwhile, only grows stronger with each passing year — as evidenced by the recently held and sold- out Beedie School Dragons’ Den, hosted at SFU Surrey. Jim Treliving and Bruce Croxon, members of the CBC business television program Dragons’ Den, visited students on Sept. 29 as part of a special evening devoted to entrepreneurship and innovation. A highlight from the night included a mini- Dragon’s Den, with two student teams from business school pitching to the Dragons. The winning pitch went to EMBA student Kiana Mohseni, who impressed Treliving and Croxon with her social networking start- up Caregaroo. And so another student’s new venture is set to take on the world.