Artem Efremkin's age doesn't usually come up until the second or third meeting with potential clients and investors for his business.
"Most times they don't know," said Efremkin, a junior. "If they do ask, I'm truthful, of course."
Efremkin is the director of Future Energy Corporation, a company with a team of in-house physicists developing a series of devices that utilize light energy to affect the bonding properties of water. Efremkin says this can both increase the growth rate of cells as well as slow cell division. Practical applications of this technology may range from the acceleration of plant growth to potential cancer treatments, Efremkin said. The company's first consumer product, a tabletop device targeted at agribusiness, is expected to be on the market in about six months.
Efremkin is one of several students applying skills from a variety of Tufts-based entrepreneurial programs to the real business world. The budding entrepreneurs are forced to balance the course load of a full-time student with responsibilities related to their own start-ups or to businesses contracting their services.
One on-campus resource for students like Efremkin is Young Entrepreneurs at Tufts (YET), an organization comprised of both students with previous experience in business and those with none. YET holds weekly meetings and organizes a yearly conference featuring opportunities for networking with successful Tufts alumni in the business world who share insight on starting companies. This year's conference, held Oct. 14, featured a keynote address from Brian Shin (LA '97), the founder and CEO of Visible Measures Corporation, a measurement firm for web-based video publishing and advertising, according to the company's Web site.
A more exclusive organization is the growing campus chapter of the Kairos Society, a worldwide, invitation-only association comprised of "the top student entrepreneurs, people who have already generated high levels of sales," said Efremkin, who is the Tufts chapter's president.
Sophomore Louis Tamposi is working on starting a company through his ELS-101: Entrepreneurship and Business Planning class. Students in the class are tasked with developing a business model, and he, along with fellow sophomores Owen Rood, Maggie Kullman, and Casey McCurdy, are currently attempting to implement their idea for a business, tentatively called Recyclical, that can be hired to clean and recycle goods after parties.
"I've always been interested in entrepreneurship, and I come from a family of entrepreneurs," Tamposi said. "I've just never had the plan to follow the traditional work model."
Because Tamposi's potential business is an extension of a class assignment, he finds that balancing his entrepreneurial endeavors with schoolwork "is actually convenient," he said. "I have three hours a week of class time to devote to this idea and I make the most of my free time for research."
Tamposi is an active member of YET, a program he said "is great because it gets people who are like-minded together, in addition to getting people to network with."
Senior Dan Schoening found another source of support for his entrepreneurial aspirations: his family. "I grew up in an entrepreneurial family, and I was interested in it from a young age," he said.
Schoening, along with seniors Ari Kobren and Zach Bialecki, is one of the organizers of FindJoey, a web-based company (catchthejoey.com) that sends users free text messages with an up-to-date Joey schedule. Schoening said that he, Kobren and Bilecki personally financed the project, which launched this fall.
"We enjoy taking on a product and seeing if it can grow and seeing if we can fill a need," Schoening said. "If we make money off of it, then great, but if not, it's a big learning experience."
Schoening would not give specifics on FindJoey's finances, but he expects the company "to make a profit at some point through small advertisements," with the service remaining free of charge.
"The idea is to look at our pattern of growth and analyze that closely and then see what our next step should be, if we can move it to other campuses or whatever," Schoening said. He plans to minor in entrepreneurial leadership and is involved in the Kairos Society.
"I had some experience going in to my classes," said Schoening, who founded a small soccer camp in high school. "I think that the best way to learn about something like this is to get real experience in different ventures and not being taught about it in a class environment. That being said, it's a great program and I've learned a lot. Tufts creates a network and a community for you to kind of develop the confidence you need to do this, because starting a company from scratch can be overwhelming."
Senior David Mok, who served as market director for Oxford Entrepreneurs, Europe's largest university entrepreneurship society, while studying abroad at the University of Oxford last year, is, like Schoening and Tamposi, developing a service-based start-up.
"I'm working on an Internet company that hooks people up with social causes," he said. Mok added that his plans for launching the business are "very preliminary right now."
"We are doing early stage recruiting," he said. "You've got to develop an idea, you work, you meet with investors, and then, when you have a prototype, the ball gets rolling."
Mok sees entrepreneurship as "the root of social change."
"What helped me gravitate towards it was the ability to make a change and to make a difference," he said. "The risks are large, but the rewards and benefits are worth it."
All four entrepreneurs interviewed acknowledged that juggling the responsibilities of their companies and the demands of pursing an undergraduate degree can be tricky. Although these priorities often intertwine — all students interviewed indicated that they have taken classes or are pursuing a minor in entrepreneurial leadership through the Gordon Institute at the School of Engineering — business-savvy students still find the responsibilities of their two worlds difficult to juggle.
"You kind of have to lower your academic standards," Mok said. "Someone might say, ‘I can't get an A on everything.' Do I answer this e-mail or do I study for my econ test? It's tough."
Schoening finds that prioritizing is key.
"If you're excited about doing something, then you will make the time for it," he said. "Everyone has their passions that they need to balance, and for me, that's working on ventures like this. I just have to be focused."
An additional element to balance is interaction with clients and potential investors who may be reticent to conduct business with a partner who can't legally meet for cocktails.
"It can be a little difficult for people to take you seriously, but for the most part I think people like our enthusiasm," Schoening said.
Mok has found that "investors are good about it because they understand and they might have been there themselves and they can [potentially] benefit from your idea."
Efremkin said that, at a certain point, age becomes irrelevant.
"It's not a big factor, because I'm very well-prepared," he said. "It's all about professionalism. If you can demonstrate that you are knowledgeable and able to do the work, then companies will let you do the work."
