Taking Stock

Friendship To Grow On

Faculty support has helped entrepreneur Angelique Irvin, WG’00, come out on top.

When you walk into Coviant, Angelique Irvin’s two-yearold fiberoptics manufacturing startup in Horsham, PA, you may have to step over Maya. She’s Irvin’s black-andtan border collie/terrier mix, a fixture in Coviant’s low-key office environment.

The presence of Maya is just one of the ways that Irvin sets the tone for an office that is open, relaxed, and creative. “Coviant is a really dynamic environment,” she says. “We have few walls, and they are physical, not emotional. We are very team oriented and nonhierarchical – which came from Wharton.” Until recently, says Irvin, Coviant employees didn’t even have titles on their business cards.

Angelique Irvin, WG’00

All of this may help to explain why Coviant has survived while so many other high-tech startups have crashed and burned. “My business is run very differently from other startups, but it’s worked for us,” she explains. “We’re flourishing in a really tough environment, in a really bad market. That’s something I’m really proud of.”

A critical factor in this success, says Irvin, is something that began as soon as she entered Wharton. There she met down-to-earth, accessible faculty members like Leonard Lodish, professor of marketing, Ian Mac Millan, professor of management, and Stuart Diamond, professor of legal studies. From day one, they encouraged her in her entrepreneurial goals.

“My professors treated my like an equal,” she says. “I had some different ideas, and they listened. They gave me friendship as well as support and advice, and that friendship helped me grow.” Eventually, Wharton helped Coviant grow as well – Irvin’s initial seed capital was generated primarily through Wharton contacts.

Diamond and Lodish serve on Coviant’s Board of Advisors, and Irvin still relies on their friendship. “I call Len (Lodish) whenever I need to run things by him, and he always calls me back. He’s called me from Chile! Having him to turn to has been really inspirational for me.” The road to Irvin’s own business started years ago, when, as a 13-year-old growing up in rural Oregon with very few resources, she successfully started and operated her own sheep farm. With an eye toward manufacturing, she earned an undergraduate degree in Ceramics Engineering. After 15 years of working for others, including high-profile positions at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Microelectronics, she came to Wharton with a very specific goal.

“I chose Wharton because I knew I wanted to start my own business,” she remembers. “I had the passion, but I needed the skills and the creativity. I was far more impressed with Wharton’s intellectual intensity and entrepreneurial spirit than I was with Harvard, Stanford, or Chicago. And Wharton was not as tied to tradition as the others – I knew I could try new things there.“ The lessons Irvin learned at Wharton have been with her every day since Coviant opened its doors. “There has not been a decision I’ve made at Coviant that hasn’t been influenced by Wharton,” she says. “I use every analytical tool I learned. Looking around my office, I see all the books on my shelf that I used at Wharton. I’m still using them today.”

Another Wharton resource Irvin has found invaluable at Coviant is fellow Wharton graduates, three of whom she has brought in to work on special analytical and consulting projects. It is hard to remain impartial, she says, when faced with the achievement level of Wharton alumni. “Their creativity and their ability to analyze have all been exceptional,” she reports. “And they have a lot more insight into what drives a business.” If there is a single trait that identifies Wharton alumni, says Irvin, it is their capacity for leadership. As a former Wharton admissions liaison, Irvin has participated in the interview process and believes it is a critical first step in the education of Wharton leaders: “Wharton looks very carefully at each applicant’s references as well as their abilities, and as a result, the accepted students are a very value-driven group.”

While Irvin herself is extremely proud of her Wharton degree, she is careful not to let it define her. “I try to show that I’m a Wharton grad based on my actions, my skills, and my responsibility. I don’t rely on my degree… I feel I still need to prove myself.”

And she does that every day, as Coviant continues to grow. Recently, the company signed a partnership agreement with Shipley Company LLC, a Rohm and Haas company, which is sure to keep Coviant’s staff of twenty on their toes. When asked about this and other successes at Coviant, Irvin is drawn back to her Wharton roots and the nurturing she was given.

“They believed in me. Sometimes that’s all a person needs to be successful…someone to give them the skills they need and to believe in them. That’s what Wharton did for me.”

The Strength of Community

At Wharton, Cesar Conde, WG’99, learned how to use his skills for the greater good.

Cesar Conde, WG’99

Reading Cesar Conde’s resume, you might think his life was pretty exciting already. Graduate of Wharton and Harvard…vice president of business development for Univision, the nation’s leading Spanish language media and entertainment company…co-founder of the Futuro Program, which provides community outreach to Hispanic high school kids in New York City. This fall, it got even better.

In September, Conde began a year-long leave of absence from Univision to serve as a White House Fellow, one of a handful of individuals picked by President Bush’s office to work and learn alongside a Cabinet secretary. After a ninemonth application process, Conde was chosen from more than a 1,000 hopefuls and assigned to the office of Secretary of State Colin Powell, once a White House Fellow himself.

During the fellowship, Conde hopes to help write policy, take on special projects, be involved in negotiations, and use his business skills to help solve problems. “I’m extremely flattered to be chosen,” says Conde. “I’m looking forward to developing a better feel for how our government works and bringing that knowledge back to my community.”

It’s no surprise that Conde, who is half Cuban and half Peruvian, names his community as the first beneficiary of this tremendous opportunity. Since earning an MBA, he has used his business skills to improve the lives of Hispanic Americans. It’s a path that has been highly successful, and one he says he owes largely to his experiences at Wharton. Raised in Miami, Conde studied history at Harvard. He decided an MBA would expand his options and chose Wharton for the depth and breadth of its curriculum.

“A lot of schools were well known for one area of business. Wharton seemed to have it all,” he explains.

While Conde had high hopes for his Wharton education, he pictured his classmates as stereotypical business students: bright but self-absorbed. What he found instead, he says, “really blew me away. Everyone was so open to other people and their ideas. They were completely down to earth and willing to help. To this day, that’s one of the things I value most about my association with Wharton – the people.”

Realizing that activities on campus were almost completely student driven, Conde jumped in. He soon found himself president of the WGA and organizing the Wharton World Tour, a series of week-long events featuring global cultures. “People were so proud to see their cultures represented. To me, it really spoke to what Wharton is all about: community,” Conde remembers.

It was a community that helped Conde build a strong foundation in business while expanding his vision of himself. “Wharton gave me the ability to test a lot of skills in a protected environment without negative repercussions, including negotiating, public speaking, strategic thinking, and networking,” he says. “I learned how to motivate people. Most importantly, I developed a bigger sense of responsibility for a cause other than myself – I learned how to leverage the skills I was building for the good of my community.” After graduating from Wharton, Cesar put those lessons to work at StarMedia Network, the first online provider of business and community solutions for Spanish and Portuguese speakers worldwide. Within 15 months, he was promoted from manager to director to vice president for business development. In February of this year, he made the move to Univision.

Meanwhile, last year, he saw a need among New York Hispanic high school students for positive role models and career skills, and the Futuro Program was born. On his own time, Conde, his two brothers and other volunteers recruit speakers and organize workshops that give Hispanic kids a clearer sense of their career options – and the tools to help them get there.

Like most Wharton alumni, Conde is still closely connected with Wharton friends, both via the Internet and in person. They help him in the business world and also make up a large part of his social circle. “The relationships I built at Wharton are intricately woven into my life,” he explains. “All Wharton graduates have a bond. In order for the Wharton experience to grow over time, graduates need to keep helping each other and strengthening the bond.”

Conde returns to Wharton whenever he can, and he was recently asked to be the Young Alumni Speaker at Class Day: “I learned lessons from older alumni about their successes and mistakes, and now it’s my turn to help the current students do the same,” he explains. Perhaps the next time he is asked to speak, he can pass on some of the insights he will certainly gain in Washington this year. He looks forward to carrying on a tradition of Wharton White House Fellows upheld by Dean Patrick Harker, who participated in the program in 1991-92.

“Wherever I go, in any field or industry,” Conde says, “I am reminded that Wharton people are leaders.”

Bringing the Internet East

For Takeshi Natsuno, Wharton unlocked the secrets of technology.

Takeshi Natsuno, WG’95

The year was 1994, the place was Wharton, and the class was “How the Internet Affects Real Business.” For Takeshi Natsuno, who had come from Japan to learn how to be a global business leader, it was a major turning point. “Most classes about the Internet in other schools were technology oriented. Wharton’s emphasized the value of the Internet in relation to real business activities,” explains Natsuno, who today runs i-mode, the world’s largest wireless Internet service, for Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, Inc. “If I did not attend Wharton, the wireless industry [in Japan] would have been at least three years behind!”

A native of Yokohama, Japan, Natsuno was raised in Tokyo, where he knew he had a future in business even as a student. “I have been always interested in ‘platform’ types of businesses, like finance, telecommunications, and real estate development, because I believe they provide platforms to other business activities and can make a bigger influence on the evolution of the society,” he says.

After graduating from Waseda University, he joined a leading company in the Japanese energy industry and also worked in real estate development. The decision to attend Wharton was a critical one for Natsuno, who knew he needed to build new skills in order to take the next step in his career.

What he expected to find at Wharton – “pressure, stress, and a hard life” – turned out to be less of a problem than the everyday cultural challenges. “It was not hard for me to follow the classes and lectures,” he recalls, “but it was hard to follow the trivial chats with my classmates, such as gossip, sports, and stock prices.”

In addition to the importance of the Internet and how to integrate it into business, Natsuno gained another key tool at Wharton: Complexity Theory. “I found that this theory can be applied to various areas such as economics, trading, and management,” he explains. “Since then, I have applied it to all the business I am implementing.” ‘

While at Wharton, Natsuno says, he became “tougher in all senses while upgrading my talent and skills.” Returning to Japan, he hit the ground running, working in the Internet industry for two years before joining NTT DoCoMo.

There, he built the fledgling i-mode to 34 million subscribers in only three and a half years. The project was not without its challenges – notably, says Natsuno, the conservative nature of the existing wireless industry – but his natural perseverance and newly acquired knowledge served him well.

Along the way, i-mode was cited as one of the “Hottest of the Hot” in a 1999 Business Week article, which stated, “…NTT DoCoMo, the wireless subsidiary of Japanese telecom giant Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., is so successful that its market capitalization now exceeds that of its century-old parent. One reason for the stock surge is DoCoMo’s popular i-Mode wireless Net service, which lets cellular users grab information from Web sites.” Two years later, Natsuno was selected by the same magazine as one of the 25 most influential e-business leaders worldwide.

Natsuno, who is married and enjoys gourmet food and wine as well as traveling, is also a two-time author. He has documented the meteoric rise of i-mode and the challenges he faced in two books: i-mode Strategy, published in 2000, and a la i-mode, published in 2002. In a 2000 review, the industry journal Mobile Media Japan said of Natsuno’s first book, “Packed with lots of analytical data about i-mode, it is a very persuasive book…[it] not only looks at the complexities involved in converting a telecom system into a mobile telephone accessed internet connection service – it also provides invaluable insight into some of the management concepts utilized in the process.”

Looking back over his success, Natsuno thinks again of lessons learned at Wharton: “To design the service specification of i-mode, I viewed every piece of technology as a tool to create value, not as the sacred work of engineers. Even the most advanced technology is meaningless if it cannot create real value to end. This is what I learned at Wharton.”

A Gift For the Next Generation

Ashish, W’92, and Sapna, W’93, Shah pay homage to Wharton’s people and programs.

Sapna Shah, W’93, and Ashish Shah, W’92

Less than ten years after they graduated from Wharton, Ashish and Sapna Shah made a decision: they were ready to give back to their alma mater. The result was something new and big – the Shah Lecture Series of the Joseph Wharton Scholars Program, which presented its inaugural event in May of 2001. The series is funded by a $100,000 donation from the Shahs.

The couple, who met at Wharton, began dating after graduation. They were married and both working on Wall Street when the inspiration for their gift struck. At a retirement dinner for Bill Whitley, former director of the Joseph Wharton Scholars Program, Ashish realized that the professor, and the concepts he had taught, had been a driving force in his life.

“When I arrived at Wharton, I wanted to be a Joseph Wharton Scholar because it provided an opportunity to take some really interesting courses,” says Ashish, who grew up in York, PA. (The JWS Program is a special undergraduate curriculum that emphasizes the importance of scholarly research and the liberal arts and sciences within the framework of a business education.)

“Bill Whitley was kind enough to give me a chance as a JWS. I started taking economics with him, and it was really tough. We were all struggling through the advanced materials – but we were all struggling together and helping each other learn. Throughout my years at Wharton and in that program, Whitley always kept me grounded.”

Although Sapna’s experiences at Wharton were different, her feelings of gratitude were the same. “I learned so much about working in teams through group projects at Wharton, which was a huge help once I joined the work world. Even roles I played in clubs like the Wharton Management Club taught me leadership, communication, presentation, and networking skills,” she recalls.

Both Ashish and Sapna credit Wharton with their choice of careers. “I was drawn to trading because of everything I learned at Wharton,” says Ashish, who began working in arbitrage at Banker’s Trust after graduation and is now a trader for a hedge fund. “I got such a great macroeconomic grounding that I now have a deeper understanding than people from other schools.

Working with Jeremy Siegel, Russell E. Palmer Professor of Finance, on research papers was another Wharton experience that deeply affected Ashish and influenced his career path. “It was like getting five years of Wall Street experience in a single shot,” he says. “He has the ability to take something very theoretical and show you how to use it right away, how it is relevant in your life.” It was especially fitting, he adds, that Siegel was a speaker at the first Shah Lecture Series event.

“When I first came to Wharton, I had little knowledge of finance, financial markets, and international business,” says Sapna. “By the time I left, I knew I wanted to work on Wall Street.” After several years there, she discovered the retail field. Now working for Ann Taylor, Sapna’s Wharton education is just as relevant: “The case studies we covered in marketing and management classes at Wharton have stuck with me and influenced the decisions I’ve had to make.”

At Wharton, the Shahs built the business skills they needed to succeed, but they were also given a fundamental lesson in values. “Throughout my courses, the message was, “Don’t worry about the dollar. Worry about being happy and doing what interests you. The dollar will take care of itself.’” It is a message that has guided the Shahs, who recently added a baby boy named Deven to their family.

“Since graduation, I have always wanted to give back to Wharton in a meaningful way,” says Sapna. “It’s nice to be able to help an institution that has made my career – and even my marriage – possible! Ashish and I benefited so much from the classes, professors, other students, and clubs, as well as outside speakers and lectures. We hope that JWS students will look back on our lecture series and say, ‘I remember going to that lecture – I learned a lot from it, and it made a difference in my career.’

Adds Ashish, “I have always been taught that education is the best way to give back. It helps others succeed so that they, in turn, can do their part. We are thrilled to be able to contribute to that process.”