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2003 Interns
Please review current and previous internship projects and look at what past interns have to say about their experience:
Paul Keough, PhD, MBA
In TechStart, you act as an entrepreneurial consultant to companies formed with technology from the University of Michigan. The internship is funded by the Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) and the Zell Lurie Institute (ZLI). I will tell you what you can bring to the internship and what you can expect from the internship.
The challenges were setting achievable expectations in the letters of engagement to each client, juggling a couple start-up companies as clients at the same time, managing the founders and entrepreneurs through strong and frequent communications, considering government and other sources of financing the start-ups, and refining the entrepreneur’s vision into the skeletal outline of a business with a future product and or service revenue stream.
Important skills to bring are the soft skills of listening, communicating, teaching, and reinforcing, and the hard skills of quantitative and analytical thinking, determination and hard work. Some projects were full of surprises, showing the fast pace of entrepreneurial changes, such as when emergency projects arose. I remember one project where the Chief Science Officer, a postdoctoral student at the U, looked at some lab space. The hairs raised on the back of my neck when I realized that this young fellow was taking true risk by renting lab space and beginning the entrepreneurial venture. The thrill was real because this was a real person taking real chances to make ideas into real products that would create jobs. Other projects were straightforward, like market research. These projects reinforce some of the skills that UM MBA students will learn in their MAP projects, like performing interviews to understand the industry and market, identifying SWOT, 3Cs and 5Ps, for market analysis and segmentation. Also, it is important to manage your boss, peers, and environment so that their and your productivity is maximized.
Your internship will impact OTT and ZLI. I do not know how, but I know that it will. Mine helped OTT by presenting them with a new database that they purchased after discarding an obsolete one, and by presenting my fellow interns with SBIR grant writing training materials. The impact the OTT experience had on me was that one company considered me for a position. If you find the entrepreneurial environment exciting, have good listening and interviewing skills, you will find the TechStart internship very rewarding. I know I did as I sit now considering a couple of job offers.
Howard Lin, Corporate Environmental Management Program Class of 2005
My two main projects were the Environmental Technology Gateway and Micro Integrated Flow Cytomer. The first was a joint project between the Office and the College of Engineering to promote environmental technology expertise and technologies of faculty in the College to other schools within the University and to the outside world. The second project was a collaboration with another TechStart Intern (Praveen Suthrum) to help several College of Engineering faculty to assess the market potential of their invention. Through research, interviewing, and cold-calling, we were able to identify a $1 billion current market and a $50 million potential niche market leveraging the unique features of this technology. I also worked on several infrastructure projects for the Office, including analyzing the workflow in the Office, specifically financial tracking, and developing a start-up survey that will help the Office of Technology Transfer better serve the needs of its start-ups. Furthermore, I collaborated with the Office and the Washtenaw Development Council to create a survey response card to help identify potential licensees in Washtenaw County who may be interested in licensing and funding research.
I recommend this internship to all graduate students who are passionate about starting companies based on disruptive technologies. With leadership from Ken Nisbet (Executive Director of the Office) and guidance from Mark Maynard (Marketing Manager of the Office and the person in charge of this internship), this is a rare opportunity to interact at a deeper level with professors and to know the movers and shakers outside of the University in Ann Arbor.
Here is my remark summarizing this summer: Two thumbs up! I enjoyed a great Ann Arbor Summer including the Art Fair, met many people with resources and contacts, and made money to pay for rent. What more can one ask for?
Dilpreet Sethi, Master Student, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
The TechStart internship provided me with an opportunity to work with three companies this summer, each at a different stage in the commercialization process. The companies spanned multiple domains: Antigone, a policy framework for secure group communication, Polytorx, a steel fiber for concrete reinforcement start-up, and HMRC, an employee health risk assessment company.
The information security company, Antigone, was the earliest stage company out of the three. Together with an MBA student from the College of Business, our responsibilities were three fold. The first was to narrow down the potential market segments this technology could effectively compete in. The second was to identify key and differentiating product features amongst existing technologies within that segment to give a competitive advantage to the Antigone framework. Finally we worked on developing an accrual based revenue projection for the company to attract potential investors.
On the other hand the Health Management Research Center had twenty years of research devoted to developing algorithms and a health risk assessment procedure that can accurately assess the health risks of an employee population and prompt companies to put appropriate benefits programs in place to mitigate future health risks. Multiple attempts in the past to commercialize this technology had failed. Working with another MBA student from the College of Business, we were able to carefully identify and document HMRC's predictive modeling process and identify its key assets. Coupled with detailed market and customer research we were able to stimulate entrepreneurial interest in the company and put the company well on its way towards commercialization.
Finally, Polytorx was one of the late stage companies I had a chance to work on. With an experimentally proven superior technology, this product had already won business plan competitions and created excitement amongst investors. The job of my team was to perform thorough market analysis, gather key competitive intelligence, and provide raw material sourcing and logistical support that could help this company towards successfully launching operations.
TechStart presents a great opportunity to learn about all the challenges involved in starting a new venture. Backed by an exciting, motivated, and fun-loving team, I would highly recommend this internship to any person with an entrepreneurial bent.
Laura Sivertson-Whitridge, MBA Class of 2004
After spending four years working for Fortune 500 companies as a Management Consultant, I wanted to experience the opposite spectrum: working for a small start up company. The TechStart internship was a low risk way to determine if I was interested in becoming an entrepreneur after business school. What attracted me to the internship was the chance to see multiple companies at different stages in the development life cycle and the opportunity to work in teams with graduate students from diverse disciplines.
Over the summer I worked with two companies. One was a medical device company that had just received initial funding. This company already had a defined product and a business plan. The TechStart interns helped the management team by working on issues involved with establishing the new company such as identifying material suppliers, understanding the process for gaining FDA and reimbursement approval, and locating space.
The second company wanted to commercialize a University technology that predicts future health care risks for corporations. This company was at an earlier stage. The TechStart team helped the professor and potential management team understand the market, identify a business model, and estimate the financing needs.
I learned many new skills during my internship, but what I enjoyed most was meeting the different entrepreneurs, learning about their backgrounds, and the skills they used to start their businesses. If you are interested in becoming an entrepreneur in the Ann Arbor area, there is no better opportunity for building your network than the TechStart internship.
Praveen Suthrum, MBA Class of 2004
Coming from an extensive Information Technology background, I was keen to get exposed to diverse industries through TechStart and eager to observe how quickly I would adapt to unknown markets. My projects were in steel fiber reinforced concrete and micro integrated flow cytometry (never heard of these industries? Me neither, until the projects got started). After winning business plan competitions around the country, the founder of the steel fiber start-up approached us to help him migrate to the next level in establishing the business. With the other project, concerning a flow cytometer (imagine it as a microscope that detects the bad guys in a moving fluid sample using lasers), inventors from the College of Engineering were attempting to shrink the device from the size of a TV to that of a disk-man.
I worked with a Computer Science Masters' student from the engineering school on the steel fibers project. We started at the Michigan civil engineering lab where the fiber was invented, learning about steel fibers and how it strengthens concrete. My task was to define the US and international markets and help understand the customer. Instead of theoretical research, I approached the problem by conducting extensive interviews with competitors, consultants, academicians, and potential customers. By analyzing perspectives and information from these diverse sources, I was able to provide the founder with a solid understanding of the market backed by definite data. Michigan licensed the technology and the company was founded during the course of our internship.
On the other project, I worked with a dual degree MBA student focused on environmental engineering. Our task was to establish the market size of the industry and individual segments and identify a potential market that the inventors could direct their research on. The flow cytometry industry turned out to be fairly secretive; people didn't know about it or if they knew, they wouldn't share it. I decided to extensively cold call industry leaders and existing start-ups to understand where the market was headed. The strategy worked and we wrote the first-ever market report for the $750M industry. Today, it is gratifying to know that our work is the foundation for all future activities of this early stage start-up, even helping to determine their technology vision.
My biggest takeaway through the TechStart program was learning about various entrepreneurs and how they got started. It helped me overcome my own mental blocks in starting a business and gave me a jumpstart in mobilizing my business ideas. I also enjoyed the independence and entrepreneurial freedom that TechStart offered to interns in driving a project forward and experimenting with innovative approaches to solve business problems.
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