Note: This is part of an ongoing series of articles that mine the Be Epic Podcast for lessons and insights that students and practitioners can apply to their lives as business leaders. This article discusses Episode 122, where Dean Waller met with the cofounders of MORE Technologies.
There’s this myth that the best path to entrepreneurship is to forgo college and dive straight into the shark tank of the start-up world. Just come up with a great idea, find some deep-pocket investors, and go, go, go.
Right?
Perhaps. But Matt Waller, dean of the Sam M. Walton College of Business, sees a business degree as a much stronger foundation for the entrepreneurial journey. Waller makes has made this case in articles and in the book we co-wrote, and he has backed up his belief by promoting all sorts of innovative efforts at the University of Arkansas that support entrepreneurial education.
In fact, the number of coordinated efforts across the University of Arkansas in this area is a bit mind-boggling – it includes the new Department of Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Venture Innovation at the Walton College, the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the Brewer Family Entrepreneurship Hub, the McMillon Innovation Studio, and the Startup Village.
Those initiatives are rich with expertise, programs, and resources, but are the students who use them really any better off than entrepreneurs who skip college altogether?
There are examples of both, of course. But if you’re thinking about a path for your personal journey, you might want to consider which journeys are most like your own. In other words, do you relate to the journeys of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Richard Branson? Or are you more like the founders of MORE Technologies?
You’ve heard of Gates, Jobs, and Branson, of course, but maybe you’ve never heard of MORE Technologies. It’s the startup company that Sphero bought in March, but you’ve probably never heard of Sphero, either. Still, if you are interested in starting a company – and even if you’ve never considered starting a company but you like to do things that interest you – you probably are more like the founders of MORE Technologies than Gates, Jobs, or Branson.
Rex Hearn, Kaushik Ramini, Canon Reeves, and Peyton Smith co-founded MORE Technologies while they were college students at the University of Arkansas, and they shared the story of their company recently on an episode of Waller’s Be Epic Podcast.
None of them arrived at the U of A with their sights set on starting a business. Reeves is majoring in computer science. Hearn majored in biomedical engineering. And Ramini is majoring in mechanical engineering. Smith, meanwhile, majored in finance and management, and he figured he would pursue a career on Wall Street until he took a class on entrepreneurship.
So, what brought these multi-disciplined minds together? Robots.
Reeves had an interest in building robots and believed the educational robot kits on the market were lacking because learning stopped once the robot was assembled. Reeves was working on robots at the McMillon Innovation Studio, partly because he wanted to build one for his sister. He met Smith at McMillon. And after they took a class together on social entrepreneurship, they toyed with the idea of founding a nonprofit coding school.
In the meantime, however, Smith entered them in a startup competition in 2018 that was hosted by Startup Junkie and held at the Brewer Family Entrepreneurship Hub. Not only did their pitch for robot kits earn first place, but by the end of the weekend they were rolling in pre-sale orders.
Starting a business seemed like the next logical step. Reeves recruited Hearn, whom he had known since high school when they built robots together, and, later, Ramini, a freshman he met on the university's NASA Robotic Mining Competition team.
Reeves said he never thought about turning his engineering ideas into a business before working at the McMillon Studio. But he and his co-founders soon began learning and applying the business concepts taught at Arkansas to their idea for a company.
Several mentors and faculty members helped them along the way, but all four specifically credited Sarah Goforth, executive director of the Office of Entrepreneurship, as instrumental to their success. Goforth, they said, helped them learn how to balance school and work, while also helping them figure out things like whether to market their robot kits to schools or to consumers, how to manufacturer the parts for their kits, how to test them with kids, how to sell them, how to fulfill their orders, and how to pivot when things weren’t working out as planned.
One of the key decisions they made was to use 3D printing to manufacture their parts, which meant they could adjust their designs quickly when needed. And not only did they get feedback from traditional focus groups, but they also used their product in camps where they taught, which meant they got live feedback from students, their intended demographic .
“The biggest, most important thing for the product was getting it in the hands of the students,” said Hearn. “No matter how much we thought we’d figured out all the kinks, once we gave it to a kid, within five minutes they’d figure out something that was messed up. That experience of seeing the kids play around with that very early, early prototype, that alone was both really affirming, but we also had a ton of notes of exactly what we needed to improve to take this from something that’s cool and great to something that will sell great and really take us where we wanted to be.”
To better understand the market, the co-founders went to events like the National Science Teachers Association Conference in Philadelphia, where they talked not only to potential customers but also to more established vendors, who typically were willing to offer advice and support.
“It was as simple as you’d get tickets to a conference, walk around with a notepad, and find people that looked interesting to talk to,” said Reeves.
At one event, they were short on cash, so they began using Lime electric scooters to get from their hotel to the conference center. Showing up on scooters with their robots strapped on their backs not only saved them money but provided an unexpected marketing benefit because attendees took notice.
“I got in this cycle of trying to one up myself in terms of the crazy robot that I would build,” Reeves said. “And that was the point where it got too popular because we couldn’t make it into the conference hall. We were being swarmed by teachers and then the conference took notice and kicked us out.”
The four co-founders began building a stable, sustainable business with strong profit margins, but the pandemic took a bite out of the demand for their product. Then in July 2020, they met with the CEO of Sphero, a Colorado-based company that makes programmable robots and educational tools. They had met previously at a conference and expressed an interest in working together, but Reeves said they were never purposely seeking a buyer.
Sphero saw MORE Technologies as a logical acquisition. It had an innovative product and smart people running it, but it lacked some things Sphero could offer, like established sales and distribution channels. With the sale, the co-founders all took jobs with Sphero, but they still work out of the Startup Village on Dickson Street in Fayetteville. Also, the deal allows the engineers on the team to focus more on that passion and area of interest rather than deal with business and operations.
Would any of this have happened if the founders had not attended college? It seems likely that all four would have found success in some other way, but the entrepreneurial community of Arkansas, with its strong ties to the Walton College, brought them together and supported their entrepreneurial journey. And that should interest other entrepreneurs.
Every success story is different, but all require the fertile ground of knowledge, time, and support. That’s what the Walton College and the surrounding community provides.
“The entrepreneur community in Northwest Arkansas was just incredibly receptive of us,” Smith said when they announced the sale of MORE Technologies. “They treated us as if we were a serious company.… I don't think there’s a better place for someone to start a venture than Northwest Arkansas.”
