Robbie Felton and his co-founders were living together in an apartment in Michigan, doing research for their health tech startup Intus Care, when the novel coronavirus began to take hold of the nation.
Felton, Intus Care’s CEO and a junior studying public health at Brown University, found himself in an unprecedented situation. He was leading his nascent startup through a global pandemic, managing a team that was split between being very remote and very, very close. Intus Care’s developers were all Brown students, forced to move off campus by March 22, which scattered them around New England and beyond. The following day, Michigan’s governor issued a stay-at-home order, effectively forcing Intus Care’s entire leadership team into a quasi-quarantine together.
“Prior to quarantine, we had already spent almost every waking hour together,” Felton told Rhode Island Inno. “So, it’s not too different, but it’s definitely interesting not seeing anyone other than the people you’re working with. Having no interaction other than business interactions.”
Indeed, Intus Care had business to conduct. The team was gearing up to pitch at the Brown Venture Prize competition, the Nelson Center for Entrepeneurship’s biggest event of the year. Normally, the competition consists of a live pitch to a panel of judges, followed by questions that student founders answer on the spot.
This year was different. With campus closed and large gatherings banned in Rhode Island, the Brown Venture Prize competition was entirely virtual. Student founders filmed their pitches in advance—including their answers to the judges’ questions, which were posed to them beforehand—and the competition committee met via Zoom to determine the winners.
Intus Care’s co-founders filmed their pitch in a single take.
“We had one rehearsal, un-filmed, one full run-through of the entire set list, and then we had our filmed pitch. No redos,” Felton said. “We had no interaction with the judges. We didn’t get to see them face to face at all. We still got dressed up for the event, because they were going to put it out to the community.”
Evidently, those tactics worked: Intus Care took top honors and the $25,000 cash prize. Still, key parts of the competition were not the same. Persuasive speech involves looking your audience in the eye, moving closer to make a point, adjusting your performance in real time based on audience feedback. None of that is possible in a virtual world.
When Rhode Island Inno spoke to Felton, the Intus Care team was packing up to head back to Providence, where they will still conduct operations remotely but, if nothing else, be closer to home. This may be the new normal for a while. Brown is one of a number of New England universities making contingency plans for the fall semester—one that might not involve students on campus at all.
If that happens, universities and the students they serve will have to be particularly innovative, especially the young adults who are just beginning to get their careers off the ground.
Student entrepreneurs pivot as funding slows
More than 2,000 miles away from Rhode Island, in his home state of Arizona, Chuck Isgar is working doubletime. A junior at Brown majoring in business economics, Isgar is also the co-founder of Intern From Home, a job board for remote internships at startups that just launched last month.
By mid-April, Intern From Home had well over 100 roles posted on its site, with more than 1,000 people subscribed to the newsletter it uses to inform students about new openings. Isgar is leading that at the same time that he takes a full semester of classes remotely, and with a three-hour gap between the Pacific and Eastern time zones.
“I have a class that does its Q&A portion at 6 a.m. Pacific,” Isgar said. “They do record, and my professors have been good about that, but it’s not the same as getting to ask your questions and your follow-up questions live.”
Isgar said he has managed to stay on top of his schoolwork, and he’s been clear with his Intern From Home colleagues that they’re expected to be students first. That doesn’t mean juggling isn’t a challenge. Isgar is also president of the Brown University Entrepreneurship Program, which has gone remote along with the rest of the university: Instead of collaborating in the program’s building on Dyer Street, founders are spread, at least for the moment, around the world.
“I can’t say that I think the whole coronavirus situation has really slowed down the student founders."
Isgar and his team members have been working to ensure that student founders are still able to build connections—with each other, with professors and, crucially, with potential investors.
Student founders are launching ventures at a time when the venture capital scene has already been described as slowed, more conservative or utterly frozen. Rhode Island-based venture capitalists, angel investors and startup advisors have warned that capital is likely to dry up in the near term as fund managers tighten their purse strings.
“Investors need to double down on their existing funds in their portfolio,” Daniel Rossignol, a Rhode Island-based startup advisor, told Rhode Island Inno last month. “There is a good chance that 30 to 40 percent of their portfolios won’t be around in the next 18 months. Investors have to take a really clear and high-conviction look at the investments they’ve made and determine which ones they can bridge.”
Even if the funding gap is only temporary, it might not be one that many startups—which are, by definition, high-risk ventures with little operating cash flow—can sustain.
More than 60 students are in Brown’s Entrepreneurship Program, and they’re still firing on all cylinders, Isgar said. But they’ve begun to pivot away from trying to make deals and doubling down instead on product development.
“I can’t say that I think the whole coronavirus situation has really slowed down the student founders,” Isgar said. “If you’re trying to make a sale, that’s really hard. But a lot of the student entrepreneurs I’ve worked with are more so thinking through beta launches, or ‘freemium’ model businesses where they can encourage people to download their app or software.”
Extra time leads to critical innovation
A silver lining to all this: Since students no longer have commutes to make or in-person social commitments to keep, many have actually found themselves with more time on their hands.
That extra time is, in fact, what some startups are banking on. It’s the reason for the founding of Intern From Home, which Isgar was inspired to launch after talking to students who didn’t know how they would spend their extra hours at home. It’s also been a boon for Pangea.app, a startup that was founded at Brown and is now based out of the Cambridge Innovation Center in Providence.
Since mid-March, Pangea’s platform, which connects companies with college students for freelance work, has expanded from 150 campuses to 300 campuses. There has also been a major influx of new companies signing up and an increase in transaction volume, with “thousands of dollars” flowing through Pangea each week, according to co-founder and CEO Adam Alpert. Pangea just disclosed that it has raised $400,000 in pre-seed funding.
“How companies engage is changing rapidly,” Alpert said. “How companies engage with students needs to change, too. It needs to be affordable for them, it needs to be time-effective for them and it needs to produce real results.”
Elsewhere in Rhode Island, students and university employees are spending their extra time—and the resources freed up by empty campuses—to innovate in a different way, by manufacturing personal protective equipment for health care workers who are experiencing shortages.
Since late March, the Rapid Responders, a group that includes students and scholars from the University of Rhode Island, Brown, FabNewport and the Rhode Island School of Design, have created hundreds of components for masks and face shields.
Meanwhile, as the Providence Journal reported last week, engineering students from the Brown Formula Racing team designed a ventilator made from common parts, except for key valves that can be printed on a 3D printer. And the University of Rhode Island’s Memorial Union has been converted into a “wartime factory” to collect, sanitize, sort and refurbish used sleep apnea machines and send them to hospitals.
“Unfortunately, hospitals just aren’t able to get ahold of the equipment that they need,” Rapid Responder member and scholarly technology lab manager at URI Libraries Erika Uzmann told Rhode Island Inno. “It’s forcing makerspaces and hobbyists to get involved and do what they can.”
Long-term, the future isn’t clear. On Monday, Gov. Gina Raimondo announced that Rhode Island’s stay-at-home order would stay in effect until at least May 8, but it could be much longer before the state is fully open based on several key metrics focused on hospital capacity and whether organizations, both public and private, have supports in place to continue social distancing and close again if necessary.
As for universities, the prospect of keeping classes online through the fall semester is only a contingency plan, at least for the moment.
In the coming months, student entrepreneurs will need to make contingency plans as well.
“It’ll mean reevaluating your plans,” Isgar said. “Thinking through the future viability of things. Thinking through how your college or career experience might look in terms of entrepreneurship.”
“But,” he said, “it’s so hard to speculate.”
Correction: This article originally stated that Intus Care filmed the Brown Venture Prize competition pitch at the co-founders' apartment in Michigan. The team actually filmed it at the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship shortly before the university ordered students to leave campus. We regret the error.
