For aspiring entrepreneurs, the tips that Andrew McKelvey, ex-CEO of Monster.com, offered last evening covered everything from the sacrifices an innovator must make to succeed to how to make success a reality.
About 80 students attend McKelvey's lecture yesterday evening in Houston Hall.
McKelvey was the keynote speaker for the Weiss Tech House's Innovation Week, an initiative aimed at supporting student entrepreneurs and inventors.
There were few such students in the crowd - when he asked the students listening to him how many ran or owned a business, only three raised their hands.
But when he asked how many wanted to run their own someday, more than half the hands in the room shot up.
The event also highlighted Pennvention, an inventors' competition that helps students turn their ideas into commercial realities.
McKelvey's advice was direct and unequivocal. He said that "either you're an entrepreneur or you aren't" and "always own 51 percent of any company you start."
He also said that, for the majority of his experience, he had to rely on himself: "The person that's gonna help you the most is yourself."
On job security, he was just as direct, saying that you "can't be risk averse," and if you are, "forget it - keep working for a company you don't like and a job you don't like."
McKelvey spoke at length about his own entrepreneurial experience, from his first job running an "egg route" at the age of 14, to his latest project, Health Diagnostics, a diagnostics-imaging business.
Wharton sophomore Simon Li said he "found him really insightful about having to go out and having to learn about it yourself."
Karthik Raghupathy, an MBA student who just incorporated a nonprofit to funnel money to social projects in India, said that "a lot of it really resonated. ... We have to change our mindset on what I've heard today. ... We have to aim for the sky to reach the ceiling."
"Listening to him it seems like you don't need a background in anything to start. ... It could be in golf or something."
