To help grow Formally into a full-fledged venture, in 2018 Vavrovsky applied to the center’s Breakthrough Lab, an intensive summer accelerator program that supports students developing high-impact ventures. During B-Lab, as the program is known, she and her collaborators received a stipend of $4,000 each, worked alongside other founders and were mentored by successful alumni entrepreneurs. In March 2019, the Formally team won first place and $25,000 in the center’s Brown Venture Prize, a pitch competition designed to take advanced ventures to the next level and funded by two Brown alumni who are co-founders of Casper mattress company, Neil Parikh and Luke Sherwin, Class of 2011 and 2012, respectively. 

What's your problem?

Before applying to B-Lab, Vavrosky had taken Warshay’s course, “The Entrepreneurial Process.” Rejecting terms like “entrepreneurial mindset” or “entrepreneurial spirit,” Warshay emphasized that entrepreneurship at Brown has all the rigor of any other academic discipline. “It is a structured process you can teach, learn, master and apply,” he said. 

That process consists of three steps: identify an unmet need, devise a solution and develop a scalable, sustainable model. Step one requires inquiry and observation — what Warshay referred to as “bottom-up research.” Class of 1985 alumnus Brian Demers, who helps transform research into successful ventures as the director of business development in the Office of Industry Engagement and Commercial Venturing, agreed. “As Danny says, ‘An entrepreneur is first and foremost an anthropologist,’" he said. "You want to go in and … understand what people are doing on a daily basis, how they’re addressing a problem — as opposed to going in with an answer and then asking them what they think about it.” 

Class of 2019 alumna Saron Mechale always knew she wanted to have an impact in her native Ethiopia, a country “often perceived by the West as a place of poverty or lack of development.” She wanted to change the narrative, but she didn’t know how. In 2015, after her sophomore year, the social analysis and research concentrator took time off to spend two years back home, where she began learning about her country’s agricultural industry — specifically, about the growing demand for the Ethiopian staple and global superfood, teff, that Ethiopian farmers have been cultivating for thousands of years.

When she returned to Brown and enrolled in Warshay’s course, Mechale realized she had already done the bottom-up research he prescribes. That research — the two years she spent getting to know the Ethiopian agricultural scene — yielded the idea for goTeff, a company that would market teff-based food products online then reinvest the profits with the farmers who supply it. Mechale’s venture would thus accomplish two goals: empowering Ethiopian farmers by connecting them to international markets and telling the world “an authentic and contemporary story” about Ethiopia. 

The idea quickly gained traction. Mechale received two venture-support grants from the Nelson Center; enrolled in Lean Launchpad, Brown’s Wintersession course on building start-ups; participated in the 2018 B-Lab; and, in March 2019, won second place and $15,000 in the Brown Venture Prize competition.

That same year, goTeff was a finalist for the Hult Prize, an international competition for student entrepreneurs. After more than 10 months of product development and testing, the firm officially launched online in September 2019, and a few weeks later was named one of the top three prizewinning start-ups in the Rhode Island program of MassChallenge, a global network of start-up accelerators. Another of the top three companies, Intus Care, is also Brown-connected, founded by four current undergraduates and aiming to provide improved home health care at lower cost.

“The research leads you to the problem … and then you try to find the solution,” Mechale said. “This methodology helped me to pursue my interest in entrepreneurship at a deeper level than before.”

It’s the same approach that led Jack Roswell and fellow engineering students Julian Vallyeason and Alex Zhuk to the idea for their venture, Cloud Agronomics. As first-years, they were doing independent research in plant physiology and remote sensing with John Mustard, professor of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences, and James Kellner, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. They were also designing and constructing a solar-powered drone they hoped would break the world record for the longest sustained flight of any unmanned aerial vehicle. After six months of work, the drone finally took flight — only to crash eight seconds later.

Roswell said the crash placed the friends at a “serendipitous intersection” of backgrounds, passions, timing in the industry, and a breakthrough in their research. Working with their professors, they observed that it was possible to extract valuable insights about a plant’s physiological processes from data collected via remote sensing, but those insights never left the lab. “So we decided to transition,” he said, “from designing a cool engineering project to creating a company and having a bigger impact.” 

To maximize that impact, Roswell and Zhuk — who come from farming families in Michigan and Ukraine, respectively — spent weeks on the ground traveling to research laboratories and farms across the United States to determine the biggest problems the agriculture industry faces, such as crop disease. Remote imaging provided a window inside each plant, while powerful analytics enabled them to identify disease weeks before any symptoms were available to the naked eye. For growers, that could mean minimum waste and maximum profits.

Today, Roswell, Zhuk, and David Schurman work full-time on the venture, which received support funding from the Nelson Center and took second place in the Brown Venture Prize competition in 2018. Since then, Cloud Agronomics has garnered not only millions of dollars in capital but recognition as well, including in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

In addition to working on carbon/sustainability initiatives with Microsoft AI for Earth, the company was named a breakthrough innovator for using agriculture to reverse the effects of climate change by Indigo Ag, itself a leading agtech company. In fact, Class of 1995 alumnus Mark Tracy ’95 left his position as vice president of Indigo Ag to become the Cloud Agronomics chief executive officer. Kellner and computer science professor Donald Stanford serve as advisers.

Other students are devising ways to use technology to improve human health.

When he walked into the required biomedical engineering capstone class, Gian Christian Ignacio, a Class of 2018 alumnus who will graduate from the Warren Alpert Medical School in 2022, wasn’t thinking about medical devices or start-ups. But he had long planned to integrate entrepreneurship and medicine in his career. “I want to help patients on a day-to-day basis, but at the same time I want to do something that will have a far-reaching impact,” he said.

So when cardiothoracic surgeon Neel Sodha, an assistant professor of surgery at Warren Alpert Medical School, presented the class with a real-life problem to solve, Ignacio took notice. Sodha explained that, after a patient undergoes cardiac bypass surgery, there’s a risk of debris from the aorta, such as plaque, entering a patient’s bloodstream and causing embolic stroke. 

Along with three other biomedical engineering students and Emily Holtzman, a Rhode Island School of Design student earning her BFA in textiles, Ignacio was inspired by the problem-based approach. They shadowed Sodha, even observing a heart surgery, and pooled their research, expertise and ideas. The result: a medical-grade mesh that more effectively filters embolic debris.

EmboNet, as the group’s capstone project is called, took first place in the Advanced Health Systems category of the 2018 Johns Hopkins Healthcare Design Competition. The team went on to place third in the 2019 Brown Venture Prize competition, and the $10,000 prize enabled them to continue working on EmboNet in that summer’s B-Lab. 

Ignacio believes being a student adds value to the problem-solving step. “We had the chance to hear about big problems that surgeons look at every day,” he said. “They’ve got years of experience and wisdom. We’re new. So instead of being stressed thinking about the problem, we brought fresh pairs of eyes to look at it in a different way.” 

Problem solving with purpose

Like its culture and curriculum, Brown’s brand of entrepreneurship transcends engineering, its historical home, and is decidedly interdisciplinary.

The center works with many partners across campus, such as the Carney Institute for Brain Science and the Institute at Brown for Environmental Sciences. Its course recommendations draw on a range of programs, including sociology, computer science, public policy, music and the visual arts. Warshay embraces the “accidental collisions” that come from such mixing. During B-Lab, he said, “we don’t have the social entrepreneur sit on the third floor and the capitalist on the second floor. Cross-pollinating leads to more effective solutions.”

Demers said that rooting entrepreneurship in a research university with a strong liberal arts foundation in its undergraduate curriculum makes it different from what MIT or Stanford offers. “All the cool stuff happens at the intersections,” he said. 

Textile designer Holtzman echoed the sentiment. “I always thought that entrepreneurship was about people just trying to make money,” she said. “But the amazing thing about Brown is that, because there’s no business school, everyone’s coming to entrepreneurship from their own concentration [and] personal interests, so they have a huge passion for whatever their business is. They actually care about their project.”

That’s important to students who are impatient to solve the problems they uncover through research. “There are so many important debates about the future, but little to no representation of people our age who have the maturity and the hunger to make a difference,” said Roswell. “Also, it’s a unique time in your life where you can move quickly, be agile.”

Vavrovsky, who sees Formally not just as a business but also as a policy fix, agreed. “I study international relations, and what we get really good at is identifying policy problems," she said. "To find solutions, we need the smartest, most creative, most interdisciplinary, most diverse group of people working on these issues. And entrepreneurship is one of the ways to do that.”