Saket Vora

On Wednesday Ricky and I finally caught up with Brian and Chris over dinner on University Avenue. Ricky has been involved with BASES forever, and as he enters his senior year at Stanford he’s a Co-President of BASES with big plans for the year. I met Brian – a rising senior at California Polytechnic in San Luis  Obispo – at the ThinkGreen conference back in April, and I was intrigued because he too was involved with organizing entrepreneurship competitions on campus  and had done work in the social entrepreneurship space, even with water purification. Chris just graduated from Cal Poly and is passing the torch over to Brian with keeping the entrepreneurship spirit alive at Cal Poly. Chris is working in business development this summer at Plug and Play Tech Center, a leading incubator space for startups in the Valley.

I have a ton of respect for these two — they are the real deal. Back up against a wall, Chris started running a eBay business out of his dorm room in college which became  profitable enough for him to hire three employees. He’s assisted and mentored a lot of other startups too. Brian worked on ideas with a social enterprise related incubator at Cal Poly, then recently teamed up with a mechanical engineering student who devised an innovative braking solution for bicycles — in just months Brian has already made trips to Taiwan to meet with bicycle manufacturers and has given pitches to angel round investors. These guys do things.

Stanford already has a vibrant culture of entrepreneurship and strong existing infrastructure with organizations like BASES to promote entrepreneurship on campus. Chris and Brian are working almost singlehandedly to cultivate that culture at Cal Poly — a school long recognized for strong engineering talent with students that have a lot of hands-on skills but go work for large existing companies rather than try a new venture. Sound familiar? Yeah — I sympathize with their endeavor because I see a lot of parallels between Cal Poly and NC State.

So far, the two of them put on a successful business plan competition, and have been integral in the creation of InnovationQuest – an organization funded by successful Cal Poly graduates to help advise and fund early stage ventures out of Cal Poly. What’s cool is that they are showing that innovation can happen anywhere. One of the competition successes actually came out out of the wine and viticulture program — the students realized that after successive wine tastings the palate becomes saturated and later wines aren’t tasted properly. So they tinkered with pH levels and carbonation in the lab and created a liquid palate cleanser. SanTasti was born — and they already have paying customers throughout Napa Valley and the Central Valley! How cool is that?

I hope we can find ways of having BASES and Cal Poly work more closely together in the future, and I can’t wait to see what Chris and Brian are coming up with next.