They Might be Magnates

Tomorrow’s business leaders are starting now, and they’re starting young

By Rich Lord / Photography by Blaine Stiger

The Knauer family thought nothing of it a quarter-century ago, when Josh, then a tot, started smashing rocks he found near their Martinsville, N.J., home. After all, kids smash rocks; it’s the natural order of things. But it’s not every kid who notes the colorful patterns in the fractured stones, sets up a makeshift streetside kiosk and starts marketing them as bookends.

Young Knauer’s forays into capitalism didn’t stop there. About seven years later, he and his brother, Matt, set up a business reselling Italian bread his father brought home from Newark. “I learned accounting, customer service, everything,” he says.

Knauer, now 27, is the founder of the nonprofit EnviroLink Network, the world’s largest online clearinghouse for environmental information. He’s also CEO of GreenMarketplace.com, a for-profit e-bazaar of environmentally and socially conscious cosmetics, food, art and more, based in Squirrel Hill. And he’s launching Network for Change, an online “community” populated with progressive people and groups.

Five years ago, Knauer and the region’s other up-and-coming young entrepreneurs would have been considered aberrations, says Ann Dugan, executive director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence. That’s because for the better part of a century, Pittsburgh mamas just didn’t let their babies grow up to be instant CEOs. “In the past, many parents prepared their children to work for a big company,” she says. “Entrepreneurialism was something they didn’t understand very well.”

But multibillion-dollar success stories like those of Microsoft Corp.’s Bill Gates and Apple Computer Inc.’s Steve Jobs—plus local wins by Marconi (the former FORE Systems Inc.) and IBM-owned Transarc Corp.—have changed that. Now parents prep their toddlers for mogulhood, teens tinker with website code, and regional leaders wonder how to produce, attract or retain the Josh Knauers of the world.

Josh Knauer got bit by the entrepreneurial spirit as a child.

No doubt it’s an unusual concoction of innovation, flexibility, curiosity, endurance and salesmanship that makes a corporate prodigy. You can’t buy that in a bottle. But is there anything anyone can do to imbue human vessels with those traits and thus sustain the local technology boom? A look at a handful of the region’s hottest young entrepreneurs provides some clues.

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Designer Genes

When Steven Chang graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, N.Y., with a master’s degree in electrical engineering, his first move was anything but entrepreneurial. Chang took a job with giant Westinghouse Corp.’s Intelligent Software Systems group in its Churchill Science and Technology Center, developing transportation logistics programs for the likes of Kellogg Co. and Kraft Foods Inc. His hard work and acumen helped him rise from the programming ranks to a leadership position that had him meeting clients, designing products, managing people—and collecting big paychecks.

But in 1998, at age 29, and after seven years at Big W, he left. He and fellow Westinghouse emigre Chris Kirby and John Bartels then founded Futuristics Labs Inc.

Chang, now 32, says it’s “probably genetics” that predisposes him to the entrepreneurial lifestyle. His father ran his own export/import business in the New York area and passed a penchant for long-distance commerce down to Steven, whose current commute takes him from Futuristics’ Marshall Township research and development center to its Sunnyvale, Calif., sales headquarters every other week.

That makes for a lot of airline peanuts, but Chang says his 30-person company’s bipolarity is good business. The talent to build its product—software that stores and analyzes the mountains of data generated when customers surf a website, visit a store or call a service center—is here. The market for it, though, is in Silicon Valley. Already Futuristics has made clients of Internet heavyweights About.com and Excite.com.

Success has a price, even beyond the salary hit that Chang took upon leaving Westinghouse. He has little time for anything but his family, his church and work. “I don’t go golfing on the weekend, have fun at the race track or play with toys,” he says.

But doing his own thing has taught Chang more about himself than any 9-to-5 job could. The twists and turns of the technology world have forced him to adjust his business plan with every market contortion. “You can’t create a two-year plan: OHere’s what you’re going to do.’ You’re lucky if you can have a six-month plan,” he says. “You learn more about yourself, as far as how far you can stretch yourself, what your resilience really is.”

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Plays Well With Others

How many start-ups has Ken Nash done? Depends on when you start counting. He and a friend started a bicycle repair shop in his Danville, Ky., basement in the seventh grade. As an adult, he’s found time to participate in three new companies while going to med school, becoming a psychiatrist and serving as an assistant professor in Pitt’s medical school.

Nash met Steve Moyer at a Woodland Hills versus Penn Hills high school football game last year, and it was soon obvious that he’d be starting from scratch again. Moyer’s track record includes developing a computer game and selling it to a software company at age 15, years of academic research and then a stint at IBM-Transarc during which he rose into management.

What eventually emerged from their friendship was Greenfield-based Fringent Technologies Inc., with Moyer, age 37, president and CEO, and Nash, 36, vice president for business development. Launched in March, the company aims to build software and hardware to enhance the movement of data through the Internet, and to change and improve those data as they flow.

Though the co-founders are not ready to ship product yet, the two are already selling their vision to investors, advisors, partners—even the occasional pooch owner that mistakes their strip-mall office for the nearby dog grooming shop. Combined, the two are a powerful one-two punch.

“I can get my foot in any door,” boasts Nash. Once it’s there, he wheedles Moyer in and lets the technological seduction begin. It’s not unusual, they say, for Moyer’s pitch to keep fellow technologists in thrall long past midnight. And when Moyer hits a technological logjam, it’s often Nash who comes up with the idea that breaks it. “Ken views nothing as a problem,” Moyer says. “Everything is an opportunity.”

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A PC in Every Stocking

Todd Olson was 14 and working a menial job at a Delaware bank when someone found out that he was into computer games. Did he know anything about programming? they asked. At the time, the answer was, “Not much.” But he learned quickly and soon became the second member of the bank’s fledgling information-technology department.

Five years later, while attending Carnegie Mellon University, he met Eric Boduch, who had been tinkering with Apple computers from a tender age. Together they landed a few $20-an-hour computer consulting jobs, then a few more. “I was 20. I couldn’t even drink, but I’m telling people that I can design their entire system,” recalls Olson.

The consulting business grew, and the two got so busy they had to blow off things like, oh, graduate school, and job interviews with suitors like Netscape Communications Corp. By the time they stopped to catch their breath, they had a staff of 25 and were dominant local players in Java-language programming.

“It just kind of happened,” says Olson.

Call them accidental entrepreneurs, lifted to leadership thanks to a longstanding familiarity with the bits and bytes that make the modern world whirr. “You have young people who got their first computer when they were 6 or 7,” says Dugan. Combine that advantage with a youthful appetite for risk, and once in a while you get a hot company like Cerebellum Software Inc.

Boduch, 26, and Olson, 25, bagged the consulting business and set up Cerebellum last year. The 65 employees of the Washington’s Landing-based company write million-line-long programs that companies and governments use to link Internet-based functions to their offline computer systems. It’s Cerebellum’s software, for instance, that powers the City of Pittsburgh’s Street Smarts system, used by police to rapidly round up data on crimes committed at any given city address.

The two now spend most of their time pushing product, courting investors and rummaging for recruits like recently appointed chairman of the board Chuck Dietrick, a former Microsoft general manager. Their transformation from technologists to executives still surprises them. “If you asked someone eight years ago what I was like, they’d say, ‘shy, introspective,’” Boduch notes. But he’s changed to fit his new role. “One of the big things you have to be able to do is sell your vision and your passion,” he says.

Both still find time to occasionally indulge a shared passion for fine wine. Boduch also plays basketball and racquetball. And Olson recently took up running.

“A year ago I was sprinting through an airport and I got winded, and that made me mad,” Olson says. He finished his first marathon in May.

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A Need for Speed

Isaac Sun, 28, pedals to his office at technology incubator iventurelab.com most mornings, despite Pittsburgh’s notorious bike-unfriendliness. The seasoned mountain biker and snowboarder is used to rough urban terrain, having biked extensively in his native San Francisco. Compared with that city’s slopes, his Shadyside-to-Oakland commute is mild. “Just one hill,” he says.

Though Sun usually takes a shine to sports involving slopes, nature and an element of risk, he’s lately had to master a decidedly tamer activity: pingpong. “That is how you earn respect around here,” he says.

An aptitude for Foosball, table hockey and Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots—all fixtures of iventurelab’s lobby—helps too. The incubator takes its atmospheric cues from the cyber cafe, student union and fraternity house, with one notable twist: Between the games and caffeine runs, the young people hanging around until all hours are envisioning, developing or growing companies.

Carolyn O’Brien sells the new generation of robots at Mobot.

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It’s Sun’s yen for action that lured him away from a secure job as a technical project manager at Wells Fargo Bank, to CMU’s business school, and finally to iventurelab. At a big company, he says, “It was hard to make a difference.” So after three years there and some fine-tuning at business school, he started pitching what seemed likely to be a hot concept: a sporting-goods business that combined the convenience of online shopping with the familiarity of brick-and-mortar retail.

It didn’t fly. The market turned against business-to-consumer Internet companies, and even iventurelab founders Tommy and Henry Wang couldn’t scrounge up funding for Sun’s concept. So he switched gears, jumped on an idea brought to iventurelab by a professional recruiter and became the CEO of CertifiedSkills.com.

CertifiedSkills hopes to link employers to job seekers, as many other websites do. But CertifiedSkills will go further, independently vetting the job candidates listed so employers know that what they’re seeing on the resume is what they’ll get. “It really speeds up the hiring process,” says Sun.

Sun continues to pedal up his own steep career path at a torrid pace. He’s in the process of becoming CEO of another, as-yet-secret iventurelab start-up.

Sun says the big-company experience he got at Wells Fargo meshes well with the Wang brothers’ proven entrepreneurial acumen. Henry, 26, and Tommy, 24, founded a sports memorabilia business in 1987, while both were attending middle school in DuBois. “We were working out of my bedroom and his bedroom,” says Tommy. When the market for sports cards and autographs approached the saturation point, the Wangs started importing the plastic sleeves collectors use to protect cards. After college they launched computer consulting firm Pittsburgh Direct Technology, and in late 1999 they transformed that into iventurelab.

Though 100-hour work weeks are common for Sun and the Wangs, none seems to pine for the pleasures most twentysomethings take for granted. Says Tommy: “Instead of hanging out with friends at a bar, I’m hanging out with friends at a meeting.”

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Family Values

Carolyn O’Brien’s eldest daughter, Caitlin, now 9, drove her from teaching to technology. O’Brien spent four years bouncing between temporary high school teaching jobs, struggling in the tough late-’80s job market to find a permanent, decent-paying role. “When I had my first daughter, I couldn’t afford day care on what they were paying me,” she says.

One day a friend asked her if she could sell, and she said she could try. And did she know much about computers? “I’ve always been a hacker,” she says, and her education was thick with math and science. Soon she took the first of three software sales jobs, each of which ended when O’Brien saw a hotter technology on the horizon, and jumped at the chance to be a part of it. Last year she opted to make an even bolder leap into an even edgier industry: robotics.

O’Brien’s robots aren’t impersonal, insectlike machines that assemble cars and refrigerators. As CEO of Strip District-based Mobot Inc., she oversees the production and marketing of quirky androids like Adam 40-80, who this year served as Pittsburgh’s wired, witty ambassador to both national political conventions.

Adam 40-80 is an example of what O’Brien calls a SIAR, for socially interactive autonomous robot. Sensors allow him to navigate his surroundings and interact with humans, and wireless Internet technology lets him transmit information and download data from the Web. The ultimate goal for SIAR technology, she says, is “to make a machine that you can walk away from with a sense that you’ve had a conversation.”

Now 35, O’Brien joined Mobot in April 1999, and her charge is to find a growth market for SIARs. She studied 47 industries before setting her sights on retail.

O’Brien says SIARs won’t replace human cashiers, stockboys or even greeters. What they will do is give customers information and services human help can’t easily provide. SIARs can be programmed with detailed data on products, can check store inventory via the Internet and will even take orders for out-of-stock merchandise and accept payment by credit card. SIARs, she says, will “be the next hot thing in electronic, one-on-one marketing.”

Though O’Brien’s day is a whirlwind of decisions, meetings and sales pitches, she says she hasn’t given up her hobbies, which include biking, in-line skating, reading, and card games like hearts, canasta and pinochle. Nor has she sloughed off her family, which now includes a second daughter, Casey Ellen, 7. So what gives? “I get about five hours of sleep,” she says, with just a hint of rue.

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Give the Gift of Gizmos

Suneil Mandava’s calling finally caught up with him last year. The Fox Chapel native had long resisted the glitter of pure technology, aiming instead for the flesh-and-blood world of medicine. During high school, he spent summers interning at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. But while there, he stumbled across the Web-browsing technology of what was then a start-up called Netscape, and its future seemed so bright that he convinced his father to invest in it.

Later he studied biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, but the computer course he took was among his favorites. And after graduation, as he toiled in the ranks of consulting group Arthur Andersen, Mandava bought the gizmo that would change his life: a Palm VII wireless pilot.

He played with it, and it started playing on him. “All of these different ideas started popping into my head.” He imagined wireless devices so powerful that travelers could access bus schedules and even determine whether an individual bus were running on time; so versatile that business executives could manage inventory while standing on a golf course; and so graphically advanced that individuals in, say, an Iowa cornfield and a Japanese subway station could have a conversation, complete with eye contact.

The ideas came so fast and hard that he left Arthur Andersen, moved back with his parents, found four partners and launched MobDev Inc. in May in Fox Chapel. In October, the newly renamed Mobile Aspects Inc. set up shop in the Strip District. The technology is still secret. Mandava will only say that, “We can track all of these different items and bring them back in relation to you.”

Now president and CEO of Mobile Aspects, Mandava, 24, says the entrepreneurial life exacts a price. He rarely dines out, doesn’t take vacations and sees his girlfriend less often than he’d like. Though he lives with his family, there’s little time to relax with them, other than during Steelers game broadcasts, which he never misses.

The upside: “I want to prove to myself that I can do this from scratch.”

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More Than Money

Mandava’s motivation is a common one for young entrepreneurs, says Dugan of Pitt’s Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence. By and large, they aren’t in it for a quick buck. “I think it’s the excitement of trying their own wings,” she says, and to “see whether they can create [a business], like all of the stories they read.”

For Fringent’s Moyer, there are also engineering bragging rights to consider. Engineers “want to build something that they think is going to really change the way things work. And they want all the other engineers to look at it and say, ‘Wow, those guys made a cool product.’”

His partner, Nash, says he’ll feel fulfilled when he can drive up to Fringent’s future corporate headquarters, count the cars and realize he has helped build a company that has improved the lives of its employees, its customers and the people of Pittsburgh.

Knauer walks an even-longer road.

His journey started on a summer day two decades ago, on one of his family’s annual treks through the American West. “I remember being in Washington state on the Olympic Peninsula, driving toward the Hoh Rain Forest,” he says. The protected forest is one of the world’s most diverse places, he says, and it’s visible from space—because everything around it has been clear-cut by logging interests. “You can see the line” where Eden ends and man’s depredation begins, he says. “It totally affected me.”

Knauer returned to elementary school a changed boy, and with the help of a teacher, he raised $3,600 to help preserve rain forests in Costa Rica. Environmental activism would mark his high school and college years. And he makes sure that GreenMarketplace provides detailed environmental information about every product it sells. The site points out, for instance, that if every American family bought just one roll of toilet tissue made from recycled paper, that would save 297,000 trees, 122 million gallons of water and 1.2 million cubic feet of landfill space.

“Let’s just give people the facts about these issues, and let them come to their own conclusions,” he says. Like many young entrepreneurs, he hopes his energy, ideas and enthusiasm will make a difference. “If we can change the way people purchase things in their everyday lives and move to things that are more environmentally friendly and healthier, that’s a huge thing. E That is so much better than an extra couple hundred-thousand dollars.”

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Rich Lord is a contributing writer to Pittsburgh Prospects. His last story was on “The Idea Hatcheries.”