Episode 27 | Part Two: The Spirit of Houston

Gregory Shepard, an entrepreneur who's built and sold 12 businesses, a recipient of 4 private equity awards, TEDx speaker, and Forbes author. This is The Boss Podcast with Gregory Shepard.

Welcome back to my conversation with Dave Cook, the executive director of the Wolff Center at the University of Houston. We've been talking about why his school was named the number 1 undergraduate entrepreneurship program in the United States for 3 consecutive years. Dave, when you think about your entrepreneurship curriculum, I'm interested in understanding what hands-on activities you incorporate into the program. Can you break down what they're doing more tactically versus strategically?

Yeah, I'm not sure we have enough time to do it. I will tell you that we're running 40 programs outside the classroom. I can take you— I'll try to do it quickly. When you come into my program, you do an innovation project. You got to go to a restaurant, find a pain, find a solution, go, and tomorrow night the class will be— 10 teams will be pitching their solutions. In April, the University of Houston opens their intellectual property portfolio. They present them to my teams. My teams pick the 2 they want. Over the summer, they do sort of a technology assessment report. They pick the one technology they want to go forward with in the first week in December. They pitch it to VCs. If the inventors and the university and the kids are happy, they form a company that has the exclusive rights to that technology, and they go compete in business plan competitions raising money until they graduate in May. We're in the process of an event called Wolf Fest, where every kid in the program will go out, find a sponsor. They'll operate restaurants for pop-up restaurants on campus for 3 days. Right before COVID in that 3-day period, the last class raised $311,000. That money funds our retreats, funds our trips, and so forth. You know, where I want you to kind of hear is that you can go a lot of places and study entrepreneurship. If you come here into my program, you will be an entrepreneur, and you also learn how to give back. We had a couple weeks ago, we graduated our first class EWOP, Empowering Women Out of Prison. So my kids get on a bus, we go over and work with women in prison over by Austin and in the Lockhart Unit, and every one of these 100 women has a business plan that they want to— when they want to leave prison, they want to open a business. So they don't have access to the internet, and so our kids do the research, try to do customer discovery and so forth, and come back and give it to them. So, you know, we're running summer camps. We're— we Baker Ripley were, you know, great stories of kids who came to a summer camp when they were in the 11th grade who are now graduating from my program that are going to go back and teach the summer camps with Hispanic kids in the north side of town. You know, 40 of these programs, we do mock term negotiations, we go to a Bank, and, and we— you want to have the class in teams, wants to sell the business, the other half want to buy it. You have real lawyers, real accountants, and you film it, and you see if you can do a term sheet and make a deal. Every kid in my program is on a dream team, and they are charged with having 100 dreams, and having goals every semester to achieve those dreams, having a 5-year plan. Most of my kids, when they leave here, have a personal board of directors where they don't ever have to worry about, hey, I wonder if I have a legal question, who do I call, or an accounting question, or a human relations question. And I think when you say what is your original intent was how do we lower the failure rate. It's that kind of infrastructure, it's that kind of texture around entrepreneurship that will shorten the time it takes to get you to where you can be successful by eliminating the mistakes that you would ordinarily make if you didn't have the mentoring, if you didn't have the experiences of being in these safe simulations that I think we're sort of staking our bet on. That's how— a good way to affect the outcome you're talking about.

So when you talk about like faculty and professors, it sounds like there's a difference between what the professors teach and what your program— your program is more you know, on the street, meat and potatoes. This is exactly what you're, you know, more tactical. This is what we're doing versus the classroom is more strategic. Is that a correct way of seeing it? Or how would you separate the difference between what they learn in the classroom with a professor and what they learn in your, in your program?

Yeah, your, your, uh, sort of assumption there would not be correct. Um, we have a guy, Bill Bobora, who Works for Third Coast Bank. He co-teaches, he teaches the implementation class along with a guy named Keith Rassen, who was head of Houston Angel Network. That class implementation is Wolf Fest. So they bring people into that class of here's how to raise money, here's how the operational aspects, and all of that teaching. In that class then gets put into place when we do this 3-day startup. And everything that you learn in the program then kind of is a showcase for that. Do you know how to handle the operations? Do you have the financials under control? Do you, do you, did you get the fire marshals to sign off on your operations? Uh, on and on and on. And, uh, you do it in a way where that professor is absolutely a coach, not only setting up, here's how the accounting systems are going to work, here's how the software and credit cards integrate into all this, but you come away with it where seamlessly what you're doing in the classroom flows directly into what you're doing in the pop-ups. The same way when we do the intellectual property, that is the basis for when you do your financial work, when you do your marketing work, that is the classroom that then flows into the competition in December. The professors are not like, hey, I'm the academic professor and that's the entrepreneur over there. Every one of our professors is an entrepreneur. has been there, done that, and are intimately involved with these 40 programs that are operating outside the classroom. I mean, it is an amazing program that when you look at that number one, there's so many great people who come here and invest their lives in changing the lives of students. And, you know, as you point out, I've been doing this a long time, and I— when kids leave my program, I sit with each one for an hour, and over the course of all these years, 100% of the students say this program has changed their life. Well, it changed their life, yeah, educationally, but it also changed their lives in terms of the relationships they have, the, the mentors they have, the, the confidence they have to, to go into a bank or to, to stand in front of a bunch of investors and make a pitch. And I think that's what I'm most proud of is, yeah, we have a great program here, but I'm proud of the commitment that students in my program make to really come here and change their lives.

Yeah, that's a really unusual thing. I mean, I speak at universities and do curriculum for them and all this stuff, and I— it's really rare to see professors teaching classes that have actually been real entrepreneurs. That's very unique. And I can't tell you how much I can commend the university for that. That's incredible. Most of the time, you don't see startup-oriented classes taught by accomplished entrepreneurs. What you see is people that understand the theories and are teaching the theory. So, I think that that's amazing. And I hope that the listeners are paying attention because if you're in that neck of the woods or want to go to an area that actually has Real entrepreneurs teaching real entrepreneur classes. This sounds like the place to go. I'd like to step back and talk to you about your own entrepreneurial journey. What were some of the most important stops you had along the way as you were making it on your own?

Yeah. So, I had— I went to work for Scott Paper Company years and years ago with an intent of when they interviewed me, I said, I want to go to work here for 2 years, learn how to sell, and then I want to go start my own company. 15 years later, I finally went out and started my own food brokerage business, and that morphed into a supermarket consulting business that I ran promotions all across the country and the world. And then it— and that really was led me into a bunch of startups all around the supermarket industry where we would have exclusive rights to a private label line, create a company around it. We received an asset of a company, supermarket went out of business. We got a $10 million milk plant that we would take over and figure out how to do it. And that led to me retiring. And the first time I retired, a friend of mine was head of— he was the chancellor at A&M and said, would you help us look at setting up a technology department up here? So for a couple of years, I worked with A&M helping them set up their Office of Technology Commercialization. And they had figured that they had given away like $4 billion worth of technologies by people just publishing it. Now it's turned into a 2-story building up there that's chugging along. Guy Dietrich and John White were the 2 guys that were, in my mind, instrumental in totally changing that. Then they wanted me to stay. Do you want to stay and help change the culture at A&M? I said, I don't think I'm going to live long enough to change the culture at any university, but I came to the University of Houston. with no intent other than mentoring a student. Who do you want to mentor? Well, I'm big into entrepreneurship. So that's how it started. I had retired and just wanted to mentor a kid, and then here I am, you know, years, years later running a program that is being driven by incredible students, incredible stakeholders and mentors, and It's been really a good ride. Yeah.

I mean, you live a great story, that's for sure. And one of the things that I noticed is that the walls of your office are papered with photos of students, and you've got a large sign between your desk and the wall, and it says, Living the Dream. Can you tell me a little bit about that? I think that that's just so cool and insightful of the culture that you've created.

Well, first of all, the pictures are a constant reminder of why I'm here. It is awful easy to get distracted, particularly in a university, with let's raise money or politically or, you know, there's 1,000 things that go on here in a university. And this is a constant reminder. This is the only reason I'm here. This is what my life is about, is these students are why I'm here. And so it also is when I bring people into this office, it's a testimony that we don't have first-place stickers all over the walls and we don't have trophies around. We have pictures of students, and that's why we're here. The second part of your question, which in, in this case has to do with living the dream, is that we do believe in living the dream. And I got this plaque that you referred to I ran a summer camp, and in that summer camp, I had 700 applicants from all over the country, and I took 30 kids. And these were juniors in high school. And so at the end of it, you know, come on, you're coming to the University of Houston, and let's rock and roll. And these— so many of these students said, hey, would you write me a letter of recommendation to get into Stanford? would you write me a letter of recommendation to get into Yale? And I would write these letters of recommendation, but in my own mind was, you're not going to get a better education in entrepreneurship than you would here. So anyhow, one of the students who went through the program and asked for a letter of recommendation, I wrote it, and he got in the university he wanted to, and he sent me this As that had been his dream to go to that university, and so as a way of thanking me, he gave me this plaque and his letters on the back of that plaque, but it is what we live here is that you can live your dreams if you have integrity, relationships, purpose, and you're good at something, you're competent, and you're in control of your life. You can live your dreams, and It is, it is that one plaque. That's the only plaque I have in my office along with pictures of the students, which I think is a pretty good summation of what we do here.

Wow. What a great way to end the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Much respect to what you have accomplished, and thank you for sharing your wisdom with, with the audience. I appreciate it.

So thanks so much for having me and best of luck to you.

Thank you. His name is David Cook, the executive director at the Wolf Center at the University of Houston. And that wraps up this episode of the BOSS Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, make sure you take a second to subscribe so you automatically get updates when new shows drop. Also, if you have a minute, I'd love it if you left us a review so more folks like yourself can discover the show. I'll see you next time. Namaste, my friends.

Learn more about the BOSS Business Operating Support System at bossstartupscience.com. Or you can reach Gregory Shepard at GregoryShepard.com.

This has been a production of Forbes Books.