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This Issue 09/15/2005

Also in this issue

• Freshman Superlatives
• Film interview: michael showalter
• Word on the street: Back to the Future
• Ego of the Week
• Lego my Ego

"Most demining experts are between 50-55, have 20 years of experience in the British military or something like that," Josh explains. "Maybe a Ph.D. They definitely weren't expecting us."

"They looked at us," Sam says, smiling, "and they thought we were like the secretaries for the guys about to get off the plane or something."

*

How did Sam Reeves, who entered the Wharton School originally to become an investment banker, and Josh Koplin, a newly-minted industrial designer, end up in Kabul to do on-the-ground research for their demining apparatus -- an apparatus which seems poised to change the way landmines are removed around the world -- at a time when most of their classmates were finishing up their summer vacations?

Well, in order to start a successful business, you have to have a successful design. The two go hand and hand, like Sam and Josh, the business guy and the design guy who finish each others' sentences. Sam is the former, the manager of business development of Humanistic Robots. He came to Penn after having odd jobs in high school in Fort Worth, TX -- a landscaping company, an auto-detailing business, a few things here and there. Of course, he thought about Wall Street and the stock market and investment banking, which at first sounded great. But after a year of learning more about them, Sam realized that the hours, the lifestyle, the lack of impact on the world -- it wasn't him.

But what else can you do coming out of Wharton? Consulting? Maybe. Then there's starting your own business. And even though it's risky, Sam is the type of guy who likes a big risk.

"I'd always had this idea that it'd be great to start a business while I was still in Wharton because I was young and then you have someone else supporting you .... There are a lot of advantages to doing it while you're in school," Sam says from his office in the Small Business Development Center in Vance Hall, on Penn's campus. Sam works part time at the S.B.D.C., which consults with entrepreneurs to get their small businesses off the ground and into the air in manageable stages.

When Sam was a junior at Penn, he won a grant from another program at Wharton, the Venture Initiation Program. According to advisor Leslie Mitts, the program is designed for "entrepreneurs from across the university who need to start and gain support for building their high-potential businesses that are accepted into that program."

After working with Sam for almost a year, Mitts thought that he would succeed as an entrepreneur, despite the risk. "Part of being creative is can you see around the corner -- can you see what's not there?" she says. "[Sam's] got enough of a feeling of safety net in his own professional confidence that he's not looking for 'how do I solve the problems that I haven't faced yet?' .... He was able to go out and find that there would be demand for the product he was selling."