Alumni in the News
Powering Up
GILER: A better way, through wireless.
Suzanne Kreiter/Boston Globe/Landov
Nothing seems to hold back the tech revolution — nothing except all those batteries, wires, cables, and other impedimenta that are always running out of power, getting tripped over, becoming obsolete, and eventually getting tossed into landfills. So Eric Giler (MBA ’82) is working on a better plan: wireless technology in which devices are powered by electricity from remote energy-emitting coils.
“It’s not electricity going through the air; it’s actually a magnetic field,” explained Giler, CEO of WiTricity, based in Watertown, Massachusetts. The company builds systems derived from innovative electricity-delivery technology developed by an MIT professor (Boston Globe, February 22, 2010). While initial applications — Giler thinks they will be ubiquitous in five years or so — will probably power handheld devices like cellphones, their real impact may be in the development of electric cars. Drivers could recharge their vehicles overnight by parking them on special mats in their home garages, thus avoiding the often-cited inconvenience of having to plug them in.
Sail Away
ROBB: A luxury home in every glamorous port.
Glenn Koenig/Los Angeles Times
Set to launch in 2013, the $1.1 billion Utopia will be a cruise ship with a difference: About half its cabins will be sold as private residences, ranging in price from $3.7 million to $26 million, the Los Angeles Times reported (January 11, 2010). Some of the cabins feature hardwood floors, walk-in closets, and fireplaces. The 971-foot ship will have three swimming pools, tennis courts, an outdoor movie theater, restaurants, and shops, among other amenities. The Utopia will call at the world’s ports for special events, such as Rio de Janeiro during carnaval, Sydney on New Year’s Eve, and Cannes during its film festival.
“The beauty behind this product is that it is a global product,” said David Robb (MBA ’93), chairman of Utopia Residences. The current economic climate and financing problems for similar projects in the past don’t faze Robb, who, with Frank Carlucci (MBA ’56) and another partner, cofounded the Frontier Group, a private equity firm that is mounting the project. Said Robb, “The Utopia has significant financial backing as well as very significant industrial partners that have enormous resources.”
Just Extraordinary
TURNER: A World Cup goal.
Matt Mendelsohn
The world’s most popular sporting event — and the reason global productivity declines for several weeks every four years — soccer’s World Cup kicks off this month in South Africa. Stacie Scott Turner (MBA ’96) and her charitable initiative, Extra-Ordinary Life (XOL), plan to join the fun in a special way: Fifteen girls from Washington, D.C., all living in foster care, will travel to South Africa for what XOL hopes will be a life-altering experience. As guests of South Africa’s First Family, the girls will connect with South African youngsters in foster care and orphanages to help raise international awareness about orphan issues.
Turner, herself adopted out of Washington’s foster care system, worked at Procter & Gamble and BET Networks before becoming a successful entrepreneur. “My goal is to show teenage girls that the world is their oyster,” she said. “Foster kids just want an ‘ordinary’ life. If we can give them that and more, they’ll have a chance at an extraordinary life.”
How Green Was My (Silicon) Valley
DOERR AND ADVISEE: From bits and bytes to batteries and biofuels.
Saul Loeb/Afp/Getty Images
“A boyish billionaire in glasses,” John Doerr (MBA ’76) began to shift his focus from bits and bytes to batteries and biofuels about four years ago, according to Time magazine (March 15, 2010). Doerr, one of the corporate leaders President Obama says he most admires, has become an influential policy and economic adviser to the Obama administration. He has contributed to the campaigns of Obama and other politicians, and some observers have noted that green energy companies and technologies in which Doerr’s VC firm, Kleiner Perkins, has invested have received government tax credits, contracts, and loan guarantees.
But Doerr distinguishes himself from past practitioners of the energy influence game in Washington. “I have referred to prior energy policies as really the sum of all lobbyists,” he said. “My lesson about policy is not to argue about your self-interest. Make an argument that is bigger, about jobs or competitiveness, and you are going to change some minds.”
The Art and Science of Teaching
Doug Lemov (MBA ’04), a charter-schools consultant and managing director of True North Public Schools, a network of schools in upstate New York, is a former teacher, principal, and charter-school founder. After years of trying to analyze and improve education results by crunching numbers and data, his focus now is on specific and proven classroom methods that successful teachers use to engage and educate a room full of restless kids. His new book, Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College, is a result of that research.
“Perhaps the greatest master of the techniques” is Lemov himself, according to a lengthy article on teaching in the New York Times Magazine in which Lemov was featured (March 7, 2010). And no one is more surprised than Lemov at his own success. Noting that a Myers-Briggs personality test he took while at HBS showed him to be the most introverted person in his class, Lemov said, “I’m a huge introvert. It’s strange to me that I do what I do and like it as much as I do.”
Cardiac Kid
HUENNEKENS: In matters of the heart, developing innovative technologies.
Nelvin C. Cepeda/San Diego Union-Tribune/Zuma Press
In 2002, when Scott Huennekens (MBA ’91) became president and CEO of San Diego–based Volcano Corp., a medical-devices company, he was its eleventh employee. Now the company has more than 1,000 workers and expects revenues of about $280 million this year.
“The company was founded basically to prevent heart attacks,” Huennekens told the San Diego Union-Tribune (January 25, 2010). To that end, Volcano makes systems to detect and treat artery blockages; the technology allows physicians to get inside blood vessels to view obstruction-causing plaques, as opposed to the external, X-ray sort of image provided by an angiogram. Furthermore, explained Huennekens, “We’re now developing innovative technologies to eliminate bypass surgery,” with procedures such as the use of ultrasound inside clogged arteries replacing more invasive treatments.
