Building a Business at JHU
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Posted by: Hopkins Insider | 
September 5 2011 | 
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Name: Thomas Smith
Year: Class of 2011
Hometown: Bala Cynwyd, PA
Area of Study: Cognitive Science and Anthropology
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During my Freshman year at JHU, I was watching television with some friends (including my future wife, Amy) on the second floor of Wolman East when two guys from the floor (Robert and Brendan) walked in, sat down, and confidently announced to the assembled crowd “We want to make some money.” They were interested in starting a business. So was I.
After getting to know each other, we talked about possibilities. My mother, a librarian, had been in the book business for years, so I knew there was money to be made there. I also knew that it was a business which could benefit from automation; many of the tasks most sellers did by hand could be done far more efficiency using software. Robert, Brendan and I all liked to code, so creating a suite of tools for online booksellers seemed like a good place to start.
Our first attempt at a piece of software was a gargantuan, tangled mess of Perl subroutines and Linux system calls, mostly fueled by Mountain Dew and programmed at 3am. Robert and Brendan created a business plan for our product with help from their Technical Communications professor Pam Sheff, and we entered it into the Center for Leadership Education’s Business Plan Competition. We made it to the semifinals. At the time, the competition felt a bit like our software; growing fast, but still not where it could be.
As time passed, our software continued to mature, and we brought in a fourth partner (Jon, a JHU alum) and identified a solid target market: textbook buybacks. As students, we knew that our peers were often unsatisfied with the prices they received for their books, so we used our data and code to create a system which could offer better prices on textbooks. Hopkins Buybacks, a student-run textbook buyback service, was born.
Over our time at Hopkins, we built our business into a small startup which began to make us a bit of money. While we were still interested in books, we had always considered ourselves a data-driven company. Optimizing market data allowed us to offer better book prices, but our real interest was in the data itself.
While considering novel ways to gather and process data, we realized that there was a market for a cheap, extensible wireless sensing platform which could measure the environment and automatically send information to a human if an interesting trend appeared. In about a month, we had created a basic prototype of an easily-customized wireless sensor, and had spun off our second business, Magpie Sensing.
At this point, we weren’t sure what to do next, so we reconnected with Pam Sheff and approached fellow CLE professor Lawrence Aronhime about our product. Through the Center’s Entrepreneurship Practicum, I was able to spend the next semester developing our technology, alongside my coursework. We decided to target the cold-chain shipment market; when companies ship pharmaceuticals and other sensitive products, they need to make sure those products are kept at very specific temperatures, and our sensor could help them do that.
Pam and Larry taught me all the details of creating a business plan, planning a product, and presenting an idea to investors, and at the end of the Spring 2011 semester, we entered the JHU Business Plan Competition for a second time. By now, the competition had grown as much as our company; there were multiple categories, appealing cash prizes, an all-star set of thirteen judges, and a reception with multiple speakers. After a brief presentation and a grueling question and answer session, Magpie Sensing took home first place in the General Business category.
Since the competition, the exposure we’ve received, as well as the personalized mentoring CLE continues to provide, has been instrumental in helping us plan the future of both our businesses. CLE has connected us with everyone from fellow student entrepreneurs to tech commercialization experts and local business incubators.
We have enjoyed tremendous support within the university community, too, from groups as diverse as the Center for Social Concern (JHU’s community service center), the Office of Sustainability and the Whiting School of Engineering. We are continuing to develop our core technology for Magpie Sensing (with a goal of seeking investment in about a year), and Hopkins Buybacks remains profitable for us and our student clients alike.
Johns Hopkins is known as a science school, and it deserves that reputation. The sciences here are done better than anywhere else. Johns Hopkins, however, also provides a certain culture and spirit which is incredibly valuable in any field. It’s the kind of place which motivates you to contract with a factory in Wuhan Dong Hui (even if you can’t accurately pronounce it or locate it on a map), teach yourself SMD soldering, and work countless nights and weekends to hack out a manufacturable product in three and a half months.
This spirit, combined with resources like the ones we found at CLE and in the broader Hopkins and Baltimore communities, make this a great place for the budding entrepreneur, not just the budding physician or scientist.
Want to talk more about it? Email us at Esdassociated@gmail.com
