BRINGING IDEAS TO LIFE
What is an entrepreneur? Ask five different entrepreneurs and you’ll get five different answers. But what they all have in common is the desire to transform their vision into reality.
As the leader of the College’s Entrepreneurship and Professional Practice department, Vice President of Alumni and Industry Engagement Robbie Nock works with students and alumni to launch and sustain mission-driven businesses. For this story, he convened members of ArtCenter’s entrepreneurial community—ranging from those just starting out on their entrepreneurial paths to those with several ventures already under their belts—to ask them how they define entrepreneurship, what challenges they’ve faced on their journeys, and how ArtCenter helped prepare them for their paths.
Hana Azab is a media designer and technologist and current Media Design Practices student, whose Kinship project leverages emerging technologies and storytelling to create platforms that bridge art, science and design; its first artifact is a card game that acts as a cultural incubator of sorts. Bijan Machen (MFA 18 Art) is an interdisciplinary fine artist and founder of the We Uplift the World Foundation, an organization that has created youth and technology programs throughout the U.S., including a hybrid and fully remote smartphone filmmaking and video editing program. Lucas Thin (BS 23 Interaction) and Feather Xu (BS 23 Interaction) are co-founders of Modul, a “link in bio builder for professional networking” that aims to give users the ability to build personal websites based on modules that can be connected to one another like building blocks. Trained as an architect and as a designer, La Mer Walker (BS 01 Environmental) has traversed both fields. His experience includes co-founding Valence, a network for the Black Professional Community, and being an early team member of BCG Digital Ventures, where he was part of launching more than 80 startups.
ROBBIE NOCK: How do you define entrepreneurship?
BIJAN MACHEN: Anyone that runs a business selling something—a product or a service—that, to me, is an entrepreneur. Even if you don't necessarily have a formal business structure, and you're selling goods or services, you could still be an entrepreneur. There are plenty of people who are full-time entrepreneurs who do not have those structures. But a creative entrepreneur is somebody who creates an object, or does some kind of creative service, that they run as their business. Anybody making things with materials they have available and selling those things, I believe, is a creative entrepreneur. I think creative entrepreneurship is specifically about people who consider themselves creative individuals, or who are in the pursuit of a creative path, and choose to fulfill that in an entrepreneurial way. Which can be making money, freelancing, doing whatever they can do to get what they make to the people that appreciate it or the people that need it.
LA MER WALKER: I would define it as self-belief and self-reliance in the sense that you have thoughts, concepts, ideas, products, or all of the above, and you believe they need to be real in this world. And you want to bring it to life, and you want to take on the market, and you want to see them come to realization—whether you're doing that as a 100% entrepreneur per se, completely on your own, or you’re doing it as an entrepreneur within a company, or you're doing it, you know, kind of experimentally on the side. And maybe you're not even labeling it as “entrepreneurial,” but nonetheless, these things are within, and they need to come out, and you're going to bring them out in an interesting way. So that's how I would define it.
HANA AZAB: Entrepreneurship is one of those words. There’s a ton of words in the dictionary that are debated, and their debate is always interesting to me, because I feel like each definition is correct and shows a different worldview. And so entrepreneurship, to me, means embracing uncertainty and crafting cultural artifacts that shape and evoke futures in the same breath. I would say that entrepreneurship means having a deep and unwavering inclination to create and put something back into the world that represents a larger picture, or is output with an understanding that it can, through its use and through its dissemination, act as something greater than the sum of its parts.
LUCAS THIN: I watched a Startup Instanbul video recently by Steve Blank, and he said there are three types of entrepreneurs—the lifestyle entrepreneur, the small business entrepreneur and the scalable entrepreneur. Lifestyle entrepreneurs do businesses on the side based on things that they are passionate about. Small business entrepreneurs are not trying to scale their companies. They like their business the size that it is. The last type of entrepreneur, the scalable entrepreneur, is where I feel we’re situated—they are the ones crazy enough to believe that something they envision is going to come true, even with an unproven business model and an unproven theory. Steve Blank was saying that the scalable entrepreneur is much closer to an artist than anything else, because they have this vision of what they’re going to create in the world. And they don’t know how many people are actually going to like the thing they create. But their job is to create something original. So that’s how I define ourselves. We have a vision and we’re trying to make that vision a reality.
FEATHER XU: I would add to that that being entrepreneurial means if the product fails, we’re responsible for it. If you’re working for a corporation and one product fails, the company may not even care that much. We’re doing the product because we believe it can succeed. The product’s success or failure is fully on us as founders. That’s what makes it an adventure, and it’s a beautiful part for us.
NOCK: How did ArtCenter prepare you for this path?
MACHEN: I learned so much at ArtCenter. Not just in class, but also by the experience of being in a place where you’re surrounded by artists. You’re surrounded by people who decided to pursue this thing that you love as their creative pursuit as well. And that creates a really special environment where you feel anything you do will be supported. Anything you do will get some kind of response. You can be appreciated more in this type of place, more so than being an artist in the real world. Everybody really pays attention to what you’re making. One of the things I learned at ArtCenter is to be able to communicate properly [when it comes to] what you want, who you are, what you’re making and why. And also being able to ask good questions. I had the opportunity to speak with some of the most successful artists working today. I had the opportunity to use some of the best creative equipment tools. I used everything I possibly could. I was welding steel sculptures that were twice as tall as me at ArtCenter. I did everything. I tried it all, and I absolutely loved it. It transformed my ability to see opportunity in the world.
WALKER: Before coming to ArtCenter, I studied architecture at USC. And at USC—and I’m assuming this is probably true for a lot of undergrad students who get an undergraduate degree somewhere else—there were all these boundaries and fences and frameworks around who gets to take certain classes. For example, I wanted to take classes in cinema at USC, and I couldn’t get into those classes. So when I came to ArtCenter, I found a lot of the same types of classes and I could get in there. I could listen. I could soak it all in. I could be in a Fine Art class and learn about Claes Oldenburg. I could get into the digital classes that the motion graphics students were taking and get exposed to that. I could take classes outside of my major and start to think about how that would eventuate into a thesis. It was empowering to see that that vision was there. And things were forming into a, let’s call it digital singularity, and you could really lean into it and become fluent, or at least comfortable, with the higher capabilities of each of those art forms. That really mattered and helped me have a confidence and a capability set.
AZAB: The list is analogous to a CVS receipt, because my first touchpoints with ArtCenter have been like radical exposure to an infinite and expansive sense of possibility. And my experience within ArtCenter and the Media Design Practices program has reaffirmed my belief that anything is possible, and you can not only materially and tangibly prototype and build the reality that you see in your head, but you are also morally and ethically responsible for engaging your community in the facilitation and creation of that reality. And within every studio discussion, office hours or event workshop I’ve experienced at ArtCenter, there’s been that through-line. This expansive sense of possibility, coupled with an implicit responsibility to your community and the world around you, that everything exists within a context and you, within the ArtCenter ecosystem, have access to the shops, the minds, and wisdom and knowledge that the professors and alumni are willing to offer you. And it’s your responsibility to engage with all that’s afforded to you to realize your creative potential and to understand that you’re putting something back into the world. And you need to have the foresight on not just what this artifact and offering means today, but how it potentially has the impact to influence the present moment and the future that it suggests.
NOCK: What are some current challenges you’re facing?
THIN: We’ve talked to a lot of users and learned that yes, this product solves a user need, but they’re not willing to pay for it, or they might not stick with it. This is something ArtCenter didn’t really talk to us about. So we need to figure out how sticky is this idea? And once we realized that there’s going to be a problem down the road with this idea, then we did some more user interviews and tried to pivot the idea. At ArtCenter, when you pivot, it’s easy. One day you just tell the teacher that you have another idea. But with a startup, how do you tell your teammates that? “I’ve been doing all this work, and now we’re pivoting? Why? Because you said so?’ And we’ve already pivoted a few times before. And we have a 1,300- to 1,400-person wait list right now. So we can’t just say “Oops.” So during the past eight weeks, we’ve been doing a lot of reverse engineering while also trying to take new insights and form a future vision, instead of just being content with what we have. So it’s been like trying to deconstruct the past, while also seeing the future at the same time, while also trying to keep the present from changing too much.
WALKER: The biggest thing I struggle with—and I think it’s a universal struggle—is timing, and the phrase product-market fit. It’s ‘Am I at the right event horizon with this idea and this methodology, and this kind of approach? And with the marketplace? Are all those things aligning nicely? Or are they completely, diametrically, on different trajectories?’ The timing and the relevance factors are the biggest things for me. I’ve noticed over my career that if the timing and relevance align really well, then you’ve got something magical. And if they don’t, if you’re just a little bit too early, you have to be careful not to completely abandon it, but you also have to acknowledge the fact that it’s too early. And then in that case, what can you do to ramp people into it? Or, and I haven’t had this happen personally, but what if you’re on the late end of something? Should you just completely reset and come back? Do you wait for another wave? So timing and alignment are the biggest challenges I would say I face. And that manifests itself in many ways, whether its finance industry machinations that are going to prevent me from getting capital that I need, or it’s the talent pool alignment—this person, this team, are not ready to work with me just yet.
AZAB: Generally, and I guess out of necessity, I try to view obstacles as a breeding ground for opportunity. There is always a gap you have to mind, and that gap is the one between theoretical inquiry, academic inquiry, and spaces that focus on the possibilities without translating the possibility to action that can be impactful on a societal and community “level.” That pattern has emerged as a challenge throughout every phase and marker of my personal and professional career. What I’ve found within ArtCenter is that, as students, we’re really prepared. We are industry focused, and we’re prepared to meet and exceed industry standards through our education, and our challenge becomes minding the gap between the theoretical and the commercial. I genuinely believe that as ArtCenter students, that we can bridge those two realms in a way that creates a culture that values the convergence of different disciplines and worldviews for the betterment of all, instead of simply continuing this cyclical nature of consumption production. There was a recent op-ed in the MIT Technology Review that had in big bold letters “Prioritizing abundance and access over profit will lead to another jump in what’s possible.” And I really do believe that. With the challenges that we all face, I try to come back to that.
