1871 CEO, Northwestern alumnus Howard Tullman talks entrepreneurship
Hal Jin,
Reporter
January 6, 2015 •
January 6, 2015 •
Howard Tullman, CEO of startup incubator 1871,
returned to his alma mater Tuesday to give a lesson on entrepreneurship.
More than 50 people attended Tullman’s
(Weinberg ’67, Law ’70) lecture, this year’s Harvey Kapnick Business
Institutions Program’s Lehman Brothers Lecture, in the Ford Motor Company
Engineering Design Center.
Tullman advised audience members on how to
make a startup successful and explained the mindsets of successful
entrepreneurs.
“We’re not in the business of making money,” he
said. “We’re in the business of people who want to make a difference.”
The company, named for the rebuilding
of Chicago after the 1871 fire, currently houses 350 digital
technology startups. The hub, which Tullman said he thought was even more
selective than NU, has graduated 65 companies.
“If you’re doing this, you need to care about it
and care about it daily because it’s really hard,” Tullman said. “At
1871, we’ve said we don’t need another 17 dating sites. You don’t want to spend
a lot of time putting lipstick on a pig — you could be doing more important
things.”
Tullman, who has been called the “the champ of serial entrepreneurs,” has
founded more than a dozen high-tech companies over the past 45 years with more
than $1 billion in exits. Aside from his work at 1871, he is also a general
managing partner of venture funds and an adjunct professor at the Kellogg
Graduate School of Management, where he lectures about entrepreneurship.
Tullman said that because of his decade of
experience as a lawyer and his background as an engineer, he’s not like other
entrepreneurs.
“I’ve been incredibly lucky to have started 12
startups when ordinarily having a 3-out-of-10 success rate would be considered
very successful,” he told The Daily.
During his presentation, Tullman emphasized the
importance of executing good plans “violently” and not waiting to form the
perfect plan. In today’s age, all the answers are available and “I don’t know”
is the equivalent of saying “I’m lazy,” Tullman said.
“Work is, in the real world and in any world,
more important than creativity, more important than talent, more important than
sheer brains,” he said. “We might not be the smartest person in the world, but
at the end of the day we will work the hardest.”
An incubator space for NU startups modeled after
1871 is slated to launch June 16, said Alicia Loffler, executive director of
the Innovation and New Ventures Office. The Garage, located near the Henry
Crown Sports Pavilion, aims to provide a space for aspiring student
entrepreneurs, she said. When those students graduated, they’d hope to move
their businesses into 1871.
One student interested in using the Garage is Cem
Ozer, a freshman who attended the lecture.
“He gave some really good advice,” the McCormick
student said. “The talk was not on how to start a startup, but on how to
be an entrepreneur.”
Ozer started a textile company in high school
that specialized in producing cold weather products. Although his company
failed due to too much competition, Ozer said he wants to use the
Garage when he comes up with more ideas.
“There are plenty of students here who are
intelligent who mainly go into consulting positions, but some take a little
risk,” said Patty FitzGibbons, assistant director of BIP. “The lecture
gives them maybe a little more strength to be able to pursue other options.”
Those other options might be difficult, if
Tullman is to be believed.
“The great thing is today just about everyone
wants to be an entrepreneur,” Tullman said. “If we knew how long a path it’d
be, none of us would’ve done it.”
When an audience member asked what
Tullman does when he can’t focus, the entrepreneur let out a short laugh.
“That’s not my problem,” he said.
