Northeastern alumni have a rich history—and a bright future—of bringing innovative businesses to life
By Elaine McArdle
(This article was published before Richard J. Egan’s death on August 28, 2009.)
Innovation doesn’t just happen. It grows from confidence, creativity, and hands-on experience. It flourishes in the right environment, and a Northeastern education—with its emphasis on co-op, global experience, and interdisciplinary research—is the ideal setting for bold thinking to take root.
Northeastern’s alumni are living proof. Take the five inventive entrepreneurs profiled here: Richard J. Egan and Roger Marino, cofounders of the multibillion-dollar technology giant EMC; venture capitalist Venetia Kontogouris; and businessmen Steven Shpiner and Dominic Coryell. All have drawn on their Northeastern experience to question old business models and ignite change within their industries.
Against the backdrop of the current economy, there’s a new sense of urgency driving imaginative thinking and the development of cutting-edge products. The parts of the world where innovation thrives most will be the places that succeed first in the new economy.
So how can Northeastern better prepare students to chase bold ideas from inspiration to implementation? It’s the next key chapter in Northeastern’s distinguished story. Fortunately, alumni are partnering to write it.
Venture capitalist Richard D’Amore, BA’76, has just invested $5 million to transform Northeastern’s capacity for rigorous innovation. Vital waves of innovation won’t emerge from a single discipline, he believes, but from the synergy that comes when traditional academic boundaries are blurred.
His multimillion-dollar investment will supercharge Northeastern’s capacity to support entrepreneurship at every turn, and infuse society with the creativity of tomorrow’s alumni.
And, as the alumni featured on these pages might attest, if anyone can think outside the box—then tear the box up and completely re-create it—it’s a Husky.
Richard J. Egan
He’s one of the most successful men in America.
In 1979, Richard J. Egan, E’61, H’95 (along with another entrepreneurial powerhouse, his Northeastern friend Roger Marino), founded Hopkinton, Massachusetts–based EMC Corporation, starting with just six employees.
Today, EMC is an S&P 500 company, the world’s leading supplier of computer memory storage and retrieval technology. It employs more than thirty-five thousand people worldwide, and has manufacturing and design centers in California, Massachusetts, and North Carolina, as well as Belgium, India, Ireland, and Israel.
In 1994, Inc. magazine named Egan “master entrepreneur of the year.” He served as EMC’s chairman until 2001. He’s now its chairman emeritus.
Egan hasn’t confined his achievements to the business world. From September 2001 to January 2003, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Ireland. A noted philanthropist, he was the major donor behind Northeastern’s state-of-the-art Egan Engineering/Science Research Center, which opened in 1996.
Yet, when asked, this tycoon counts his family as his greatest accomplishment. Married since 1956 to wife Maureen, he is the parent of five children and the grandparent of fourteen.
Egan believes Northeastern offered the key to his professional successes. “I don’t know of any university that provides their graduates with a more diverse experience, and hence better prepares them for the real business world,” he says.
The university’s ace in the hole, says Egan, is cooperative education. “I can’t say enough good things about co-op,” he offers. “With co-op experience, a Northeastern graduate comes out with a two- to three-year advantage over a student from a four-year program.”
Egan’s own astronomical post-college trajectory started with a rather simple goal: getting a job. By the time he graduated, he was already married with children and had served in the U.S. Marines. He was looking to earn a decent wage at a computer company, preferably in Massachusetts, so he wouldn’t have to relocate his family.
He interviewed with more than a dozen companies, saving the one where he really wanted to work for last, betting he’d master the art of the interview by then. “It seemed to have worked,” he recalls. “Their offer was ten dollars a month more than I had requested.”
Egan later went to graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT’s Draper Laboratory, he was part of the team that developed the Apollo Guidance Computer. He’d go on to work at NASA, Lockheed Aircraft, and Intel.
Then came the idea of launching a business with Marino.
“We both had good jobs and a wealth of experience—at least we thought so—in memory technology,” Egan says. “We also knew a lot of people who had started successful companies, and we thought if they could do it, we could, too.”
Initially, Egan and Marino had a third partner—a Mr. “C.”—who dropped out of the deal. By then, they’d already incorporated the company as “EMC.” “It would have cost us another eighty-five dollars to reincorporate,” Egan says, so they kept the name as it was.
It took six months for the company to achieve positive cash flow. Says Egan, “I vividly remember that, because it coincided with reaching our credit-card limits.”
At the outset, EMC sold computer-storage systems made by other companies. In 1981, the company sold its first self-manufactured product. It was so profitable, Egan says, “that we began to take ourselves seriously.”
By 1986, the company had gone public, making Egan and Marino very wealthy men. Egan says he’s particularly proud of the thousands of “good, clean, well-paying jobs” EMC has created in the United States and Ireland, where it opened a plant in 1988, years before the Irish economy began its historic growth spurt.
Praising his successors as chairman, Mike Ruettgers and Joe Tucci, for managing the company to even greater heights, Egan expresses satisfaction in the fact that “EMC products greatly improve the productivity of our customers—in particular, Americans, who are invariably the first adopters.”
Egan has received, among other recognitions, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s Patriot Award and the Jewish National Fund’s Tree of Life Award, and he’s been named one of Irish America Magazine’s top 100 Irish Americans. But, he cautions, “my advice to anyone aspiring to achieve these or similar awards is to forget about them and apply all your waking hours to your business and your family. The ultimate reward will be to see them grow and prosper.”
“I’m now working on my third attempt at retirement,” he reports. “Wish me luck in achieving this final goal.”
Roger Marino
My father was very disappointed when I said I was going into engineering,” says Roger Marino, E’61, H’96. “He wanted me to have my own business. It wasn’t until my uncle said that a lot of engineers have their own businesses that he calmed down.”
It turns out the uncle was right.
In 1979, Marino teamed up with classmate and friend Richard J. Egan to create EMC Corporation, a billion-dollar global company and one of the biggest success stories in Massachusetts business history.
EMC began by selling other manufacturers’ computer memory storage products, then started producing and selling its own. It’s currently the largest provider of data-storage platforms in the world, outpacing such competitors as IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
It’s also the only technology company to make the Fortune magazine list of the world’s ten most-admired companies for product quality and customer service. This distinction is really no surprise, since EMC has always emphasized customer service as the road to success.
“We were focused on the right thing, on the customer,” says Marino. “That, and focusing on the viability of the product, eventually held us in good stead.”
It was a mindset that separated EMC from other memory- system manufacturers, including industry giant IBM. “We were unique,” Marino says. “We didn’t become focused on how pretty our office was or how big our desks were. Dick and I were always focused on the fact that the customer was important.”
Did Marino envision all the home runs EMC would hit? Not really—he was too busy working. “People who are successful usually work toward the success, without looking up to grab the success right away,” he says.
He chose to attend Northeastern because of the co-op program. Among other co-op sites, he worked at Raytheon, the huge defense contractor in Waltham, Massachusetts. Co-op was ideal for an ambitious youngster, Marino remembers, because “you saw a business functioning. You absorbed the ins and outs of a company by just being there.”
He majored in engineering because he was good at math and science. “It was a very, very pragmatic decision,” he says. “I could make a good living as an engineer.”
After graduation, he worked at various computer companies, moving from engineering, to technical marketing, to sales. He’d invested in several unsuccessful ventures before he and Egan began talking about EMC.
Like any true entrepreneur, he didn’t let the risk deter him. “I had $5,000 in the bank, a $50,000 home with a $32,000 mortgage, and two girls about to go to college,” he recalls. “I didn’t think twice about it. Starting EMC was just the right thing to do.”
Marino was the company’s master salesman, landing its first order and, over the years, helping to build it into the mega-success it is today.
After retiring from the company as president in 1992, Marino decided to pursue the love affair with the movies he’d had since boyhood. He acted as an executive producer for such films as I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead; The Door in the Floor, based on the John Irving novel A Widow for One Year; and Stiffs, a comedy about a hearse driver filmed on location in the North End and other Boston locales.
He’s enjoyed his fortune in other ways, too, including purchasing the National Hockey League’s Pittsburgh Penguins for $40 million (he later sold the franchise), and investing in Broadway shows. He once made a bid to buy the Red Sox.
Although these endeavors are fun, Marino says, he finds sharing his success through philanthropy—including the money he gave to fund the construction of the Marino Recreation Center, one of Northeastern’s most iconic buildings—even more meaningful. He’s most proud, he says, “of being in the position to give back. If people realized how rewarding that is, we’d see more of it.”
Today, he helps burgeoning businesses as an angel investor. His advice for aspiring entrepreneurs is, like the man himself, very practical.
“Get a job; learn what’s going on,” he says. “Ask a lot of questions. Try to get a job that exposes you to a lot of areas of a company. Learn from it.
“Going out and learning from observation is a good way to achieve your own success.”
Venetia Kontogouris
Venetia Kontogouris, LA’74, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who’s helped launch more than a dozen companies, is a dynamo.
“There are people who, even when they’re young, don’t have energy,” says the broadly smiling Kontogouris, who came to Northeastern from her native Greece as a teenager and today travels the world helping new companies blossom. “I’m very blessed. If you’re blessed with energy and an attitude of learning, of exploring, think about the possibilities.”
Kontogouris embraces life with relish. She learned to ski downhill at forty-three and within days was hitting the black-diamond slopes. Every year, she returns to Greece and spends hours swimming in the ocean, to remind herself of nature’s vast power. On a recent trip to Boston, she bypassed staying in a luxurious hotel and bunked instead in a Northeastern dorm, where she could listen to students talk and get a window into future trends.
“So many people are afraid to move away from their comfort level, and I’m not,” says Kontogouris, who laughs often and heartily. “I’m totally opposite. I break the barriers.”
Consider her entrée into corporate America. After earning her MBA (and meeting the man who would become her husband) at the University of Chicago, Kontogouris landed an interview at IBM. But “they told me they don’t hire women with foreign accents,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Give me a chance.’”
They did. It wasn’t long before Kontogouris was named IBM’s Rookie of the Year and placed on the executive fast track. “It shows how you can change minds when you produce,” she says.
For the past thirty years, Kontogouris has done nothing but. Her broad resumé reflects her interest in creating and directing high-tech companies.
From 1983 to 1995, as a Dun & Bradstreet executive, she helped introduce a number of technology products. She’s held sales management positions at AT&T and IBM, and even launched her own telecommunications start-up.
Today, she is managing director at Trident Capital, a leading private-equity and venture-capital firm that helps entrepreneurs build information and software businesses, and manages more than $1.6 billion of capital. Among the companies she helped launch and now helps direct are Advantec; Infotrieve; and Outsource Partners International, a finance and accounting firm.
Although Trident injects fledgling companies with capital, the real thrill is helping them succeed, says Kontogouris, a member of Northeastern’s governing boards. “Working with a team and building the business is the most exciting element,” she says. “You have to have passion. It’s about building jobs and opportunities for people. I really believe in that.”
After Kontogouris’s parents in Athens lost everything during World War II, they started over from scratch and became very successful financially. Perhaps inspired by their example, she says, “I was always motivated to make my own money. At the age of twelve, I told my parents that. They were shocked I wanted to do something on my own.”
The family was supportive, though, and encouraged her to go to college in the United States. At Northeastern, she loved being able to explore different academic areas, including criminal justice, which ignited an early interest in international law and politics. “I also benefited a lot from many contacts with alumni, who shared their advice and experiences,” she remembers.
Like her parents—and despite her challenging career—she puts her children first, she says. Today, her son, Eric, is a Northeastern undergraduate. Her daughter, Danielle, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania this year.
In true entrepreneurial fashion, Kontogouris sees today’s grim economic climate as an opportunity.
“This is not a recession,” she says. “It’s a global reassessment of the economy. You have to take a breather and ask what that means. It means new, incredible, innovative ideas will come from our very young people. I really believe that. Innovations will come from the very young who say, ‘I want to create my own opportunities.’”
According to Kontogouris, “the promise of a completely new economy” will come from breakthrough technologies, particularly those related to nanotechnology and new building materials.
“It’s what I call human evolution,” she says. “It’s important to see and discover innovations.”
This will take hard work, of course. And she will be ready.
Steven Shpiner
When he was growing up in Miami, Steven Shpiner, BA’07, would grab whatever materials were lying around and construct toys for his neighborhood pals.
As he got older, Saturday mornings meant trips to Home Depot. “My friends and I would say, ‘What are we going to build this weekend?’” recalls Shpiner, who in high school had jobs making electric motors for airplanes and installing stereos and alarm systems in cars.
“I just always liked building things with my hands,” he says. Shpiner comes from a family with a long Northeastern lineage—his great-grandfather, great-uncle, father, aunt, and several other relatives are alumni—but it was the allure of the co-op program that sealed his decision to enroll at the university.
His choice of major—finance and entrepreneurship—surprised nearly everyone. “People would ask me, ‘Why not go into engineering?’” says Shpiner. His answer was simple: He had his eye on an entrepreneurial future, and he was sure studying business would be the best path for him.
And so today, just two years after graduation, Shpiner is operations manager at HypoSurface, a company he helped found.
Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, HypoSurface makes the world’s first 3-D display system, a new medium in which a flexible screen surface is physically moved by compressed air.
The technology, which has already won a number of major international awards, promises to revolutionize how information and images are displayed. It can be used in signage (imagine if the displays in Times Square could jut out toward you, then recede), in industrial applications, in product launches.
“One day, your TV at home may be moving in 3-D,” Shpiner says.
The shape-shifting surface can be programmed to react to sound or movement. “This is something people haven’t seen before,” says Shpiner. “It’s like looking at the ocean, or a fire, or the clouds.”
A billionaire recently hired HypoSurface to use its dazzling technology to dress up a birthday party. But the undulating screens aren’t just a new gizmo, Shpiner says—they’re a new way to communicate: “It’s about moving content in a form true to the world in which we live.”
Right now, HypoSurface has two full-time employees and five contractors who are brought in as needed. With the exception of Shpiner, they all work at or have a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As the operations head at the young company, Shpiner wears many hats. He makes sales calls. He arranges deals with vendors. He talks with clients and handles logistics. “And, by the way, you may have to take the trash out, too,” he adds. “Everything high and low must be done.”
Early in his Northeastern career, Shpiner helped a research scientist at the Barnett Institute of Chemical and Biological Analysis build a mass spectrometer. That experience set him up for his first co-op, at Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Bluefin Robotics, which makes remote-controlled submarines for the military. (Once, with just a few hours’ notice, Shpiner was sent to Norway for three days to help the U.S. Navy locate a missing submarine.)
Then an acquaintance insisted Shpiner needed to meet an MIT professor with a cool new idea. Shpiner sat down with the professor in a coffee shop. “He showed me the presentation for HypoSurface, and I was just like, ‘Oh, my God, I want to work for you, and we’re going to make this happen,’” he says.
Shpiner began helping refine the concept from his dorm room. When he realized he wanted fewer distractions, he moved into an apartment. His next two co-ops were at HypoSurface. He kept working to get HypoSurface off the ground even while taking classes.
“I absolutely could not have done it without Northeastern,” he says. “It was a supportive environment where I was able to take my real-world experiences and bring them into the classroom, and take what I was learning in class and use it at work.”
For his senior capstone project, Shpiner rewrote HypoSurface’s business plan—and won the university’s undergraduate business-plan competition. He also received a co-op award for entrepreneurship.
Shpiner is fueled by ambition. He works on HypoSurface from early morning to late at night, and most weekends, too. Plus, in his spare time, he’s launching another company, Case-X, which will sell durable cases he’s designed for high-end cameras. He says he recently heard that Outdoor Photographer magazine plans to feature Case-X in an upcoming story.
“I hate sitting still,” Shpiner says. “Sitting there doing nothing is burning time.”
Dominic Coryell(with Adam Jacknow, in a Garment Valet locker)
Dominic Coryell
He was a busy Northeastern senior. So busy that an interview with a reporter had to be squeezed in between a sales meeting and another business appointment.
At the ripe age of twenty-three, Dominic Coryell, BA’09, is already remarkably successful, the co-owner and CEO of Garment Valet, a high-tech laundry and dry-cleaning company serving Greater Boston.
For years, many Northeastern students looking for an affordable, efficient way to get their jeans and sweaters clean have turned to the company, launched nine years ago under the name Husky Express by Coryell’s business partner, Adam Jacknow, BA’02.
Now Garment Valet, which earned more than $925,000 in sales last year and serves more than a thousand Northeastern and non-Northeastern customers, is poised to continue its expansion, even as the darkening economy sounds the death knell for other laundry services.
“By 2011, I want to be in Philadelphia and Chicago,” says Coryell, a finance and accounting major who, before he graduated with honors in May, put in at least fifty hours a week on the business while juggling his classes and a serious relationship. “We’re definitely expanding nationally and, potentially, globally under a franchise model.”
As a measure of the business’s innovation, in November Coryell was chosen from among a thousand students at three hundred universities around the world for the Global Student Entrepreneur Award, known as the Heisman Trophy of entrepreneurship. The award, presented by Mercedes-Benz Financial and the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, gives Coryell more than $100,000 in cash and donated services from leading international entrepreneurs, including Web and public-relations support, general business consulting, and mentoring.
Coryell also received the Innovation Award from the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, a network of more than seven thousand business owners in thirty-eight countries. The prize recognized his company’s fully automated process for pick-up and next-day delivery of garments—and, in the words of award officials, its “creating efficiencies not commonly associated with the industry.”
Garment Valet developed a new model to produce these efficiencies. Whenever possible, it sets up a locker system in multiunit residential buildings. Customers are able to leave their dirty clothes in a locker. Garment Valet picks the clothes up, cleans them, and delivers them back to the locker by the following day. If a locker system isn’t available, customers may also choose to give Garment Valet a key to their apartment. These options spare customers’ having to travel to drop off their clothes or to wait around at home for delivery.
The company—which dropped “Husky Express” and adopted “Garment Valet” in an effort to create an international brand—also offers online order tracking and is committed to sustainability, including the use of green cleaning processes that reduce the waste traditionally associated with dry cleaning.
Coryell has always been a doer. When he was a high-school senior living outside New York City, he worked as a legal assistant at a Manhattan law firm, then delivered pizzas at night. He chose to go to Northeastern because it offered him scholarships and he liked the hands-on immediacy of the co-op program.
Little did he know he would complete his co-ops at his own company. His first week on campus, Coryell responded to an ad seeking a delivery driver at Husky Express, which Jacknow had started during his sophomore year. Coryell and Jacknow hit it off immediately, talking for eight hours that first day about how the company could grow.
Within a month, Coryell was handling sales, marketing, and financial duties there. Jacknow offered him a 49 percent share, and the two became partners.
What makes a great entrepreneur? “The ability to never take no for an answer, and to know that if you keep fiddling at something, it most likely will work out,” Coryell says. It’s important to embrace “good stress,” he adds. “I’m a big advocate of always being out of my comfort zones, and to always be trying harder.”
Northeastern professors, says Coryell, “have been great advocates” for his work. “They’ve been able to give me the flexibility to go to school and build a great company at the same time.”
He’s now working with the School of Technological Entrepreneurship to start another business, one that partners with the entertainment industry to sell tickets for events. The ink on his diploma is barely dry, mind you.
Elaine McArdle is a freelance writer who is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.