T100 Mentors: Steering Faculty
Start-ups Towards Success
At their best, universities are dynamic and fertile environments for creativity and innovation. Countless technological, scientific, and medical advancements have been conceived in university laboratories. But bringing faculty inventions to market takes time, money, and business expertise: onerous prerequisites that can quickly discourage budding faculty entrepreneurs.
Enter the University of Virginia T100 Alumni Mentoring Program, based in the Office of Economic Development. T100 was initiated in 2003 by alumnus George McCabe in order to match alumni business expert volunteers with University start-up companies, providing a crucial bridge between faculty innovations and the marketplace.
T100 mentors provide a critical service to the University community. Not only do they make a financial contribution that is used to support burgeoning U.Va. companies, they also commit to sharing their time, expertise, and business contacts.
“T100 provides early stage companies access to experts at a critical point in their life cycle,” says mentor Greg Giammittorio. “It is a time when many companies, without the appropriate outside advisors due to budget constraints, make choices that come back to haunt them, significantly diminishing the value of the enterprise.”
Giammittorio is one of several mentors who have been with the program since its inception. Five years and 14 companies later, these mentors continue to guide promising companies towards success. These charter mentors cite giving back to the University as a major incentive for their tenure.
“It is gratifying to see the talent that the University has been able to attract. The T100 Program also helps retain faculty by offering support and opportunities that other universities may not,” says long-term mentor Elizabeth Roark.
Charter mentor David Peyton notes that mentoring gives him a revealing, behind the scenes look at what it takes to make a start-up succeed. “You have to do a whole lot of things right!” says Peyton. “You must persuade others that it’s in their interest to join in as funders or customers. You can certainly read good stories in the business press, but in T100 we’re talking about real decisions by real live people against real deadlines.”
Roark has seen the impact of T100 mentoring on the survival of faculty ventures. “I have seen potentially catastrophic mistakes averted in areas such as contract and licensing negotiations, hiring, and the process and documentation of raising capital,” says Roark. “I've also seen the benefit of having outside perspectives help T100 companies see the bigger picture and prioritize their efforts better, which can be critical when working with busy faculty members and often part-time management teams during the early stages of forming the company.”
T100 Charter Mentors
- Chip Stelljes, President and Chief Investment Officer of the Gladstone Companies
- Ned Wheeler, President and Chief Operating Officer of FBR Investment Management, Inc. and Head of the FBR Asset Management Group
- David Peyton, Washington representative for the Vermeer Manufacturing Company of Iowa and Click Bond, Inc. of Nevada
- Ed Hott, Director, Strategic Relationships, Microsoft Exchange
- John Skeele, Investment and Capital Markets technology services group, Freddie Mac
- Greg Giamittorio, Partner in the Northern Virginia office of Morrison & Foerster
- Gerry Brunk, Managing Director at Lumira Capital
- Elizabeth Roark, Vice President of Administration for a Richmond, VA based start-up
< Back to T100 |
