On Oct. 19 it was announced that MagnaQuest, a Hyderabad, India, company had acquired eVapt, an Austin company which has its roots with the Texas Evening MBA program (TEMBA). Both companies are involved in providing cloud computing solutions.

Shortly after the acquistion, TEMBA Director Trent Thurman interviewed Ranjit Nayak, MBA ‘07, who founded the company along with Divakar Jandhyala, MBA ‘07. Nayak can also be seen in a recent panel discussion about the start-up process and how the McCombs School’s entrepreneurship offerings, including the Moot Corp competition, helped in the process of building a successful venture such as eVapt. View the video.

Trent Thurman: First of all, congratulations on the news. I know this is an exciting and probably very satisfying accomplishment for you guys. Was acquisition always a part of the strategy or did the MagnaQuest deal come as a surprise?

Ranjit Nayak: Acquisition was the preferred exit at the very inception of the venture. It was therefore not a surprise.

TT: Give me a little background on what you guys were doing when you entered the program and whether or not you thought TEMBA would be a platform to launch your own venture?

RN: I was working as an integration manager at IBM Corporation when I started the evening program (Divakar was a product line development manager at BMC Software). As far as starting my own business, no, that was not on my mind when I entered the program. However, starting my own business has always been something I wanted to do.

TT: How did you and Divakar first meet and when did you realize you wanted to pursue this idea together?”

RN: Divakar and I had actually met socially before the TEMBA program, but we were in Bob May’s managerial accounting class and were fascinated by the use of activity-based costing and use of cost drivers for accounting. We felt that this should be applied in the computing industry.

TT: Very interesting.  Dr. May will love to hear that. Cloud computing technology was fairly new when you developed this idea, so take me from that managerial accounting class to the development of the idea.  In other words, exactly how was eVapt born?

RN: True, cloud computing was new. The idea was born out of problems seen in the enterprise software space but clearly the solution was more applicable in a SaaS ( Software as a Service) space which is now a subset of cloud computing. Incidentally, Divakar and I had a conversation about the problems faced by en-terprises en route to the first BIC (now Austin Intensives) prior to the start of classes.

TT: Can you define cloud computing in layman’s terms?

RN: In layman’s terms, cloud computing is the delivery and consumption of computing services as if it were a utility.

TT: I understand that you guys bounced a lot of ideas off of Daniel Nelson (TEMBA ’06 and founder of Phurnace Software) before your launch. How valuable was it to have someone like Daniel in your corner?

RN: That is correct. It was extremely valuable to have someone like Daniel to bounce ideas off. It was like driving in a thunderstorm following the tracks and tail lights of the car in front.

TT: Great analogy. Clearly, you and Divakar also did a lot of brainstorming and bouncing of ideas. What do you consider the strengths that each of you brought to the table?

RN: Both Divakar and I brought a track record of experienced software industry management capability.  Divakar brought some technology evaluation strength, while I had experience in customer engagement and professional services.

TT: Other than Moot Corp, what part of the TEMBA program best prepared you for launching this venture?

RN: Being part of the TEMBA program allowed us to participate in UT’s Idea 2 Product competition. Also, I took an entrepreneurship practicum that was simply the best preparation I could have hoped for. The class, taught by John Doggett, opened my eyes and let me consider my options.

TT: Tell me about the Moot Corp experience and how it helped refine your business plan.

RN: The preparation for Moot Corp gained in the New Venture Creation class allowed us to think through the issues rationally in gradual progression. The Moot Corp competition itself helped us identify gaps and holes in the business plan. The questions posed by the judges came from their own experiences. It was up to us to learn from their perspectives - and perhaps mistakes - without having to commit them ourselves.

TT: Obviously, you knew you were onto something when you won the McGinnis Venture Competition at Carnegie Mellon. Were you guys prepared to launch even without the validation of a competition such as McGinnis or Moot Corp?

RN: Interestingly, the decision to launch this venture was made before the McGinnis Venture Competi¬tion.  Divakar and I had quit our regular jobs by Jan 2007.

TT: Wow. So, how was eVapt initially funded and at what point did you get investors?

RN: eVapt was initially funded by our savings. The McGinnis Competition gave us almost $45,000 in cash and services, which kept eVapt going through the end of 2007.  We got angel funding in Jan 2008.

TT: So, back to the acquisition. I understand that eVapt will remain in Austin. Will you and Divakar stay with the firm?

RN: Yes eVapt will continue operations in Austin. Divakar plans to stay on with the firm.

TT: So, what’s next for you?  Any new ventures in the works?

RN:  I am definitely looking at all options at this time. A new venture is an option I am seriously consider-ing.

TT: Looking back over the last few years, is there any advice you would give current TEMBA students plan-ning on pursuing an entrepreneurial path upon graduation?

RN: Students must understand that entrepreneurship is a very tough proposition. Financial preparation and spousal support is absolutely essential before diving into it.  It is an emotional roller coaster, but very rewarding.

TT: Thank you Ranjit. Again, congratulations and best of luck to you and Divakar.  I look forward to hearing about your next adventure.

To learn more about eVapt, visit them online at http://www.evapt.com or follow them on twitter at http:// twitter.com/evapt.

Are you willing to obsess over costs, eat Ramen for dinner, toil far from the PR limelight, and build the business one customer at a time?

I walked the path over to Chris Treadaway’s blog, The Common Sense Web…An Entrepreneurs’ Blog, and was immediately taken by his posting on An Alternative Startup Approach. Treadaway quotes Rob Adams (one of the driving sparks behind the UT business school’s vibrant entrepreneurship program) at a recent Texchange event, saying that it is “easier for a startup to sell a major customer than it is to raise funding.”

Treadaway highlights a few of the reasons this is so, noting that even angel investors are seeking safe investments, as there isn’t much appetite for risk these days. He suggests that conditions as they are have created a temporary shift of power to the bootstrapping entrepreneur. Read his article for the details, the conclusion as I see it is this. How much do you want to bring your idea to market? Are you willing to obsess over costs, eat Ramen for dinner, toil far from the PR limelight, and build the business one customer at a time?  Read more.

No matter what anyone says, change takes energy - whether it’s positive or negative change.  We may tell ourselves that we embrace change and thrive on it, but the reality is that it can be stressful.  Change often triggers fear, one of the biggest impediments to success.

So, what is fear exactly?  At the most basic level, fear is resistance.  Let’s take the simple analogy of a thermostat to further explore this.  We are living creatures with systems that operate in a narrow range.  For example, the human body temperature is 98.6 degrees and blood pressure falls within a specific range.  So, in essence, your body has a particular “setting” on a thermostat.  If you change that setting even half a point, your body has to expend energy - so your body “resists” in order to conserve your energy and keep you exactly where you are.  When you are trying to make a change in your behavior, a similar process occurs.  Fear and other discouraging thoughts show up in order to keep things status quo.

So, how can you keep fear from holding you back? Here are five strategies to consider:
 

1. Tame your Gremlins

The “Gremlin” is the internal voice that makes us have second thoughts or fear change.  For example, your Gremlin might say “You’ll never find another job that pays this well and has this level of flexibility.”  Realize that the Gremlin does not always speak the truth.  Its function is to keep things exactly as they are…to stop you from making the change.  Pay close attention to what your Gremlin says to you, and develop strategies to counter its voice.  Depending on your circumstances, the Gremlin may be very powerful and you might need outside help to reduce the power of its voice.

2. Take small steps

Break change down into manageable pieces and tackle each piece one at a time.  This will break down your resistance, and make the change feel less insurmountable.

3.  Identify what is holding you back.  Be specific.

Let’s take the example of a man whose stomach turns upside down at the thought of giving a presentation.  What triggers his fear?  When he starts to think about it, he realizes that his fear surfaces only in presentations to his boss or peers.  After we dig a little deeper, he realizes that at the heart of it, his fear is really about appearing incompetent in front of his colleagues.  Now he has something concrete he can work to overcome.

4.  Play out your fear and develop a rational response

Play out a video of your worst fear.  What is happening? How likely is it that what you see in the video will happen?  What is the size of the risk (large, medium, small), and the probability of it occurring (high, medium, low)?  If your fear came true, how would you handle it?

When we go through these questions, we often recognize that what we have imagined is far worse than what might happen!  But even if our worst fear came true, having a game plan can make it less scary.

5.  Get support from others

Don’t try to take it all on by yourself.  Getting help from others will make you feel like someone cares about your success.  Create a support system for yourself with individuals who will encourage you and celebrate your successes - big and small.

Change can be hard work, so make sure you stack the odds in your favor.  If you need some support to achieve your goals, consider working with a coach.

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Neena Newberry is an executive coach and consultant based in Houston. She is the President of Newberry Executive Coaching and Consulting LLC and has over 16 years of experience coaching and advising clients in midsize to Fortune 500 companies. She works with motivated managers and leaders to improve their effectiveness, and has a passion for working with women in dual career families.

Contact: neena@newberrycoaching.com; 713-822-3032

Dr. Ronn will provide an overview of the financial markets’ forward-looking metrics: what they are, how they are obtained and the message they are conveying by focusing his talk on:

• Measuring the nervousness/uncertainty of equity, credit and commodity markets
• Assessing the status of credit markets
• Quantifying future inflation rates
• Forecasting crude-oil prices

“Equity, Credit and Commodity Markets: The Market’s Assessment of Where We Are Headed”

When: October 29, 6:00 p.m.
Where: CityPlace
2711 N. Haskell Ave.
Dallas, TX 75204
Cost: Today - $25, cash bar available.
After 10/27/09 online registration will be closed. Please pay $30 at the door.

Click here to RSVP.

Background on Dr. Ronn:

Dr. Ehud Ronn is a professor of finance and director of the Center for Energy Finance at the McCombs School of Business.

Dr. Ronn obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University and has published articles on investments and energy derivatives in both academic and practitioner literature.

Prior to joining the University of Texas at Austin in July 1988, Dr. Ronn was a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. While on a two-year 1991-93 leave of absence, Dr. Ronn served as vice president, Trading Research Group at Merrill Lynch & Co. Dr. Ronn has been the founding director of the Center for Energy Finance since 1997.

Since 1993, he has served as a consultant on interest rates and energy-commodities. In November 2004, Dr. Ronn was selected by Energy Risk to the “Energy Risk Hall of Fame.”

This short film explores the economic opportunity for Central Texas to leverage and build off its foundation in clean energy and technologies (CleanTech). Austin, Texas - a world-leader in semiconductor manufacturing, battery technology, and home to some of the largest Texas wind energy companies – is experiencing a wave of investment activity to establish itself as a national leader in CleanTech. A selection of the city’s many assets is listed below.

Austin Energy, one of the most progressive electric utilities in the nation, is opening the city’s electric grid to entrepreneurs through the “Pecan Street Project” – a initiative to make Austin a leader in “smart grid” and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle technology.

One of the largest solar PV power plants at 30MW was approved in 2009, and building-integrated solar PV manufacturer HelioVolt has made Austin its headquarters.

The Clean Energy Incubator, the first in the nation, provides seed-stage clean energy ventures with support for field-testing and commercializing their technology, and the University of Texas at Austin is training the future leaders of this emerging industry. The opportunity is here to capture this market – it only requires “the willingness and determination to lead.”

Pricing for plane tickets, car rentals and hotels is constantly changing. Why not for sporting events, too?

That’s what Barry Kahn wondered three years ago, when he was a University of Texas doctoral degree candidate in economics.

Convinced there was a business there, he teamed with UT MBA student Jiten Dalvi in 2007 to found Qcue, which has developed software that prices tickets based on fluctuating market factors.

A year later, their company swept the UT and Rice University business plan competitions, winning $327,000 in cash and services plus a year at the Austin Technology Incubator.

The founders have extensive academic credentials — Kahn, 27, holds a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in economics from the UT, as well as a bachelor of science in applied and engineering physics from Cornell University. Dalvi, 35, earned his MBA from UT’s McCombs School of Business and has a degree in mechanical engineering and a postgraduate diploma in business management he earned in India.

Read the full story at statesman.com or visit McCombs Today to listen to Kahn and Dalvi share their story along with other past Moot Corp competition participants from McCombs.

The 2009 ranking is based on survey responses from alumni in the Class of 2006 and school data typically from the 2008-2009 academic year or the most recent entering class (Fall 2008), depending on the question.

Click here to view the full ranking.

When: October 21, 7:15 p.m.-9:00 p.m.
Where: AT&T Executive Education & Conference Center, Room 106
1900 University Avenue
Austin, Texas 78705

Cost: $20 at door ($10 for Students and Staff)

After earning her MBA from McCombs in 1997, Rainey Knudson founded Glasstire, a non-profit online journal about the Texas visual arts scene. Not exactly the traditional MBA career path, but Knudson says her decision to follow her passions of art and writing is what has made her a successful entrepreneur.

McCombs Communications Director Dave Wenger spoke with Knudson about Glasstire’s new journalism model, social entrepreneurship and the sleeper arts scene in Texas. Here’s some of what Knudson had to say:

On gaining credibility:
“What we’re seeing strongly in the past 12 months is a real shift in how people regard websites in arts journalism, obviously across the board, and how people take far more seriously the idea that a great blogger can self edit. They don’t have to have an editor to be taken seriously. And websites are the critical hubs for how everybody gets information for everything, not just the arts. So we’ve seen a huge transition in how things are regarded.”

On the decision to operate as a non-profit:
“Very simply, within about six months of launching Glasstire it became painfully clear this was never going to be a profitable, for profit enterprise. I’d talked with some of the Houston foundations and they said it would be something they’d be interested in looking at if we got our 501(c)(3), which we did. So one of the things with arts journalism now is people are wondering if there is a for-profit model that will work for arts journalism. And there are a lot of for-profit models out there, magazines and a couple of websites, but people are still feeling their way with it.”

On the Texas art scene:
“The Texas art scene doesn’t enjoy the stature it really deserves, and it’s my mission to help get the word out about it and help bring it to a larger audience and help shine light on the artists who are working here.

There’s this sense that yes there are some of these institutions like the Menil Collection in Houston or the Dallas Museum of Art or other places in the Midwest or Southwest and yes they’re fine, and okay there might be a few artists, a handful of artists around who have real talent, and then they move to New York or LA and get serious. But really, that’s [Texas] not where the action is. And that’s just simply not the case.

There’s less of a microscope on what people are doing and there’s more freedom to get really innovative and that’s what’s exciting about the Texas art scene, and that’s why I chose early on to focus on it.”

On following your passion:
“I feel really proud that I have built this thing. Yes it’s a nonprofit, and that’s a totally different business model but it is a business and we do employ people and we’re keeping Texas artists who might not have other outlets or might not have had other outlets before Glasstire, we’re giving them an opportunity to stay in Texas. In our small nonprofit way we’re really trying to cultivate the art scene and the writing scene here. So that’s the thing I’m most proud of, I’ve created something that gives employment to people, and that is helping to celebrate something I am very passionate about which is aesthetics and the arts in my home state.

If you are excited about something and you feel like there’s a real need for it, you should go for it. Life is short.”

For the full interview transcript and mp3, visit Dave’s blog.

Post a comment and tell us about your favorite reunion moment or view more photos on your class’ Facebook page!