Tag: Cliff Holekamp



At a farewell reception in his honor, Cliff Holekamp greets Mahendra Gupta, the former Olin dean who hired him as the first full-time entrepreneurship professor for the business school.

Since starting work on his MBA at WashU Olin in 1999, Cliff Holekamp’s career has been deeply entwined with the campus.

Now, after he launched a startup as a student, earned that MBA in 2001, joined the faculty in 2008, taught entrepreneurship for nearly 12 years, started 14 courses in the discipline and helped more than 200 students launch their own startups, Holekamp says it’s time to disentangle himself from Olin.

Holekamp is retiring from his teaching post effective June 30 to work full-time at Cultivation Capital, the St. Louis-based venture capital firm he cofounded. Work there, he says, has become too consuming to fully focus on both that and his teaching responsibilities.

“I didn’t want to be the guy who is here in body, but not in spirit,” Holekamp said from his office in Simon Hall. “I wanted to leave knowing that I put everything into my job here every day.”

The news sparked an outpouring of reaction from former students, who praised Holekamp’s passion for their ideas and the way he urged them to test themselves.

“In him, I have found a champion—someone who believes in me and challenges me to surpass my own expectations,” said Nisa Qais, AB ’12, founder of Arya Mental Health, a San Francisco-based nonprofit. “He has been a defining highlight of my WashU experience, and I am beyond grateful for his continued presence in my life.”

Chisom Uche, AB ’10, who minored in entrepreneurship, added that “Cliff’s classes were unlike any I had taken. They tested not only creativity, but also the ability to execute within a team. Ultimately, Cliff’s classes prepared leaders for the real world.”

Getting real

Holekamp dove into “the real world” in the midst of his own MBA education when he founded a startup called Foot Healers, a one-stop shop for podiatric care. He later sold the business, though he remains connected as an adviser.

At the time, Olin Professor Bart Hamilton was teaching entrepreneurship part-time when the school offered only two courses—an introductory class and the Hatchery, designed as a launchpad for student startups. Hamilton brought on Holekamp as an adjunct to take on the intro course. He took on the Hatchery course when the instructor took ill.

Soon, former Dean Mahendra Gupta asked Holekamp to join the faculty full-time as Olin’s first dedicated entrepreneurship professor. He never looked back.

He codeveloped the entrepreneurship minor at WashU, pioneered off-campus courses with St. Louis’s Cortex and T-Rex incubators, advised senior campus leaders on entrepreneurship education, participated in searches for the Skandalaris Center’s director and the Olin dean (leading to Mark Taylor’s appointment) and a long list of other accomplishments.

“Cliff has made significant contributions to Olin,” Dean Taylor said in a tribute at Holekamp’s retirement reception. “Cultivation Capital’s gain is our great loss.”

“The school has been amazing in giving me the autonomy to build the entrepreneurship program and the freedom to collaborate with the other WashU schools and the community,” Holekamp said. “They saw the value of entrepreneurship for our students and for the strategy of the school.”

What’s endured, what’s changed

Reflecting on changes at the business school since he started, Holekamp still appreciates the intimate class sizes and personal relationship faculty members cultivate with students. At the same time, he’s thrilled at the expansion of courses, the early efforts to integrate entrepreneurship in the curriculum and the immersion of global experiences in courses and practicum projects. That’s an innovation he credits to the model pioneered in the weeklong venture consulting in Budapest course he launched.

“Getting entrepreneurship adopted as one of the four strategic pillars of the school is the capstone of my work at Olin,” Holekamp said. “We have worked to add the courses and programs needed to raise our entrepreneurship program from unranked to seventh in the country. The next phase will be to integrate entrepreneurship and innovation perspectives throughout the entire curriculum.”

Student reactions

“Cliff is a champion for his students and an ambassador for the road less traveled. While many of my classmates were pursuing more traditional post-MBA jobs, through Cliff’s guidance I was able to learn about career paths in the startup community.” Elise Hoffman, AB 2011, MBA 2016, principal at Cultivation Capital.

“He has always been direct, unambiguous and insightful when providing guidance or critique. I’ve worked with him for about five years at Cultivation Capital and Wash U (as a student and then employee) and his thoughts and opinions are always interesting to hear as they are very well formulated and succinct.” Matt Plummer, MBA ’18, principal, The Yield Lab.

“Cliff is like the ultimate matchmaker to connect people and talent in the WashU and STL startup space. As I was trying to grow a nonprofit, he helped me access resources I didn’t even realize existed.” Elise Hastings, MBA ’19, former managing director of Givable, transitioning after a move to Denver.

“Professor Clifford Holekamp is by far one of the most positive and powerful influence in my development as a young entrepreneur. No other professor has ever devoted such critical attention to my academic development, working with me to fine-tune my projects and offering feedback in ways that allowed me to mature.” Hannah Perl, BSBA ’17, account manager at Invisibly, a startup with Jim McKelvey.

Pictured above: At a farewell reception in his honor, Cliff Holekamp greets Mahendra Gupta, the former Olin dean who hired him as the first full-time entrepreneurship professor for the business school.




Jim Enright, senior vice president for development at LockerDome, one of Cultivation Capital

A major St. Louis venture capital firm—which includes three WashU alumni among its cofounders—has released an analysis that shows Washington University accounts for more employees in its investment portfolio than any other university.

Cultivation Capital has invested in more than 100 early-stage startups since it was founded in 2012. Combined, those portfolio companies employ 84 WashU alumni—far and away the most of any university. The University of Missouri-Columbia was second with 52 alumni at Cultivation Capital companies, then the University of Missouri-St. Louis with 39.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Saint Louis University rounded out the top five with 36 and 32, respectively.

“WashU is bringing world-class talent to the region,” said Cliff Holekamp, a Cultivation Capital cofounder and senior lecturer in entrepreneurship at Olin. Thanks to the pedigree of its cofounders, the fact that four out of 11 of its employees are WashU alumni—and the trend among its portfolio companies — “I see Cultivation Capital as being an external validation of WashU’s successful focus in entrepreneurship,” Holekamp said.

The firm’s employment analysis also showed that its firms have contributed at least 2,586 new jobs to the economy in firms based in St. Louis, around the country and around the world. The largest share of those employees—19 percent—are working in St. Louis. More than 11 percent work in Silicon Valley, 6 percent in Chicago, and about 4.5 percent in New York City.

The firm used LinkedIn data to determine how many people its portfolio firms had employed, where they lived, and which schools they attended.

LockerDome, a St. Louis-based technology firm, is among Cultivation Capital’s portfolio companies with more than $18 million invested—and a number of WashU grads on the payroll. LockerDome’s Jim Enright, senior vice president for business development and marketing (not a WashU grad himself) tattooed Cultivation Capital’s logo to his bicep after one of its funding rounds.

Holekamp noted that “despite having international reach, 20 percent of our jobs are being created here.” About a quarter of the jobs created among Cultivation companies were in engineering; 21 percent in business development; 13 percent in information technology; and 13 percent in sales.

About 11 percent of employees in Cultivation firms classified themselves as simply in “entrepreneurship.”

Holekamp said the analysis was a great illustration of the big things that can happen among smaller companies. “There is too much emphasis on major corporate hirings and firings,” he said. “All along, in the background, we have small companies hiring.”




By Kurt Greenbaum

This article was originally published in the 2017 Olin Business Magazine.

As a first-year business student, Hannah Perl found inspiration for a startup. As a sophomore in her first entrepreneurship class, she gained the motivation to launch it. As a senior, she had the savvy to sell it for a five-figure payday and parlay her skills into a job with one of the rock stars of St. Louis’ startup community.

Along the way, her entrepreneurial education at Washington University carried her to Budapest to consult for an Eastern European startup and to the streets of St. Louis for another classroom-based consulting gig.

In June, Perl (BSBA ’17) sold Pyramid Promotions, her event management and promotion company targeting young audiences. Today, she’s chief of staff for Jim McKelvey, the St. Louis entrepreneur and financier who’s had a hand in Square and LaunchCode.

In many ways, Perl embodies the entrepreneurial spirit at Washington University—a spirit Olin educators intend to infuse into every student, whether they’re destined for a career at a major corporation or a newly conceived startup.

“That’s the biggest effect Washington University’s had on me,” Perl said. “It completely defined my path for where I am today.”

Students are engaged in consulting projects for startups around the block and around the globe. They’re partnering with WashU’s Brown School of Social Work to learn about and launch social enterprises. They’re earning stipends from the Weston Career Center for internships with startups instead of traditional Fortune 500 jobs.

Dean Mark Taylor wants his message to be clear:

“Every business student today must understand how to think like an entrepreneur.”

Mark Taylor

“Being entrepreneurial, regardless of the size or scope of your organization, is absolutely imperative for the mindset of future business leaders,” said Taylor, who has made entrepreneurship a key tenet of the school’s new strategic plan.

Established companies increasingly demand bold ideas and innovative thinking, said Taylor, whose plans include putting students in close contact with entrepreneurs already in the marketplace.

Nimble, innovative, creative

For years, Olin has promoted entrepreneurial education and supported student startups through competitions, classwork, and experiential opportunities. That work has put Washington University squarely in the midst of a trend that has swept business schools since 1985.

At that time, according to the Kauffman Foundation, business schools offered about 250 classes in entrepreneurship.

By 2012, the number exploded twentyfold, with more than two-thirds of business schools offering courses on the subject. Of the 1,250 business incubators in the United States at the time of the study, about a third were based at universities.

Numbers also show that today’s businesses—large and small, established or emerging—need entrepreneurial leaders. A 2013 Harvard study showed failure rates between 70 and 90 percent for large corporate entrepreneurship efforts—often referred to as “intrapreneurship.” The numbers suggest demand for leaders with the time, talent, and vision to drive change.

“The war for talent has just started,” Deloitte asserted in a 2015 white paper devoted to corporate entrepreneurship. “However, some companies fail to foster a source of great talent: intrapreneurs. Encouraging employees in intrapreneurial thinking will lead to a growing number of high potentials.”

Meanwhile, startups have a growing appetite for MBAs with entrepreneurial skills.

The Graduate Management Admission Council this year reported that 75 percent of startups planned to hire recent MBA graduates, up from 52 percent in 2016.

“We’re looking for tenacity, grit, can-do, quitting-is-not-an-option attitudes.”

Daniel Bentle (MBA ’13), director of Olin’s Center for Experiential Learning, which leads several initiatives in the strategic plan.

They include a finance and accounting clinic in which master’s students provide free services to area startups and an international impact initiative that “takes our consulting services global” as select students work with social enterprises in developing countries.

“It’s about infusing the nimble, innovative, and creative spirit of entrepreneurial management through the cases we teach, in the projects students undertake, and in the community,” said Todd Milbourn, vice dean and Hubert C. and Dorothy R. Moog Professor of Finance.

Seizing on the need for proactive, nimble, and interdisciplinary thinking, several parts of the strategic plan focus on getting students outside the classroom, learning how entrepreneurs confront problems, grow their businesses—and even deal with failure.

Borderless classrooms

For example, students from across the university are invited to apply for two different entrepreneurship career treks. One trek will visit executives at mature startups, the other will go inside established corporations that have launched intrapreneurial teams. The Weston Career Center organized the first entrepreneurship trek in March.

In a whirlwind two-day visit to New York City, students visited six companies—some new, some well established—including Nomad Financial, which develops financial analysis technology, and Woosh Beauty, which develops innovative makeup and beauty products.

Karen Heise, interim director of the career center, said students appreciate rubbing shoulders with executives who demonstrate innovative thinking and problem solving across a range of industries and corporate structures.

“Our students have a very strong entrepreneurial spirit,” Heise said, “but they don’t all want to start their own companies.”

The career center is also the hub of another off-campus initiative: the Entrepreneurship Summer Stipend Award. Launched in the spring, the program awarded up to $5,000 to each of four students who wanted to forego traditional MBA internships for the freedom to explore and develop their entrepreneurial skills.

“There’s so much pressure to get a high-paying summer internship at a top firm,” said Josh Henschen (MBA ’18), a recipient of the new entrepreneurship stipend. “Thanks to this support, I could afford to veer off that corporate path and pursue alternative career possibilities.”

Inspired by classmates in Cliff Holekamp’s introductory entrepreneurship class, Henschen’s mind overflowed with startup ideas—diverting him from his intended career path in consulting. Holekamp, senior lecturer in entrepreneurship, academic director for entrepreneurship, and director of the Entrepreneurship Platform, persuaded Henschen to apply for the stipend.

“In certain fields, there are very clear career paths,” Holekamp said. “MBA finance students have traditionally gone to Wall Street or banking for summer internships that often result in job offers. But for those interested in entrepreneurship, the options aren’t as obvious or lucrative. We really wanted to normalize the summer internship experience for students who want to pursue entrepreneurship.”

So rather than “giving up” a summer internship, Henschen’s resume shows that he won a summer stipend fellowship, which let him spend the summer in Bulgaria evaluating the viability of several startup ideas. His first—a chain of hostels for Eastern European travelers—still needs development, due to unstable real estate prices.

He’s since spoken to Bulgarian diplomats, importers, automotive industry experts, and soybean growers as he evaluates other startup ideas.

“It’s changing as I learn,” Henschen said. “But honestly, that’s the whole point of this summer. I needed to learn by doing.”

The experience has given Henschen the opportunity to test what he’s learned at Olin across a variety of disciplines—corporate finance, operations, marketing, sales, product development, and accounting. That cross- disciplinary experience is key to what Olin educators say entrepreneurship demands.

“This can be a way of thinking rather than just about going off and creating a company,” said Barton H. Hamilton, Robert Brookings Smith Distinguished Professor of Economics, Management, and Entrepreneurship and the academic advisor for the Center for Experiential Learning. “Students can take this way of thinking about combining resources in a different way, empowering them to bring that thinking to their organization.”

Culture of collaboration

Increasingly, students are eager to apply their business savvy and entrepreneurial spirit to some form of public good. Oft-reported statistics show that social impact education was virtually nonexistent even 10 years ago. Now, half the world’s top business schools offer it.

Olin is expanding its commitment to that sector by collaborating with the Brown School of Social Work to create a social entrepreneurship innovation accelerator. Led by Heather Cameron, the Brown School’s Michael B. Kaufman Professor of Practice in Social Entrepreneurship, WashU has retooled its existing social entrepreneurship competition.

In the past year, Cameron’s classes have evaluated a host of social startups and recommended several for seed funding to explore their viability. Two students are interning for two of the startups. The idea, Cameron said, is to “move away from prize culture and into investment culture.” Meanwhile, the fledgling accelerator is actively seeking investors for existing startups that are ready to move to the next level.

The future, embodied

To see how far entrepreneurship education has come at Olin—and where it can continue to go—look no further than the experience of Elise Hastings (PMBA ’19). From a business incubator in downtown St. Louis, she embodies the many ways a WashU business student can intersect with entrepreneurship education at Olin.

She’s executive director for Givable, a microgiving platform designed to reach the next generation of charitable donors. Founded by Cultivation Capital, the Staenberg Family Foundation, and the Regional Business Council, Givable hired Hastings as its sole employee in October 2016. She quickly applied her accounting, management, and marketing skills from the classroom.

In the spring, Hastings worked with the Weston Career Center and hired intern Nathan Vogt (MBA ’18), among the first summer stipend recipients. He worked with Hastings to develop a marketing pipeline for Givable. “I can sit back and think a little more about strategy and the big picture,” Vogt said. “That’s incredibly helpful to Elise.”

As the operator of a startup, Hastings engaged one of Holekamp’s student consulting teams through the CEL’s Entrepreneurial Consulting Team course. For the market analysis project, the student team recommended that Givable target small businesses as customers.

“I’m wearing all the different hats of an entrepreneur.” Hastings said. “It’s been so valuable to take what I learned in class and apply it to my work at Givable.”




Starting in the Spring, WashU undergraduate students will be able to take an exciting course combining entrepreneurship, cybersecurity, and national defense.

“Laboratory for Defense and Corporate Cybersecurity Innovation” is a joint entrepreneurial lab between WashU, Saint Louis University, CORTEX, and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, where students will solve real-world problems facing the Department of Defense and corporate America in the realm of cybersecurity.

The course is coordinated by Olin’s Academic Director for Entrepreneurship, Cliff Holekamp, and will be co-taught by Adam Timm, EMBA 47 and the Digital Transformation Chief at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

“We are leveraging the world-class resources that we have right here in St. Louis with the NGA, CORTEX, and our strong corporate cybersecurity community,” says Cliff Holekamp, Senior Lecturer and Academic Director for Entrepreneurship. Classes will be held at CORTEX, and student-developed solutions could evolve into startups or be adopted by industry leaders. The course is open to all undergraduates at WashU.

Students will not only develop prototypes to address some of the most pressing cybersecurity challenges facing clients, but will also hone strategies for selling the concept to the Department of Defense and Fortune 500 companies.

“This course is the embodiment of the collaborative spirit that we have been developing in the St. Louis entrepreneurial community,” says Holekamp. “I have also been delighted by the continued spirit of collaboration between Olin and the School of Engineering, with whom we developed this course.”

Enrollment for MGT 460N – Laboratory for Defense and Corporate Cybersecurity Innovation is happening NOW! Sign up via WebSTAC to be part of the lab’s inaugural class in Spring 2018.