Tag: Undergraduate

Nate Maslak, BSBA ’11, and the company he cofounded and leads—Ribbon Health—landed a $43.5 million Series B investment in November.

General Catalyst led the investment with participation from new and current investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, BoxGroup, Rock Health and Sachin Jain.

The funding is a big deal. “This funding will enable us to accelerate and scale Ribbon Health, creating even more value for our partners with exceptional talent and technology. We will expand our reach across health plans, provider organizations, and digital health solutions,” according to an announcement on Ribbon’s website.

“Ultimately, Ribbon will become the connective tissue that allows patients to find the care they need across any touchpoint in the healthcare system.” 

The company had secured three earlier seed funding rounds. The Series A $10.25 million round led by Andreessen closed on February 27, 2020.

“Nate was a rock star entrepreneurship student as an undergrad at Olin,” former Olin entrepreneurship professor Cliff Holekamp said at that time. “His success is no surprise.”

Cofounders meet in grad school

As the story goes, Maslak and Ribbon cofounder Nate Fox met at Harvard Business School. Both wanted to help family members find the care they needed. That’s because both had watched parents and grandparents endure tests and unhelpful referrals, while spending thousands. They decided to try to help.

In 2016, they launched HealthWiz. HealthWiz evolved to Ribbon to provide patients with a seamless way to navigate healthcare across checking symptoms, researching conditions, finding doctors and estimating costs of care.

The issue became clear. As they helped clients find doctors, according to Ribbon’s website, the team discovered the doctor-data-problem. It included wrong phone numbers, old addresses, out-of-network doctors and physicians who no longer practiced.

Data flaws at the root

Data on medical providers, including address and phone number, are only 48% accurate, according to a press release from Ribbon.

The flaws directly affect patients who want to compare procedure prices. As it turned out, one in three patients were skipping care due to cost concerns. Therefore, “there is a critical need for accurate data on providers, specialties, and insurance that takes price transparency and quality into account.”

Consumers can easily find the address for a local restaurant, Maslak said. The same can’t be said for patients. They might be looking for a phone number to make an appointment for a critical MRI. Or they might want to confirm they are seeing a clinician who is in-network and of high quality. Malslak wants “no unexpected costs associated with their care visit.”

Ribbon’s application programming interface (API) delivers data across providers, insurance, conditions and procedures treated. Plus it supplies cost and quality metrics.

Ribbon has raised a total of $55 million in funding, according to the press release.

WashU Olin’s BSBA program flew up eight spots to No. 4 in Poets & Quants for Undergraduates‘ 2022 ranking of four-year undergraduate programs, released last week. In its report on the ranking, P&Q took note of Olin’s strong third in the ranking’s admissions category and fourth in career outcomes.

“Our BSBA program is one of the jewels in Olin’s crown,” Olin Dean Mark P. Taylor said. “We are proud of the strength of the program and the remarkable alumni it has produced. We have faced strong competition over the past few years, with a number of leading business schools entering the full-time BSBA space for the first time.”

The P&Q ranking equally weights three major categories—admissions standards, alumni experience and career outcomes. This year, the online business education site tweaked its methodology “to accommodate for universities going standardized-testing optional because of the pandemic or dropping standardized tests altogether.”

Taylor said Olin’s team has worked continuously to innovate on and improve the program, with a focus on adding more high-impact experiences for our students, including residencies at the Brookings Institution and more experiential, global and entrepreneurial opportunities.

Students also benefit from a recent redesign of Olin’s Weston Career Center, he said, which now provides dedicated career advisors who follow students throughout their college journey, along with industry experts and a business development team that opens career doors to both students and alumni.

Though the P&Q ranking gave a strong showing to Olin’s admissions and career outcomes, Taylor took note that “the results show areas for improvement” related to the school’s 29th-place finish in the alumni survey section.

Taylor said faculty and staff are conducting a deep review and update of the BSBA curriculum and program.

Wharton Business School topped the 2022 P&Q ranking, followed by Georgetown University and the University of Southern California. After WashU Olin, the University of Virginia rounds out the top five.

An amazing story about Olin alum and WashU athlete Justin Hardy, BSBA ’21, is making the rounds.

Hardy, 22, graduated in December after just three-and-a-half years—with a double major in accounting and finance while also playing a sport.

“What Justin is doing right now is a miracle,” Jack Nolan, a WashU basketball player who is teammate of Hardy, recently told television station KSDK-Channel 5’s Frank Cusumano.

What Hardy is doing is playing on while he battles stage 4 stomach cancer.

“Hardy is a really good basketball player,” KSDK reports. “He does all of the little things that makes teams great, and the Bears are just that. They are 12-1 on the season and are ranked No. 4 in the country.”

Hardy got the news of his cancer last April. At the time, he was dead lifting 450 pounds.

“The sadness was really tough at first just because I felt my life was kind of closing in on me,” Hardy told Cusumano in this piece, which aired January 17. “And there wasn’t going to be all the things that I loved in my life. I felt like most of things were gone and I was finished playing basketball.”

Hardy wasn’t finished. Athletes have come back after dealing with cancer, but how many play through the treatment?

‘Not like most’

“The prognosis isn’t pretty, but I am not like most,” he told KSDK. “This is pretty rare to see in a 21-year-old. My age and my health status are two things I really have going for me.

“You have to live your life. I am living in some of the best days of my life. This is one of the best years of my life that I have lived. I want to embrace the moment I am living in. Coming back and playing basketball and finishing my degree are two things that I really wanted to do.”

• See the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story “Through cancer, Washington U. basketball player shows ‘he’s just built different’.”

Capacity, the St. Louis-based artificial intelligence software startup led by Olin alum and former Answers CEO David Karandish, plans to grow its team and expand its technology after closing its Series C financing.

The company announced an additional $27 million in Series C financing on January 19, closing out the round at more than $38 million.

To date, Capacity has raised more than $62 million, according to a press release from the company. The latest round, which comes on the heels of recognition from the EdTech Breakthrough Awards, FinTech Awards 2021 and KMWorld’s AI50, was led by existing investors.

Support automation

“The future of work is here,” said Karandish, a serial entrepreneur who received his BSCS from WashU in 2005 with a second major in entrepreneurship at Olin. “Companies are demanding better technology to keep their workforce connected.”

He said support automation “is the next big thing in helping businesses do their best work.”

The helpdesk automation market is projected to exceed more than $17 billion by 2024.

“Capacity is well-positioned to empower teams to work productively and cohesively regardless of location,” according to the release. Capacity is an AI-powered support automation platform that connects a business’ entire tech stack to answer questions, automate repetitive support tasks and build solutions to business challenges.

Karandish and Chris Sims founded Capacity in 2017, and it is part of the Equity.com incubator.

More information can be found at Capacity’s website or on Twitter at @CapacityAI.

To learn more about Karandish’s experience as an entrepreneur, listen to this episode of Olin’s podcast, On Principle.

Top photo: David Karandish in 2018.

Todd Gormley, area chair of the faculty for finance, and Dean Mark P. Taylor shared this update to the WashU Olin community.

We are writing to let you know that Tim Solberg has been appointed as the academic director for the business of the arts minor at WashU Olin. The business of the arts minor integrates specialized coursework, experiential learning and rich networking opportunities for undergraduate students looking to gain a deeper understanding of how business principles apply to a range of arts-related fields.

Launched in 2018, the program offers students a framework of business, financial, marketing and strategic approaches for managing a career out of their artistic pursuits.

Tim joined the Olin faculty in 2018. He is a professor of practice in finance as well as the academic director of the corporate finance and investments platform. He will lead the business of the arts minor program in opportunities that engage faculty, students, alumni, and community members.

The minor launched with a generous donation from Richard Ritholz, BSBA ’84, his wife Linda, who expressed a commitment to challenging students to practice their artistic endeavors with rigor and business savvy. The Ritholz’s donation is targeting the creation of new courses, experiential learning opportunities in the arts, scholarship funding and internship stipends, and paying for faculty members to teach and publicize the program.

“I am excited to be the academic director of the business of the arts program. I have always had a deep commitment to the arts, whether performing or design, or literature,” Tim said.

“We are designing a program that will have on-site experiential learning with fashion and garment design and creation, gallerists and museum managers, theater and media producers to learn the backstage operations methods. With my teaching experience in arts management at the premier arts and media management school in Chicago, Columbia College, and my own musical education, I am eager to mix finance and management with the arts and provide a hands-on experience for the students.”

In addition to his background in the arts, Tim has worked 30 years in finance, including as a corporate banker and investment advisor for endowment and foundation trustees on their asset allocation and spending policies.

Congratulations to Tim on this new role.

Ally Gerard, BSBA ’22, wrote this post for the Olin Blog.

A team of Olin Business School undergraduates came out on top of this fall’s WashU Business of Sports Society (BOSS) competition. Olin partnered with local Major League Soccer expansion team St. Louis CITY SC, which hosted a national sports business case competition.

The competition, sponsored by the Olin Business School and the Weston Career Center, featured a case from CITY SC on subscription-based consumer loyalty programs and possible marketing activations for its local kit sponsor, Purina.

Six teams across four universities (WashU, Duke, UCLA, UNC-Chapel Hill) participated in the two-month competition. They were evaluated on blind submissions.

The idea for the competition began in April 2021, after organizers noticed the success of other collegiate sports business case competitions. As a student in the Olin Sports Business Program and former president of BOSS, I knew a comparable event would appeal to our students and to sports business students across the nation.

After I pitched the concept to the undergraduate office, I secured a generous $3,000 donation from Olin and the WCC for prize money. With this funding in place, the next step was to find a partner for the actual case material.

CITY SC was the obvious choice because of its ties to the St. Louis community and the start-up business environment in advance of their 2023 inaugural season. With the help of CITY SC Chief Brand Architect Lee Broughton, we developed the case material and competition logistics to launch at the end of the summer.

Throughout August and September, teams compiled and recorded a virtual presentation for CITY SC leadership detailing how the club could develop a subscription-based membership program to drive monetary and brand value beyond ticket sales. Student recommendations placed a strong emphasis on ideals like community and loyalty, and they focused on ways to meet the needs of all fan profiles.

‘Blown away’

Broughton and CITY SC’s Director of Loyalty Jeremy Tripp evaluated the blind submissions. Tripp, PMBA 32, recounted he was “genuinely blown away” by the quality of the students’ presentations and their clear understanding of the club’s strategy.

“The presentations were polished and well-researched, and each brought a creative perspective to solving key problems that would not only set our club apart but would do so by improving our entire region,” he said.

In the end, the winning team of five Olin undergraduates included team lead Jeanette Smith, BSBA ’24, Quade Pohlman, BSBA ’24, Spencer Min, BSBA ’24, Larry Liu, BSBA ’24, and Tommaso Maiocco, BSBA ’24.

Reflecting on their participation, they found this experience valuable for applying their coursework and professional skills to actual business situations. Smith described feeling “very fulfilled … and that the experience had greatly contributed to my professional development.”

For a business school that places experiential learning opportunities at the forefront, this competition was both professionally and personally rewarding for its nationwide participants.

I cannot thank St. Louis CITY SC, the Weston Career Center and Olin Business School’s undergraduate office enough for taking a chance on this new event. I hope to see future generations of sports business students continue the partnership in the future!