Your Entrepreneurship Roadmap

Rachel Dorin Ph.D. ’13 says “I have always been a bit of a risk-taker and trouble-maker. So I am lucky to have found a place where these traits are valued and even rewarded.”

The “place” Dorin found is the CEO’s chair at Terapore Technologies, Inc. in the San Francisco Bay Area. And she didn’t “find” that place so much as she created it. Terapore is a nanomaterials company that serves the pharmaceutical industry by making filters used in the manufacture of drugs. The company is four years old and was started by Dorin just one month after she received her Ph.D. from Cornell’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE).

“John Amos ’85 EAS spent much of his childhood in the hills and gorges of Upstate New York with his father, looking for fossils. Fossils are plentiful in the area, as it used to be the bottom of a shallow sea, but to find them you have to know both where to look and what you are looking for. Otherwise, you just see a lot of rocks. As an adult, Amos has combined this ability to see things other people might miss with a desire to use digital mapping and remote sensing to make the world a better place. His nonprofit organization, SkyTruth, challenges the status quo and enlists ordinary people to help protect the environment.”

Dan Simpkins B.S. ’80 EE and MEng ’81 EE makes it clear that being a gifted engineer does not automatically make a person a good leader or businessman.

“My grandparents had their own business,” says Simpkins. “I got to watch how businesses ran.  I got to see things from the perspective of a customer, but also from every perspective, end to end.” Simpkins learned valuable lessons from watching his grandparents, and then his father, run a business. “My father taught me that the customer is not always right; but when they are, you need to be able to react to it. He also taught me the value of treating employees right. You need to create impassioned employees.”

To play music, you need an instrument, right? You can pluck a string or vibrate a reed or strike a surface or force air through an opening. But whichever of these you decide to do, you need an instrument. It is one of the basic rules of music.

Cornell Engineers Ray Li and Michael Ndubuisi have set out to break this basic rule. Their creation, called SoundSpace, has already created quite a buzz around the Cornell campus. An earlier incarnation of SoundSpace, (called Aura), won the Bright Idea Award from The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Innovation Competition in the winter of 2013. Li and Ndubuisi built on that success and presented a concert with a chamber orchestra in May of this year.