Academia

Unlocking College Success: 8 Proven Strategies for the Aspiring Student Entrepreneur 🎓🚀📚

As the countdown to the new school season begins, I’ve been having some chats with the newest wave of freshmen and others going back to school. Each chat’s been a flashback, making me share those game-changing tips I wish I’d known when juggling the whirlwind of engineering classes and side hustling with startups.

So if you or anyone you know is heading to college this fall, here are a few tips that worked really well for me.

1. Treat College Like a 9-to-5 Job: In my first semester, my GPA was a mere 2.5. Instead of studying in between classes, I’d chill in my apartment, wrongly assuming good grades would follow. The next term, I committed to a 9-5 school routine, keeping away from home distractions. Suddenly, everything became manageable and way more productive.

2. Sync Up with Study Buddies: The above strategy felt a tad tedious until I teamed up with like-minded friends. We synced our schedules, adding an element of fun and accountability to our academic grind. Our time together also gave birth to new business ideas which then became actually companies we built together. We also ended up leveraging school resources for our companies. For example, we used giant engineering printers to make banners for our first company.

3. Be a Regular at Professor Office Hours: Like anything in life, building relationships is key. Frequent visits to professors not only clarify doubts but also help in forging genuine bonds. Remember, they’re often the ones marking your papers, so a positive impression goes a long way.

4. Pick a Practical Major: Some majors just don’t translate well in the job market. Instead of art or the dubiously termed ‘political science,’ (politics is not a science!) hone in on pragmatic fields like Science, Technology, Engineering or Math (STEM). Even if you don’t directly use the degree, the critical thinking skills acquired are invaluable.

5. Embrace ‘Work Hard, Play Hard’: Yes, diligence is vital, but so is downtime. After a long week of productivity, reward yourself with some relaxation and partying. These things feel a hell of a lot better after you’ve clocked in some productive hours.

6. Craft Your Own Curriculum (Bonus: Start a Company): Many institutions offer independent study options. I once teamed up with a professor, Nicholas Hitchon, to start a tech company as a course, which was both entrepreneurial and educational. For me, I needed 3 more credits of a specific engineering course so my friend and I proposed a “start our own technology company” course where we would literally start a company together and get engineering credits for it. So we did, launched The Campus Atlas, and checked off the last credits we needed for our major. In another independent study, we wanted to check out the new multi-million dollar engineering equipment, so we proposed a research project and got to spend time in an Intel-like lithography bay. Pictures below.

7. Launch a Startup: The college ecosystem is a rich environment for startups. Surrounded by smart minds and abundant resources, it’s the ideal incubator for your ideas. And hey, if it doesn’t pan out, college life continues. Need inspiration? Just look at Facebook.

8. Network with Alumni: Seeking counsel from successful alumni can open doors in unexpected ways. A simple request for career advice might evolve into job offers, insightful guidance, or valuable introductions. Plus, the very act of doing the cold outreach is a life lesson in sales which is useful no matter what you do.

Those are a few things I wish I had known earlier on heading into college. They were ultimately very helpful for me and maybe they’ll be helpful to you.

Left to Right. Steve Weisman, David Nosbusch, Me (2007) in the Wisconsin Center for Applied Microelectronic Devices

Me (2007) – Wisconsin Center for Applied Microelectronic Devices

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The Reich Hebrew Academy

This week, my family and I were honored by my childhood school for the work we’ve done over the years to give back to the school and to the community.

I gave a speech and made another commitment.

Both are below…

**** The speech ****

Next week is Passover. 

It’s a time in the Jewish tradition when we talk about how we escaped bondage, oppression, and persecution and were freed from slavery in Egypt. 

Growing up every year, when my grandparents were around, we would go to their house for this holiday. I would sit next to my grandfather at the head of the table, watching him tell the story about how, we, as Jews, were freed from slavery. 

As some of you may know, my grandparents were Holocaust survivors. And like the Jews from Egypt, my grandparents managed to survive their own Pharoah and discover freedom on a small farm in Toms River, New Jersey. 

To sit next to my grandfather, and listen to him talk about Jews being persecuted and freed, thousands of years ago, was quite surreal to me.

Even in my eulogy about him, I remember remarking about how these moments felt like a window into the past, through his eyes and his narration of the Sedar, with his Yiddish accent.

At a young age, I could appreciate this relationship between Passover and the Holocaust. The Hebrew Academy certainly had a role to play in helping me understand these chapters of our past.

But I remember one year in particular.

I was sitting at the head of the table and my grandfather had a few more cups of wine than usual.

Out of nowhere, for the very first time in my life, he began to tell me stories about his experiences during the Holocaust. 


These weren’t stories about the six million Jews. 

These were stories about Sam. About his friends. About his siblings. About his parents. About his family. 

About my family. 

One story he told me was about the time when he was a prisoner of war, he went without eating his bread rations for a week, so he could sell those rations to enemy soldiers and bribe his way out of the camp to work as a carpenter, which he was not. 

You could imagine the irony of listening to him tell me about the importance of bread and how it saved his life while starting at a matzah plate in the middle of the Sedar table.

These stories, and others like it that night were the first time that I really internalized the fact that he lost everything, yet, we were here.  

We were free. 

With everything. 

We had opportunities he never had. 

We have opportunities 6 million people, and their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren never had. 

This is something I think about every single day of my life. 

בְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלוּ הוּא יֶָָצֶָא מִמִּצְרַָים

“In every generation, every individual must feel as if he personally had come out of Egypt”

This visceral understanding gives me perspective and encourages me to make the most of this gift that each one of us has. 

The gift of life.

Back at the Passover table, and after he shared his war stories, he then proceeded to give his young grandson some life lessons. 


They were simple.

Work hard and go to school. Get a good education.

I think he understood that our kids are our future and that his kids and grandkids were his future. 

I think he also understood how education played a central role in it all, especially when he himself was not able to pursue it due to the war. 

This is something, as a parent myself, I now really understand but more importantly, it’s something I feel and connect with every time I look at my own kids, Michaela and Brayden. 

It’s something my parents understood too when they sent me to school at The Hebrew Academy.

My grandparents and parents knew that if that little boy at the Sedar table worked hard in life and got a good education, he might be ok. And maybe, just maybe, he could help pay it forward and do the same for his family and for others.

And here we are. 


I’ve worked hard, had a great upbringing thanks to my parents and The Hebrew Academy, had a little success and a lot of luck, and now recognize that it’s my turn to help ensure our Jewish family carries on for future generations. 

That is why, tonight, I am excited to honor the memory of my grandparents, Sam and Betty, by rededicating my childhood school, formerly the Solomon Schechter Day School and currently The Hebrew Academy. 

Moving forward, it will forever be known as “The Reich Hebrew Academy”

I can truly think of no better way to express my love and appreciation for my grandparents and their legacy.

Today more than ever, this is especially important with the backdrop of what’s happening in Ukraine. Once again, people are fleeing Europe to save their lives as my grandparents did from their small towns in Poland years ago, which are now part of Ukraine.

This commitment ensures that my generation and future generations will be afforded the same opportunities that were afforded to me. Opportunities that were not afforded to my grandparents and millions of others. 

So here’s my ask to all of you…

Please consider joining me and my family, Joe and Maxine Macnow, and recent others like David and Vanessa Wise, Randy and Laurie Pearlman, in stepping up in a big way and helping ensure this school gets built. 

Joe, Maxine, and Yoti told me they had a dream about this project. As an entrepreneur, I too love to live in the clouds and try to invent the future.


And their dream is an amazing one where the past present and future exist concurrently. It’s an exciting vision and we would not be here without them.

Joe, Maxine, Yoti, thank you. 

So please, help us make it a reality and help us ensure the path to the future is secured for our kids and future generations.


And now, I’d like to introduce you to the funnier, better-looking Reich, my brother Jeremy. 

Thank you.

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Value of Engineering to the Entrepreneur

This post originally appeared on Badger Engineers.

My company Spinback was recently acquired by Buddy Media, the largest Facebook Management Company in the world. It’s clear that my four years studying in the Wisconsin College of Engineering has played a role in that acquisition.

At the core, I’d argue that an engineering, math, or science related degree is the single best degree or use of four years in an undergraduate program, especially a program at UW – Madison. In my years in the COE, I obtained a certain skill set that has helped me succeed during and after school, and in the various businesses I was involved with including Spinback. I’m not talking about skills like designing a circuit or solving for a system of equations. I’m talking about the cliché skills we always hear about but disregard as obvious and too abstract for our own benefit.

The skills I’m talking about are teamwork, problem solving, hard work and creativity. In every single class and project that I worked on while at school, each one of these skills was required.  I remember spending many hours with my friends like Steve Weisman (ECE ’08) and David Nosbusch (ECE ’08) poring over class notes and textbooks (and also starting two businesses together while at school). No matter what the content and material, the routine was the same. We studied together, relentlessly discussed the problems together, and used creativity to help solve a solution when we couldn’t find one. In the COE, this is what we were all taught to do. In the real world, these are the skills that have helped me succeed and they are also the same skills that have given me confidence to venture out as an entrepreneur.

Before we were acquired, we were the typical startup. We had raised very little money and had a billion and one things to do. We had to build a product, sell the product to clients, create marketing materials, manage finances, create processes and business workflows, deal with attorneys, and on and on. The reality is I never learned about any one particular topic in school that was applicable to our business. Its not like I took a class called “how to prioritize features” or “how to get a terms sheet from a VC.” I did however learn how to think in a certain way. An analytical thought process that allowed me to break down each component of our business and understand how each component affected the other.  And this is what engineering is all about. It’s about understanding how things work, in order to identify a problem and ultimately solve for that problem.

At Spinback, the problem we were solving was how to help online retailers leverage social media to drive and track new sales. In a short period of time, our solutions called EasyShare and EasyTrack helped us secure over 15 clients in less than two months. We were able to sign up some of the largest online retailers in the world, convince investors to give us money to scale our business, and secure our position as a thought leader in the social commerce space. As a result, we were lucky and fortunate enough to be acquired by one of the fastest growing technology companies of all time.

Looking back, I can recall one very late night in our Union Square office. As we were trying to solidify a sales and marketing strategy one of my partners said, “this is one giant equation that we are solving.”  In that moment I thought about the four years at UW-Engineering and said, “Yes, yes it is.”

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Start a Business in School

GDR "village teacher" (a teacher tea...
Image via Wikipedia

If you are in college you should start your own business because there is no better time to do so.

When I was in college working on thecampusatlas.com I remember thinking how great it was to have the flexibility of a student and to have the resources of a college university in order to get things done. I was surrounded by exceptionally bright people from all different backgrounds and areas of expertise who were willing to provide guidance.

A friend of mine recently had success with his college endeavor and conveys a similar thought in a recent article called Deconstructing Invite Media’s success story :

“There is no better time to start a company than when you’re in school,” he said.

After all, college students don’t require a lot of money, their housing often is paid for, and their peers often are willing to hustle at all hours to meet deadlines. “You can’t beat that when you need to have your attention focused on the company,” he wrote in an e-mailed response to a question.

Furthermore, academic institutions have the resources to educate entrepreneurs on any single area of a business or topic and by leveraging the various academic resources to build your business, you actually obtain a wider knowledge base of information then originally intended.

As a student, you have the ability to build your own business in a safe, low-cost, resource-rich environment and if it doesn’t work out you still hedged your bet because you’ll most likely graduate with a degree.

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Educating youth with subject matter that matters

A while back I wrote about the relevance (or lack their of) of the systematic approaches taken by the public school systems and large universities. I would argue that practical and relevant hands-on approaches need to be implemented to better educate the youth in such a competitive global economy. In many instances, parents recognize the need for specific types of education. In fact, one of my relatives has a tutor come to his house once a week to teach his son conversational Japanese, as his business realizes economic growth with Japanese based companies. Fred Wilson also recognizes the importance of practical education and so, in his post today he writes:

“But this year we went one step further. We got our son Josh a young teacher who came over in the evening once a week and taught him how to write code and make a rudimentary computer game. We didn’t know of anywhere in the city to send Josh for this kind of class, so we contacted a local company, Blue Tomato, that provides supplemental tutoring and test preparation.”

Imagine a classroom that prepares students for TODAY’s world, for TODAY’s challenges.

I was fortunate enough to have a high school teacher that also recognized the extreme importance of technology in the classroom (I thank him for his role in influencing me to pursue Electrical Engineering). His name is David Peins and his company is Robodyssey. In his high school Robotics class, we were taught math, physics, electronics, and computer programming all while building robots (my robot can be seen below), and this all happened between the 9th and 12th grade. I learned about semiconductor devices, NPN, PNP transistors, tutebot circuits, and more, 3 years before they were even introduced to me in my Semiconductor Devices classes, (my junior year of college).

If America is going to keep up with the ever changing, fast paced global economy, we need these types of teaching mediums. One that provide relevance to today’s technological and societal challenges, while extracting the most value out of a classroom setting.

“I believe in engaged education and I believe in pushing the envelope and trying new things. Things like this.

Our kids are growing up in a different world than we did. We have to teach them using these new tools. Not just the ones that were used on us.

Fred W. could not be more right.

My Robot (and Chris Murphy) from HIGH SCHOOL: (The robot was a self-navigating, automated fire fighting robot. It autonomously navigated a maze using ultrasound and infrared sensors, found a lit candle in one of the rooms, and blew out the candle)

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Academia: Badger Bike

Academia Series: Post 2

My freshman year of college, I was required to take a class called Engineering Professional Design (EPD 160). I was among a group of 35 other undergraduate engineering students (whose majors were undeclared at the time), and we were required to design and construct something for a real client.

Our client was the Department of Agriculture of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and we were to design and fabricate something that could carry at least 300 lbs of material and soil all over the campus.

Of the 35 students, we all broke up into teams to design a potential solution. My small group came up with a hybrid model of a tandem bicycle with an extended bay and motor. This design was chosen, and I was elected project manager to supervise the construction.

Early into construction, our client decided to give us additional funds that surpassed the required minimum. We had a budget of around $3,000.

In the end, we developed the “Badger Bike”, under our budget, and provided a unique and environmentally friendly device, to some environmentally friendly people.

Pictures and our final presentation below:

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Academia: Radiation in the THz range

With my college career coming to an end, I decided to start a series of posts entitled “Academia”. In each post, I will discuss a project or research I have been involved in.

In this first post of the series, I will briefly discuss my research in terahertz generation. In the spring of 2007, I had the distinct honor of working under Professor Leon McCaughan, a professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Under his supervision, I studied the properties of:

  • Guided wave photonic devices and circuits
  • Quantum optics
  • Far infrared (terahertz) generation and spectrocopy
  • Waveguide and photonic crystal theory

More importantly, I had the opportunity to take part in one of his research projects and work along side of other extremely talented students and researchers . A description of the project:

“Terahertz (THz) radiation is of great current interest for imaging science and technology. Applications include time-domain spectroscopy (e.g., the dielectric response of molecules in the far infrared), medical imaging in a new radiation band, detection and imaging for homeland security and defense applications, as well as communications.”

Within the project, I spent many hours in the Wisconsin Center for Applied Microelectronic Devices developing photolithography and reactive ion etching techniques to produce a THz photonic crystal in Silicon. By creating this photonic cystal, we were attempting to create a control in order to provide tunablity to the light source. Prior to the fabrication of the 2D crystal, we also undertook some computer-based model calculations.

Pictures from the research here:

Picture of 2D photonic crystals.

2-D photonic crystal integrated ‘superstate’

Myself and two of my colleagues in the lithography bay.

Description of the project (can be found on www.nsf.gov)

Thank you to Professor Leon McCaughan for a truley invaluable experience!

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