As a student at the University of Utah, Daniel Goldfinger liked to go camping on the weekends. He enjoyed laying in his hammock on said camping trips, but the Los Angeles native faced a problem during visits to southern Utah: a treeless desert isn’t much good for hanging hammocks.
Goldfinger’s friend Nick Bierwolf, a mechanical engineering student, offered to build a stand for their hammocks. Goldfinger, a geography major, thought it sounded like a great idea — so great, in fact, he felt it might make them some money. Most college seniors would probably just stop there and file away the idea for a post-graduation possibility, if that. But in 2017, Goldfinger and Bierwolf visited something that’s becoming increasingly common at Western universities: an on-campus entrepreneurship program. And that’s where things got interesting.
Across the West, public universities are starting programs to help students launch companies that could be their cities’ next big employers. Among them, the universities of New Mexico, Wyoming, and Boise State all boast entrepreneurship programs. University of Nevada students can launch a company be they in Reno or Las Vegas; both campuses have startup centers. Nine of 10 schools in the University of California system have entrepreneurship programs; Berkeley alone has four. Many feature pitch competitions with real cash prizes to fund real businesses.
Such is the case at Utah’s Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute. Bierwolf and Goldfinger went through two pitch competitions, winning seed money that funded a patent application and a prototype. The partners had an office at Lassonde Studios, where they officially launched their company: LIT Outdoors. They got face time with attorneys, accountants, CFOs, and plenty of other entrepreneurial students as they refined their flagship product, the tammock: a hammock that comes with its own freestanding frame and a small tent-like cover for storage space and protection from the elements. Goldfinger spent his final eight weeks as a college student going through an accelerator program designed for outdoor-gear companies.
“From there we started making more prototypes, went to China, visited factories, found a supplier … and have been product testing and refining our design,” Goldfinger said. In April, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign that, as of publishing, has sold about $65,000 worth of tammocks. Now, at 27, Goldfinger has his company, and Utah has another promising small business.
And that’s kind of the whole idea, says Troy D’Ambrosio, executive director of the Lassonde institute, a division of the university’s business school. While the entrepreneurship program itself has been around since 2001, it got a major facelift in 2016 with the opening of Lassonde Studios, the on-campus facility that includes not only offices and space to design prototypes, but also a four-floor residence hall for students who want to live that entrepreneurial lifestyle around the clock.
Utah has some of the fastest job growth in the country, and Salt Lake City was recently named the second-best city in the country for starting a business by Inc. magazine and innovation policy company Startup Genome. “We’ve certainly been a part of the explosion of entrepreneurial growth in Utah,” D’Ambrosio said. “We definitely consider ourselves a catalyst to help build up entrepreneurship here … and it’s turned out fabulous for the state.”
A lively startup scene makes macroeconomic sense, reasons Mark Pingle, an economist who helped start an entrepreneurship program at the University of Nevada-Reno.
“The basic job of an entrepreneur is to figure out what the next thing will be, rather than what has been good,” he said. With new companies constantly emerging, a region is less likely to rely on a single industry, like automobiles in Detroit, for example. “Promoting entrepreneurship as an economic development strategy makes sense for that reason.”
Though D’Ambrosio at Utah sees his entrepreneurial program as part of the state’s small-business growth, he says encouraging students to start their own businesses in college is more about the learning experience than the viability of the company.
“It’s a way to enhance the student learning experience by taking things students are learning in class, then finding something they’re passionate about and applying it in real time,” he said. “Overall, this kind of learning makes students more successful in the real world, whether they become entrepreneurs or not.”
For Goldfinger, getting his company started in Utah has been a blessing, not just because of the entrepreneurial community he’s found thanks to Lassonde and several groups in the area, but because he’s surrounded by his ideal customer base — other outdoorsy people. “We’re very lucky to be in an industry central to where we live,” he said.
And he’ll stick around the state, with his business, for the foreseeable future. “This is definitely home, at least for now,” he said. “I spend my days camping, skiing, hanging out with my friends. And building my company. What else could I need?”
