Time to leave the nest

I was returning from my daily walk through Remote Location, USA.

As I drifted into the street to avoid the other zombies, I was thinking about how to wrap up the Capstone class I had been teaching at NYU. We were fast approaching the moment when my students would pitch a panel of outside judges on the startup businesses that we had worked on together all semester.

Usually when I walk back to this borrowed house, the only new development is a pile of Amazon boxes on the porch. But this time, I also saw a robin perched above the front door, fixing her eye on me with twitchy head movements.

As I got closer, she flew to the neighboring rooftop, still watching me. Then I saw what she was preoccupied with. She had built a nest on top of the door frame. I reached up with my phone to get a better look. Up sprang three hatchlings, beaks open and quivering.

The productive imagination of my NYU students had led them to draw up plans for a wide range of startups. One cluster of businesses was about food: artisanal soy sauce, a hydroponic home garden to grow massive quantities of vegetables, a proposal to put breakfast vending machines in Times Square, an app to search for specialty coffee. Some businesses were about community: apps to find friendships, arrange for therapy, or book travel and other adventures. A few were about fashion and beauty: teen wellness spas and high-tech approaches to skincare and apparel sizing. The final category, which we called “Mammals in Motion,” comprised two pet-care devices, a cat-sitting service, and a smart bike.

Given my professional interests and personal obsessions, much of the semester was devoted to finding data that would make these business ideas stronger and make the stories more persuasive to investors. Startups feed on very different information from mature businesses. How many people are in your chosen segment? (Many students had independently come across an alluring segment called “millennials,” so we worked on ways to narrow that down.) How big is the problem you’re trying to solve? How many people or businesses might want to buy your thing, and at what price? At what rate do businesses like this typically grow?

Every day when I opened the front door to take a break from Zoom meetings with clients, there would be a mad, flapping commotion, and Mom would land on the neighbors’ roof, leaving three chicks with their beaks open, interrupted mid-meal.

The US Census and the General Social Survey were reliable standbys to feed my students data about the size and growth of the markets they were targeting. To get a handle on demand and pricing, they conducted primary research, surveying target customers—often, one another—about their needs and willingness to pay. I encouraged them to look even farther afield for data: online search trends as an indicator of latent desires and competing brands’ visibility, social media data for anecdotal expressions of joy and frustration, the abundant resources of the school’s online library for trends in analogous businesses.

My students were ready. On pitch day, they gave enthusiastic presentations to the remote judges, who alternated between asking pointed questions and offering encouragement. When the last student answered the last question and completed their master’s degree requirement, we took a moment to reflect on a semester that had begun with us workshopping one another’s ideas in a Manhattan classroom and had ended on faraway laptop screens.

Finishing a recent walk, I approached the house. Mom flew to her lookout spot to glare at me. The chicks, having eaten their earthworm deliveries, had grown astonishingly large and were packed into the nest, a few days away from being pried out. I hoped they would bounce off of some Amazon boxes before landing on the porch.

I wish the best of luck to members of the Class of 2020 as they search for sustenance in widening circles and, soon enough, take to the sky.

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