olina. He ended up as a computer science major and
one of the first entrepreneurship minors. While they
were all still undergraduates, he, Zach Clayton ’07, Clay
Schossow ’08 and Kris Jordan ’07 founded a company
now known as New Media Campaigns, which builds
Web sites for political campaigns and advertising agencies ( www.newmediacampaigns.com). The team won
the 2006 Carolina Challenge.
That meant that by the time he graduated, Sutherland was president of a company with an established
client base and offices in the Midway Business Center,
a business incubator in Chapel Hill. He was supposed
to go to China with others in the entrepreneurship
minor the summer after graduation. Instead, he says, “I
decided to stay, along with the others, and get the business off the ground.”
Schossow is now lead project manager at the company; Clayton and Jordan are in graduate school at
Harvard and Brown, respectively. Last year, the company outgrew its offices at Midway and moved to
larger quarters in Carrboro. “Since we started, we have
launched over 150 Web sites and worked in politics on
races of all levels, from presidential on down,” Sutherland says. “Now we also work with some of the largest
ad agencies on the East Coast.”
The Carolina Challenge, the entrepreneurship
minor and campuswide encouragement of entrepreneurship also fostered the transformation of a student
poverty-relief effort called Hunger Lunch into a nonprofit now known as Nourish International
( www.nourishinternational.org, featured in the September/October issue of the Review).
“There were a lot of people saying, ‘You can do
this,’” says Joel Thomas ’06. He met Hunger Lunch
founder Sindhura Citineni ’04 when both were undergraduates and joined her Carolina Challenge team. The
group went on to win the social track. The business
plan competition “stretched us to think outside of the
UNC bubble,” Thomas says. “It made us figure out
how to stretch to other universities, how to make this
big thing happen.”
Originally headed for a career in biology, Thomas
found his involvement with what became Nourish
leading him in another direction entirely. He completed the entrepreneurship minor and the “Launching
the Venture” course in his senior year.
“Every week in ‘Launching the Venture,’ they would
ask us to start off with our elevator pitch,” he says. “We
went in there every week, and they would tear us
apart. They said, ‘We don’t get it.’They were business
folks, really smart people, who didn’t know anything
about international development. We learned to change
how you pitch, how to use different diction, different
vocabularies according to who you’re talking to.”
Now headquartered off campus at the Midway
Business Center, Nourish International has more than
20 chapters at universities across the country and has
taken on the role of encouraging social entrepreneurs.
Each Nourish chapter uses its members’ talent, creativity and energy to support long-term, sustainable projects in poor communities around the world. James Dil-lard ’07, assistant director, who learned about Nourish
through the entrepreneurship minor, says he expects
the nonprofit to grow exponentially.
While the Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative has
made entrepreneurs out of a number of students who
had no idea before they came to campus that they were
interested in starting an enterprise, some young alumni
followed the more traditional route with an MBA.
Among them is Ron
Unger ’02 (MBA), who
started his information
technology services
company, WorkSmart
( www.worksmart.com),
before the entrepreneurship program
began. He took part in a
Kenan-Flagler program
called Launching Your
Company, a precursor to
CEI’s “Launching the
Venture” course. Unger
pursued an MBA specif-
ically to start a business, although at first he hadn’t quite
homed in on what it would be. He used the classes he
took to round out his idea, recruited some friends to
join him and incorporated his business partway
through the degree program. Daniel Martin ’02 (MBA)
was one of the founding owners; Clay Harris ’01
started as an intern and is now vice president.
The Launching Your Company program, Unger
says, “got us in front of advisers. The entrepreneurship
classes taught you to focus on an area and perfect that.
Still today, we use that philosophy — we zeroed in on
the IT services area and have never swayed from that.”
The program also gave them the chance to compete
for six months of free office space in the basement of
the business school, which WorkSmart managed to
extend long enough to get solidly on its feet.
“Of course, we thought we’d have hockey-stick
growth and become millionaires in two years,” Unger
says with a laugh. That hasn’t quite happened, but the
company has grown steadily and received several accolades, including being named the Durham Chamber of
Commerce Small Business of the Year in 2005. It has a
staff of 27.
Beth Richardson ’08 (MBA) and Sarah Chasnovitz
’07 (JD) used the Carolina Challenge to develop a business idea sparked when both were working in South
Africa: a company called Zebra Crossings to market
items created by South African sewing cooperatives in
areas of high unemployment.
“I put the cart before the horse, entering the Chal-
COUR TESY JESSICA CROWELL ’07
Jessica Crowell ’07,
left, and Melissa
Adelman ’07 won
$15,000 in the
Carolina Challenge
and used it to start a
company helping customers order the correct size of clothing
from online retailers.
