For the young and entrepreneurial, launching a startup with your college friends is a natural thing to do. You’ve spent countless hours studying, hanging out and crafting ideas together in an environment that is ready-made for inspiration.

Pomona College is in the midst of a mini-surge of Sagehen startups, part of an entrepreneurial scene that reaches from the Bay Area to New York and beyond. Lately, Southern California, too, has seen a wave of new ventures in areas such as tech, with dozens of incubators and accelerator programs launching, and venture capitalists taking notice and investing in promising young companies.

Right here on campus, business-minded students are working to make entrepreneurship more than a niche. “There are very few professions in the world that are more liberal-artsy than being a young entrepreneur,” says ASPC President Darrell Jones III ’14, who is already on his second entrepreneurial effort. He is part of a campus group called Pomona Ventures that encourages entrepreneurship and, with support from alumni, helps students line up seed money to get started.

But whether a startup is taking off in Claremont, the Big Apple or on a windswept Alaskan island, the shift from dorm-room dreams to a successful enterprise requires stamina, passion—and capital. Beginning entrepreneurs need to sort out their roles within their new organization, find ways to handle disagreements and figure out ways to support each other, all while bringing in the funds to keep the lights on.

Finding their Way

Jesse Pollak, Mark Hudnall and Brennen Byrne.

“The habit we keep having to break ourselves from is assuming that there are rules or guidelines or some path to follow. In school, there’s a path that’s laid out for you from matriculation to graduation. Starting a company isn’t nearly as straightforward,” says Brennen Byrne ’12, CEO of Clef.

Now based in the Bay Area, Byrne began working with Mark Hudnall ’13 and Jesse Pollak ’15 while they were at Pomona. They started off interested in how websites share information with each other, and ways to improve that process. Within weeks, though, they focused in on the issue of identifiers and concluded that “passwords were the problem.” That led to Clef, a mobile app that replaces online usernames and passwords. The app identifies users by their phones, so they never need to remember or type anything when they log into a site.

One area where the startup has tried many avenues is in marketing. They first followed typical routes, trying to get the market, consumers and press to pay attention through social media. But the Clef crew got real traction when they tried something different. This July, they recruited 15 other similar identity companies, a handful of consumer rights groups and a few celebrities to launch a “Petition Against Passwords.” Their move on the petition landed them attention from The Economist, the BBC, Los Angeles Times and others. “We were suddenly a dominant voice in a conversation that we hadn’t had access to before, and we started getting emails from our dream customers asking for more information about Clef and how they could start using it. By stepping outside of the expected checklist, we were able to have a much bigger impact,” says Byrne.

Next step: Byrne and Co. are looking to apply their work in the realm of e-commerce checkout, which holds more competition, Byrne says, but also more lucrative opportunities. “Every day there are a million different opportunities for us to be pursuing or directions for us to be going in, and we have to navigate that in a completely different way. College throws hard problems at you, but in a startup you have to find the right problems to solve,” says Byrne, an English and computer science major.

Partners on the Roller-Coaster Ride

Tom Vladeck, Ben Cooper and Geoff Lewis.

Geoffrey Lewis ’08 launched Building Hero last year with Ben Cooper ’07 and Tom Vladeck ’08. They had become great friends at Pomona, largely, Lewis says, “because of our shared passion for energy-efficiency.”

The company started in San Francisco pursuing the niche of installing LED lighting in businesses such as boutiques, art galleries and hotels. Their pitch: energy-efficient lighting saves customers’ money and benefits the environment without sacrificing aesthetics, and at the start, they were greatly aided by a local utility offering generous rebates for businesses that switched to energy-efficient lighting.

However, the rebate program was so generous that it ran out of money on several occasions

“As a small startup, it was hard for us to deal with this type of uncertainty,” says Lewis. So they made a “strategic decision” to expand into New York City, which, like San Francisco, has high population density, lots of small retail shops and high electricity prices, which make LED more appealing.

That wasn’t the only shift. With the end of the rebates, the Building Hero crew realized that many small retailers weren’t willing or able to pony up the up-front costs to switch over to LED. So Building Hero switched over to a different model, in which businesses got their lights right now but repaid the cost over time through a monthly service fee, which included maintenance.

Lewis, however, points out that constant change is just part of the ride for a startup: “That uncertainty: Is this company going to exist years from now? That’s what makes it exciting to come to work.”

“Startups are a crucible; it’s very hard to create something new in the marketplace, and that creates a lot of stress on the founders of any new venture. I think coping with that stress together has had a huge effect on bringing us closer together.”

Arye Barnehama ’13 and Laura Berman ’13 met while studying cognitive science at Pomona. Sharing that interest led them to become fast friends. And it eventually led them to launch Melon, which consists of a lightweight headband and a mobile app that employs EEG technology to get a read on all those neurons firing in your pre-frontal cortex, use the data to measure focus and “give you personalized feedback to help you improve.” As they work, Berman and Barnehama have had to learn how to support each other. “As entrepreneurs you’ll face a lot of ups and downs,” says Berman, CEO of the firm based in Santa Monica, Calif. “During the good times, it’s great to share those experiences with a close friend. When you find yourself in harder times, it’s great to have somebody whom you know how to support and who, in return, knows how to support you best.”

Work-Life Balance

Laura Berman and Arye Barnehama

With no school calendar full of classes, activities and built-in breaks, startup entrepreneurs must adjust to setting their own schedules. It’s their own willpower that must see a team through product launches, long hours and thorny problems. On the other hand, there’s a temptation to skip sleep and ignore all other parts of life.

“When we started our own company, we felt a lot of pressure to work constantly— as close to 24/7 as humanly possible,” recalls Berman. “It’s easy to get into a mindset where you think, ‘Every moment that I’m not working on this, nobody else is either,’ and you become scared to take a break.”

Many entrepreneurs have this type of mentality at first, believing that a round-the-clock schedule will lead to faster success. But the accompanying stress can lead to greater tension and mistakes.

The Melon team found greater work-life balance after working as a startup in residence at a top design firm IDEO (most famous for designing the first Apple mouse). There, they learned that innovation comes easiest in a creative space where people are working on a variety of projects. One of their mentors at IDEO advised them to favor curiosity over expertise when hiring, and to designate time every week for creative activities unrelated to Melon.

“This is different from college, where you have a pretty set schedule of assignments and deadlines. Learning to create a schedule where we worked efficiently and didn’t overload all the time definitely took a while,” Berman says. It seems to be paying off: Melon has raised nearly $300,000 through Kickstarter, and venture capitalists and angel investors have provided additional funding. The pair, previously based in Massachusetts, was recently honored among 25 top entrepreneurs under 25 by the Boston Globe.

Communication and Differences

Zach Brown ’07 grew up in the Southeast Alaska town of Gustavus (pop. 350), too small to even have a McDonald’s or a movie theatre, and so remote you can only get there by plane or boat. Perhaps it was the very small town feel that made Brown value kinship and trustworthiness in others. It also made him want to build something in his home state.

Brown and three fellow graduate students from Stanford University are founding the Inian Islands Institute, devoted to research and experiential education on a breathtaking five-acre parcel, set on a pristine island and known locally as the Hobbit Hole. The opportunity arose when Brown family friends, who have owned the isolated spot for decades, decided to put it up for sale.

As Brown and his partners envision it, the school will bring students from various universities to Alaska for field courses focused on ecology. Participating students will have an opportunity to catch their own salmon, drink rainwater and harvest their own food in a breathtaking setting of glaciers, fjords and temperate rain forest. The institute is nonprofit, but many of the challenges, trials and triumphs of a new business startup may apply to their organization as well. To figure out their roles, Brown says his team fell into categories of expertise pretty naturally: “We had one person most interested in marine issues (myself), one most interested in terrestrial issues, one for management/governance and one for conservation.

Zach Brown

These pretty well covered the themes we want to address in our school.” Still, making the institute a reality will be a huge undertaking for the foursome. “At first, we were just kicking around ideas over evening beers, and there was nothing at stake. Nothing to lose. It was a lot of fun. But as the vision has grown, we all realize the sheer scale of what we’ve embarked on, and as we begin to internalize what it could mean for our careers, some tensions have flared at times.”

I think that’s natural, and we’ve always gotten past them. It’s really important to have regular check-ins, face to face, and to be very open and honest with each other. It’s better to voice your concerns to the group right away, before they have a chance to fester. I think that’s true of any relationship: Communication is key.”

Even though constant harmony might seem appealing, Clef founder Byrne points out that it’s actually a good thing to not always agree.

“Young companies are full of really bad ideas and bad decisions, and it’s easier to make more of them, if everyone agrees on everything,” he says. “One of the things I’ve been really surprised by is how important it is for us to disagree. You have to disagree to tackle problems from different perspectives.”

Knowing When to Say When

Inevitably, many entrepreneurial ventures won’t make it in the first try. Lewis and Vladeck, decade-long friends who had even trained for a triathlon together, had to have a difficult talk about Building Hero this September. (Cooper had already moved on.)

“Energy-efficiency nerds,” as Lewis puts it, loved their LED financing model and its similarity to the way many consumers buy solar power. Potential customers weren’t as thrilled, though, as the pair struggled to build trust and convince strangers to buy into their innovative, energy-saving plan. “What’s hard for us is we got some positive feedback, but not enough to invest the next five years of our lives,” says Lewis. So it was time for the talk. “It was pretty much just a joint decision,” says Lewis. “We spent a long time kind of debating it with each other, having conversations about how we felt.”

Even though they decided to end that business, neither Lewis nor Vladeck expects this will be their last startup. They want to learn from their mistakes and press ahead. “This wasn’t our last chance to change the world,” says Lewis. “This was just our first chance.” — Mark Kendall contributed to this story.

On December 2, a group of large, athletic men will walk onto the court of AT&T Center in San Antonio. Five of them will wear the red-and-blue uniform of the Hawks, a mostly-middling NBA franchise from Atlanta. The other five will wear the black-and-silver of the San Antonio Spurs, perhaps the most successful franchise in modern pro sports. In most respects, it will be just another early-season, midweek game on the NBA schedule. But for the two not-so-large, suit-wearing men standing in front of each team’s bench, it will be a historic, and no doubt emotional, moment. After 19 years on the same sideline, Mike Budenholzer and Gregg Popovich will coach against each other for the first time.

Six hundred-odd miles to the northeast, Jason Levien will be watching. Levien is the general manager of the Memphis Grizzlies—an NBA team which, he prefers you don’t remind him, was swept by the Spurs in the Western Conference Finals during last season’s playoffs. The Grizzlies won’t be playing on that Monday, so Levien might be at home or, perhaps, on the treadmill, where he often ends up on game nights, too nervous to sit and watch. He logged eight miles in the second half of a single Grizzlies playoff game last spring.

Since this is an alumni magazine, you’ve probably guessed what connects these three men, but that doesn’t make it any less remarkable. The chances that two NBA head coaches and one NBA GM—the ultimate decision-maker for a franchise and one of the hardest jobs to attain in sports—would all come from one Division III, liberal arts college are infinitesimal. But there they are: Popovich, the Pomona-Pitzer head coach for eight years, ending in 1988; Budenholzer, a Pomona-Pitzer shooting guard, class of ’92; and Levien, Pomona-Pitzer reserve guard, class of ’93.

Just as expected, the Sagehens have overtaken the NBA.

FIRST, SOME BACKGROUND. As it turns out, I have an unusual perspective on all this. In the fall of 1992, I transferred into Pomona as a sophomore, hoping to play on the basketball team while preparing for a career in journalism. Mike was one of the first players I met. He made quite an impression. One memory stands out: an informal pickup hoops game at Rains Center, early that fall. Most of the team was there.

As one of a handful of point guards hoping to make the varsity squad, I was matched up against Mike, a senior and starter on the team. There was no coach. No audience. Just a bunch of young men getting in shape before the season.

Mike’s team scored first. I took the inbounds pass and turned to dribble up court. That’s when I saw Mike, 70-odd feet from the opposing basket, standing directly in front of me, hands in a defensive posture, eyes wide, face a contorted mask of intensity. And so it went, for the rest of the afternoon. In a pickup game, in the preseason, Budenholzer picked me up and defended me full-court on every possession, as if it were the NBA Finals.

At the time, it was shocking; playing full court defense in a pick-up game is akin to bringing your own backing band to karaoke night. Later, though, it would make perfect sense—once I learned that Mike’s father, Vince, was a longtime high school coach, so successful that in 2005 he was inducted into the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame. And that Mike was the seventh of seven children, and the fifth boy. And that, though born with neither exceptional athleticism or size— he stood 6’1” and was never a leaper—Mike had succeeded at every level of the game. He did so, I learned, by wanting it more than anyone else on the floor.

I met Jason next. Immediately, he stuck out. Amid the tall, gangly players trying out for the team, Jason was an anomaly: relatively short and neither quick nor springy. Instead, he was clever and efficient. He’d transferred in the season before, his sophomore year, from Georgetown. Though not a regular rotation player, he’d enjoyed a few big moments: playing important minutes against CMS, hitting four three-pointers against Caltech.

From the start, he struck me as a born politician, in the best sense of the word (if there is such a thing). He was intelligent, gregarious and possessed the rare and valuable trait of being genuinely curious about other people’s lives. As preseason wore on, the two of us were paired up as workout partners. We lifted weights, sweated through drills and, most memorably, shot an endless succession of free throws. Every player on the team was expected to make 1,500 before the first official practice. Our reward: a T-shirt that read The 1,500 Club. I believe mine is in the garage somewhere, in a box underneath the ping-pong table.

The team was talented that year. Mike was the heart and soul—the coach on the floor—but Bill Cover ’94 was the star. Six-foot-six and fundamentally sound, Cover was a deadly midrange shooter and the team’s go-to option on offense. He would end up graduating the following year as the Sagehens’ all-time leading scorer (a distinction he still holds). The team also featured Paul Hewitt, 6’6” and lanky; Brian Christiansen, a deadeye shooter whose range extended seemingly to the bleachers; Alden Romney ’96, a blonde, toned swingman who looked like he should be on Baywatch; and Phil Kelly ’95, a quicksilver, lefty point guard. The coach, then as now, was Charles Katsiaficas. A disciple of Popovich, he’d been an assistant for years before taking over the head job full-time in 1988. (None of the players on the 1992–93 team played for Pop, though Budenholzer, who was a fifth-year senior, had been recruited to Pomona by the coach in 1988).

The season came to an unsatisfactory end. The varsity finished 16–9 overall and 9–5 in SCIAC but missed the playoffs. Mike played well, averaging 5.4 points per game, 3.04 assists and leading the team with 44 steals in 25 games. Meanwhile, Jason and I spent the great majority of our time toiling on the junior varsity. There were highlights—overtime wins and postgame breakdowns and poker games and, for me, a lone collegiate dunk, which I have since treasured as one might a family heirloom. That it came against Caltech and that I traveled on the play are neither here nor there. We take what we can in life. As for Jason, he finished his Pomona varsity career with what has to be one of the highest three-point percentages in school history: 62.5 percent. He took eight shots from behind the arc and made five.

OF THE THREE, Popovich’s NBA ascent occurred first. His story is also the best-known. At Pomona, he turned around the Sagehen program, taking a team that was 2-22 in his first season and, within six years, leading it to a SCIAC title and a NCAA Division III Tournament berth. After spending a year as a volunteer assistant to Larry Brown at Kansas, he rejoined Brown with the Spurs, as an assistant. After a stint with the Golden State Warriors, he ended up back in San Antonio, and eventually became the general manager. In 1996, he named himself head coach. It’s a title he’s held ever since.

Mike first worked for Pop at Golden State when he asked to “observe” the team. Pop told him he could work in the video room. He wouldn’t be paid, and he shouldn’t talk to anybody. Just do the film and go home. Budenholzer jumped at the chance. A couple years later, after Mike spent a post-grad season playing and coaching for Vejle Basketball Klub in Denmark, where he averaged 27.5 points, Pop called with a real job offer: video coordinator in San Antonio. It was almost as unglamorous as his first position. In the pre-digital age, Mike’s job was to hand-splice together VHS tapes of upcoming opponents in a small, dark room. Still, when I came through town in the summer of 1996, it was clear Mike was happy. At the time, I was writing a book about playground basketball, and the reporting took me around the country (two other Pomona grads from the class of 1995, Eric Kneedler and Craig Harley, came along to help with the research). When we stopped in on Mike, he was living decidedly low on the hog. In particular, I remember that he’d somehow accumulated a treasure trove of free sandwich coupons from Subway. As far as we could tell, he was living off them while working in that dark cave. No matter: it was the life he wanted. And it paid off. That fall, Pop elevated Budenholzer from video coordinator to the team’s lowest- ranking assistant coach. He was on his way.

Meanwhile, Levien followed a more unconventional path to the NBA. He attended law school at the University of Michigan, worked as a campaign consultant (writing Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford Jr.’s keynote speech at the 2000 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles) and, eventually, seguedt into the position of sports agent. After a number of high profile signings, including inking Miami Heat forward Udonis Haslem’s $33 million contract, he was featured in an article in this magazine titled “Show Me the Money.” He later brokered an $80 million deal for Chicago Bulls forward Luol Deng.

Meanwhile, I meandered on my own path toward, or at least near, the NBA. In 2000, after grad school, I took a job with Sports Illustrated. Two years later, I was assigned a feature story on the Spurs. When I showed up, Popovich referred to me as “the Pomona kid.” It would be the first, and only, time that my alma mater provided a reportorial advantage in the sports world. In the years that followed, Budenholzer steadily advanced within the Spurs organization as the team made trip after trip to the NBA Finals. Soon enough, he was promoted to lead assistant. Meanwhile, Levien left his job as an agent to become assistant GM of the Sacramento Kings in 2008. Three years later, when things didn’t work out in Sacramento, he joined an ownership group that purchased the Philadelphia 76ers. Last year, continuing his rapid ascent, he sold his stake in the 76ers to join the Grizzlies ownership group, along with an unlikely list of names that included Peyton Manning and Justin Timberlake. Majority owner Robert Pera, an old friend, named Levien the CEO and general manager.

So far, Jason says he’s enjoying the job. He keeps tabs on Budenholzer, whom he remembers as “the best competitor on the team” at Pomona, and still occasionally employs maxims he learned from Katsiaficas, including “be quick but don’t hurry.” “To me, Pop’s success made the NBA world seem more accessible and smaller,” he says of the Pomona connection. “And the time I spent on the team, I tried to learn as much as I could about the game. I really tried to suck it all in, because I knew Kat got much of his stuff from Pop.”

As for Pop, well, he just kept on winning. Four NBA titles. A better winning percentage than any team in pro sports over the last 16 years. Another trip to the Finals last season behind Tim Duncan and Tony Parker. As time passed, he softened. A year and a half ago, when I wrote a feature story on Duncan, Popovich teared up while describing his star player. He told me about swimming in the Virgin Islands with Duncan when the two first met. He referred to him as close to a “soulmate.” He got equally gooey talking about Budenholzer, who he referred to as his “co-head coach.”

Mike? For many years, people around the league assumed he would succeed Pop when he finally retired in San Antonio. Every offseason, Budenholzer received inquiries from teams in need of a head coach. Every season he said no. Then, finally, after 19 years with Popovich, he accepted the head coaching job with the Atlanta Hawks this past May. His new boss was an old Spurs player, and front office figure, Danny Ferry. The timing, only days before the Spurs played the Heat in the NBA Finals, was rough. San Antonio went on to lose the series 4-3, in heartbreaking fashion. Mike had to go straight to work at his new job. This year, Budenholzer enters the NBA season with a rebuilt roster and midsize expectations. In Memphis, Levien presides over a team with a new coach and loftier goals. After advancing to the Western Conference Finals last season, and buoyed by a stellar defense, Memphis is well-positioned to make a run at a finals appearance. And the Spurs, as always, remain title contenders. Year by year, against the odds, the Pomona influence grows.

TWENTY YEARS’ TIME can color one’s memories, but certain truths remain. Recently, under the auspices of reporting this article, I convened with my old teammates Cover and Romney for beers at a rooftop bar in San Francisco. Cover was close to Budenholzer, and remains so. He talked about Mike’s competitive fire, about all the pickup games the two played together up and down the California coast, about that one beautiful scoop layup Mike hit against Redlands his senior year. For two weeks one summer, Mike slept on the Cover family couch. Afterward, Budenholzer sent Mrs. Cover a thank-you note. “What kind of college kid does that?” Cover asks, incredulous. Cover had his own brief pro basketball odyssey. After Pomona, he played for two years in Australia, the lone American import on a team. He now lives in Petaluma, with his wife and three daughters, managing a real estate business. He says he doesn’t play hoops anymore; it brings out the competitive beast inside.

Other teammates tell similar stories: Christiansen, who now works in finance, operations and human resources at Nike, gave up recreational basketball at age 38, but found his Pomona hoops experience has helped as “a badge of honor” and to “open doors,” and that it is also invaluable in corporate team-building. Romney, who is now at One Medical Group in San Francisco, played for the corporate team at Oracle, where he worked for a while, but hasn’t laced them up in a year. And Kelly, the lefty point guard, is a film/television agent in Los Angeles who’s retired from hoops, though not by choice. He tore both his Achilles.

Basketball careers done, they have all moved on. Life beckons, with all its playdates and late nights at the office and Saturday morning youth soccer matches. The game falls into relief, a treasured memory, a glimpse of a former self. The perspective changes. Now, when it comes to hoops, they live vicariously through Levien, Pop and Budenholzer.

The successes of those three become, in some way, communal successes. And so the game lives on.

Noah Belanich ’11 and his two older brothers are a behind-the-beans force fueling New York City’s tech scene. The coffee, the caffeine, the morning kick for a slew of startups—it comes from the liberal-arts-trained trio, and who knows how many “aha” moments they’ve helped ignite.

Their own ignition as entrepreneurs came during the summer after Noah’s junior year at Pomona, when the brothers started Joyride Coffee from a food truck. Buzz built over social media as they served up beloved brews from high-end roasters such as Stumptown. Add to that lots of good press, and business boomed. So much that while Noah went back to finish his senior year at Pomona, the older brothers expanded into a new niche, providing their fancy-brew coffee service to (mostly) tech firms such as Twitter’s Gotham office.

Noah returned to the firm as a cofounder after graduation—his brothers only had a few coffee-service customers at that point—and two years later, Joyride Coffee has carved out a profitable new market providing top-notch roasts in the workplace. The relatively inexpensive perk of fancy coffee yields big appreciation from workers—that’s Noah’s pitch. And it’s working. Joyride was turning a profit by the end of their first year and, now, with 175 clients (coming from well beyond their original tech niche), the Belanich bros are the ones who need the caffeine.

“For a while there, we were so busy that we didn’t have time to hire people,” says Noah.

All three brothers have elite degrees. Adam delved into fine arts at Dartmouth, while Dave majored in political science for his B.A. at Middlebury and master’s at Yale. At Pomona, Noah earned the interdisciplinary philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) degree.

Noah says a liberal arts education is good preparation for entrepreneurship because the broad-based curriculum helps prepare you for the wide range of challenges you’ll deal with running a business: “It’s just the ability to think about problems from various approaches.” Now that he’s finally hiring, Noah, to no surprise, looks favorably upon his fellow liberal arts grads, and he recently brought on board two Sagehens: Anders Crabo ’12, a chemistry major, and Gracie Bialecki ’12, an English major. Says Noah: “It’s more about the way you think than what you know coming into the job.”

As an entrepreneur, Noah has tapped into his liberal arts ingenuity countless times. Case in point: recently big brother Dave took notice of a café that was dispensing ice coffee from a keg-like device. He came to Noah: “Do you think you could design something like that that we could put in offices?” Noah loved the idea, and through extensive experimentation, trial and error, he came up with an adapted refrigerated beer keg that could dispense cold coffee on tap. The ice-coffee keg was a big hit in the Big Apple this summer. “Everybody loves talking about how they have a Cold Brew Kegerator in the office,” says Noah. “It almost makes people feel naughty, like they’re drinking beer.”

Next comes a bigger challenge: Expansion to the West Coast. The brothers plan to bring Joyride to San Francisco next summer, knowing the city by the bay is full of tech companies with a taste for good coffee. It’s a move they have mulled for some time. “We want to build it slowly,” he says of the business. “And we want to build it smart.”