Fabio Berger and Tito Bohrt own matching scooters. The sophomores often ride around campus together because scooting, they explain, allows for faster commuting. But these blockmates have more in common than just a superior mode of transport. As we sat on the patio outside von der Heyden Pavilion, Fabio and Tito talked with the same animated energy, jumping in at the end of each other’s sentences. They inhabit the same brain wave and maintain an easy flow of ideas.
Most importantly, they share a company, named ShelfRelief, that they just launched last week at a qualifying track event of the Elevator Pitch Competition.
ShelfRelief—they told me, pulling the site up on Fabio’s laptop—exists online (www.shelfrelief.com) as a reliable marketplace for students to buy and sell textbooks from one another. The idea for such a company came to the two last spring, as both scrambled to buy the semester’s textbooks at affordable prices. Why not let students get their books directly from each other?
Fabio and Tito are examples of a small but promising—and hopefully growing—group of entrepreneurs on campus. These students are the ones who participate in the Duke Start-Up Challenge, want offices in DUhatch, attend lectures held by the Duke Entrepreneurship Education Series and are in the process of starting an entrepreneurial selective living group called InCube. When asked about their career plans, they talk about start-ups rather than investment banking, starting their own office instead of being assigned a cubicle in someone else’s building.
And we, the rest of Duke’s pre-professional, myopic undergraduate population, should be paying more attention.
Fabio and Tito’s idea for ShelfRelief grew quickly from an initial spark of inspiration to a well-conceived plan and functioning business The pair estimates that since the beginning of the semester, they’ve spent seven hours a day brainstorming, researching, problem-solving, getting advice from local entrepreneurs and watching online web-design tutorials.
With their academic and social lives severely compromised, the pair became more and more invested in their start-up. Now ShelfRelief is at the forefront of their plans for the future. If the company thrives overnight, Fabio and Tito anticipate taking a semester—or more—off to pursue national expansion.
“SelfRelief is Plan A, and I have Duke as Plan B. I joke about that,” Tito said laughing, but the glint in his eyes reveals just how serious he is about his company.
What breeds this sort of passion? Despite the box office success and “based on a true story”-ness of “The Social Network,” entrepreneurs aren’t all scorned lovers hungry for revenge, basking in the attention of a crowd of admirers. Instead, the students I talked to harbored no grandiose idealism about the process of starting a company. Fabio and Tito stressed the dirty work and sleepless nights involved in making a start-up happen.
Sidney Primas, a junior and founding member of InCube, actually laughed when I asked him about how much profit he wants to make. “No one does it for the money,” he told me. Then he got serious. In fact, he said, many of the risks involved in entrepreneurship run antithetical to the low-risk, high-income career track Duke’s pre-professional culture promotes. Not all business ventures are wildly profitable—only a few people become Mark Zuckerberg.
But think about this. Most undergraduates come to Duke ready to translate ideas into tangible impact: We start clubs, plan service initiatives, find ways to get involved in campus activities. We’re enthusiastic and innovative, bright-eyed and excited. But “[o]nce [we] have to look at [the] future,” Sid said, “because of the Duke culture, [we] suddenly get conscientious and decide to go the safe route.” That’s at least how he feels: As a freshman, Sid was confident about his entrepreneurial ambitions. Now, he’s considering consulting.
As I sat listening to Fabio and Tito talk about ShelfRelief, I was struck by the truth of Sid’s words. Fabio and Tito radiate positive energy, love talking about problems in order to solve them and see endless possibilities for the future. In comparison, I thought about how trapped many of my fellow Duke students feel, the ever-diminishing list of job options, the stress of catering to different graduate school applications.
Ultimately, entrepreneurship remains rare at Duke not because of lack of talent or initial zeal, but because of the omnipresent culture pressuring students to pursue to pre-professional routes.
By the way, ShelfRelief made it to the finals of the Elevator Pitch Competition. You can see Fabio, Tito and their scooters at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 12 in the Geneen Auditorium of Fuqua.
Shining Li is a Trinity Junior. Her column runs every other Monday.
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