The lights went out at Aman Bhargava’s place in the Rice Village Apartments around 2 a.m. on Monday, Feb. 15. As the day passed, the apartment got colder. The pipes froze, cutting off the water supply. And the temperature — inside and outside — was only going down.

Bhargava, a full-time MBA student in the Class of 2021, hadn’t expected to lose power and water during a Houston cold snap. Luckily, he still had some bottled water left over from his preparations for a summer hurricane that never materialized. But he had no canned food and little to keep him warm in the Arctic indoor conditions that developed as the outage dragged on into Tuesday.

A number of his classmates, he realized, were in the same boat — many of them international students, like him, living in the Rice grad student apartments where conditions were quickly deteriorating. Two emails from Rice Business gave him hope: One said there was still power and water in McNair Hall. The other said anyone who needed help should contact administrators. So he did.
 

“I reached out and said, ‘Can we shelter at school?’ ” he said. The answer was yes.

Bhargava and his RVA neighbors joined dozens of others who sheltered at McNair Hall the week of Feb. 15, including business school faculty, students and staff, along with members of Rice’s “ride-out team” of essential personnel who stay on campus during disasters. The building never lost power or water during the winter storm that caused widespread outages throughout the region, when temperatures dropped to lows not seen since 1989.

On Tuesday morning, Bhargava channeled his energy into mobilizing the other Rice Business students at his apartment building, compiling their personal details to share with the Rice University Police Department, which approved their plan to camp out at McNair. Then he booked them an Uber, which took an hour to arrive on icy roads — plus another 25 minutes to make the short trip from the apartments to campus, which normally takes about five minutes.

“I’m so glad the driver showed up and was patient,” Bhargava said. “Every time we got to an intersection, it was either closed or too icy, so we had to turn around and find another way.”

When they finally made it to McNair, they faced a new problem: How to feed everyone in the building. Restaurants and grocery stores were closed, and the roads weren’t safe for deliveries in any case. But Bhargava coordinated with Adam Herman, executive director of the Student Program Office, and Joe Garcia of Elite Events Houston, which handles catering for Rice Business. They got in touch with David McDonald, senior director at Rice Housing and Dining, who immediately said the students were welcome to eat at one of the Rice undergraduate dining halls, South Servery, shared by Hanszen and Wiess colleges. Later in the week, Garcia provided meals on site in McNair Hall: enchiladas for lunch on Thursday and pad thai on Friday.

After meeting the basic needs for food, water and heat, McNair became a sort of cold-weather summer camp. Herman — who coordinated the impromptu housing effort along with Rice’s crisis management team, RUPD and other Rice Business administrators — started referring to the building as Hotel McNair for its overnight guests, who were given cots to sleep on, and Camp McNair for those who came by during the day to charge devices, warm up, and take showers.

“The mood with everybody there was kind of a quiet thankfulness,” said Elizabeth Walton, a full-time MBA student in the Class of 2022, who spent two nights camping out in a breakout room with her husband and their dog. “I’m just so grateful to have Rice Business, and that McNair Hall randomly has showers.” 

Everyone was still careful to wear masks and keep their distance, but for many students, it was the most in-person time they’d spent with their classmates in a year. No one was in the right frame of mind to do classwork, Walton said, but some played board games and watched movies together.

“It was fun to be around other people instead of alone in your cold, dark apartment,” she said. “There was a lot of camaraderie — we were all in it together.”

“With the way COVID has been, I haven’t been able to meet many first-years. But because of this winter storm, I was able to not only meet but to have meaningful conversations with some of them. It was nice to have someone in the same situation as you are and talk to them about how they’re managing,” said Bhargava.

The “crisis within a crisis” not only brought people together, but it brought out the best in the Rice Business community, said Herman.

“This was an opportunity for the school as an organization to show up for students, faculty and staff, but also for students like Aman to show up for his fellow students and form something that was organic in McNair,” he said.  

Students mobilized to help people in need off campus as well. Professional MBA students supporting a nonprofit called Amel Houston as part of a Capstone course started an impromptu initiative to help those in Houston’s refugee community after the storm.

“What started with few texts quickly became a community initiative, where our efforts coupled with the generosity of corporate sponsors (H-E-B, Target), restaurants (Dimassi’s, Fadi’s), Rice MBA classmates and neighborhoods helped contribute 75 meals, tons of water and about $1,000 worth of basic supplies to refugees,” said Arthi Vasudevan ’21.

As power and water came back on across Houston, Hotel McNair reverted to its primary purpose as an academic building. Bhargava packed up and returned to the Rice Village Apartments on Thursday. Recovering from the stress of the ordeal took a little longer.

“Because of the pandemic, it’s not going back to ‘normal,’ ” he said. “It’s going back to the ‘new normal.’ But I have power and water now, so it’s a little easier.”

Tragedy in the Rice Business Family

The severe freeze that devastated Texas in February caused at least 25 deaths in Harris County alone, the Harris County Institute of Forensic Science reported in March. Tragedy struck the Rice Business community when Jackie Nguyen, EMBA ’21, lost her mother, Loan Le, and three children — Olivia, 11; Edison, 8; and Colette, 5 — in a fire at her home in Sugar Land while the family tried to stay warm. Jackie was hospitalized with injuries from the fire but is recovering.

“The depth of this loss is unimaginable,” Dean Peter Rodriguez wrote in a letter to the Rice Business community. “Measured against it, our sympathies seem so feeble. Still, even now, we know that sharing our love and expressions of comfort with Jackie is needed and meaningful. I hope that you will join her classmates in the EMBA class of 2021 in their loving support and compassion for Jackie. The hearts and prayers of all of us in the Rice Business family are and will remain with her and her family in this sorrowful moment.”

Jackie’s classmates rallied to help her, providing clothing and essentials, cleaning up from the fire, and donating to a GoFundMe account with the aim of creating a foundation to honor the memory of Olivia, Edison and Colette. By the time of the children’s funeral services in early March, the account had nearly reached its goal of $500,000.

On the Slack channel houston4jackie.slack.com, there’s been an outpouring of love and support from all who knew Jackie’s family — and many who didn’t.

“Jackie, your children truly became honorary members of our EMBA 2021 class this past year during the many hours spent together over Zoom,” wrote her classmate Matthew Goldsby ’21 in one Slack thread. “I will never forget their smiling faces peeking over their computer screens, in particular one day when a professor suggested that grades do not really matter. Their mischievous grins and pure delight in that moment will never fade in my memory.”

“This really made me smile,” Jackie wrote. “I also feel like they were beside me on our MBA journey...  and am just so sad that they won’t get to see us walk. They were so looking forward to it. Love y’all so much.”

Those who want to offer support but don’t have Slack can also email houston4jackie@gmail.com.

In business, as in politics, transfers of power aren’t always seamless — and when threatened, the powerful sometimes dig in their heels. After the nation’s top elected official struggled to accept his ouster in the 2020 election, management scholars reflected on similarly fraught leadership successions at organizations both large and small. For insight into this dynamic, we spoke to psychologist Marlon Mooijman, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business. With a focus on the interrelation of power, trust and status, Mooijman’s research offers a unique perspective on the current political moment — and its connection to organizations well beyond the arena of government.

How does your work dovetail with the post-election period?
What’s most relevant is the question of someone’s willingness to give up power, to relinquish control. We define power as controlling something others desire: a business budget, government funds. That control gives people power because it makes others want to do things for them, to gain access to that desirable good. As a consequence, gaining and having power is nice, and losing it is not. And that’s as relevant an issue for CEOs as for politicians.

What are the conditions under which leaders find it particularly hard to give up power?
My research suggests that on the way to the top of the corporate ladder, leaders lose trust in those around them. They start to think of the managers below them as doing their bidding only because those direct reports want something the leader has to dole out: more budget, bigger bonuses, promotions. As a result, leaders don’t trust that others are working for them because of their own good will.

In a Machiavellian way, leaders come to see interactions with those below them as all about political maneuvering, and they start to feel like they have to always be on their guard, so they don’t get taken advantage of.

And that makes it hard to cede control?
The more power you gain or exert, the less you trust. And the less you trust, the more you feel like you have to rely solely on your power to get things done.
 

The longer people stay in power, meanwhile, the more cynical they get about trust. Leaders find they have to use more and more power to hold on to power.

So they crowd out trust, they crowd out the possibility that people are willing to follow them voluntarily, and their leadership starts to rely on force and domination. People then exhaust every option to keep power.

How do organizations resolve this problem? How do they get rid of a power-mad leader who’s really dug in?
It often requires creating a cushy way out. If a board wants the CEO out, its members need to think about what’s important to him or her, what’s the underlying concern. Everyone is different. Is it really just about holding on to power?

My takeaway is, organizations have to focus more on making outgoing CEOs feel like they’re still esteemed, admired, and that they will be moving forward. Maybe that’s about some sort of honorary title, emeritus status, maybe it’s about still having a parking spot.

It’s about money, too, of course. You have to buy people out, that’s standard. But what often goes unrecognized is that departing CEOs want a good way out in terms of how esteemed they seem. Ultimately, it’s about respect.

If you’re a CEO who’s maybe failing a bit and then asked to leave, it’s embarrassing. Leaders get trapped in a phenomenon that’s called escalation of commitment: When doing poorly, they want to invest more time, more energy and money into saving their reputation. A way out of that cycle is to provide an exit that saves face.

What’s the relationship between the power-trust dynamic and this desire for respect?
In my field, we make a distinction between power, which is controlling resources, and status, which is about respect and admiration. If I have power, that tends to undermine trust. Because I have something desirable, I become more cynical about others’ motives. But if I think others admire me, I tend to trust them more.

If an organization can make people feel respected and admired, it becomes an environment where inclusion is prevalent, and trust goes up. If a workplace has more power hierarchies, it creates more distance and less trust. 

Does that mean there should be no hierarchies? 
Every organization needs to have some sort of power hierarchy. But there are other ways to boost inclusion and trust: Minimizing a focus on different titles; deemphasizing the degree to which people have access to different levels of resources and the degree to which people occupy clearly different spaces and types of offices based on their titles and level of power. If an organization can do that, it feeds into an idea of employees being close to each other instead of far away.

What steps can organizations take to make that happen?
I've been in corporate board meetings, where people smack the table and say basically, “I'm the boss, so I decide.” Sure, that’s true. But you destroyed all your authority in that moment.

Instead, you have to focus on culture, and culture starts at the top. Studies show that when CEOs place high levels of trust in managers right below them, that trickles down. That’s not a surprising outcome maybe, but it’s nice to know that research bears it out: You can change the trust dynamic in a company when you make changes at the top.

What does that mean for the country moving forward?
The tone at the top matters. The president sets the tone, the norm, the implicit understanding of what's acceptable. So it’s important to have those in charge foster trust and respect throughout an entire organization — or, in this case, the whole nation.

Andrew Sessa is a Boston-based writer and editor.

It’s been a year.

Rice first canceled in-person classes the week of March 9, 2020, after a university employee tested positive for COVID following a Nile River cruise. As the coronavirus pandemic started sweeping the U.S., Rice was the first Texas university to issue major cancellations, out of “an abundance of caution.” Abundant caution quickly caught on, of course, and other schools soon followed suit.

What at first seemed like it would last a few weeks, prompting us to panic-buy toilet paper and canned goods as if we were preparing for a hurricane, became our “new normal,” a seemingly indefinite life in limbo as restrictions eased and tightened through several pandemic peaks. 

Rice Business moved all classes online for the spring semester on March 16, 2020. When classes resumed in the fall, we delivered courses using a hybrid model that meant students could choose whether to attend classes in person or virtually. To ensure a high-quality online experience, we made a $1.2 million investment in classroom technology and provided professors with additional support staff to eliminate technical difficulties. Our faculty — who delivered classes from their homes, their offices and live in the classroom — were supported by classroom ambassadors (our COVID-era teaching assistants) and technology TAs who made sure that classes were inclusive and accessible to students attending remotely. About 75 percent of students across our programs, however, chose in-person learning.

We successfully navigated the fall semester with precautions in place to keep everyone in the community safe. Everyone on the Rice campus was required to wear masks and undergo regular COVID testing. We moved events outdoors wherever possible, and we limited the number of people in classrooms and public spaces to ensure that everyone kept a safe physical distance. That allowed us to deliver courses on schedule and enable students to make progress toward earning their degrees on time. It also kept the virus from spreading. Since the beginning of this academic year, Rice has conducted more than 120,000 COVID tests, with a positivity rate of 0.27 percent.

After the winter holidays, a surge in cases nationwide and in Houston meant that Rice, and Rice Business, began this spring semester remotely once again. In mid-February, we returned to hybrid instruction — a week later than planned, due to the devastating storm that blanketed Houston in snow and ice.  

As COVID vaccines become more widespread, we hope that the newest normal will start to more closely resemble our old normal. In March, Rice announced in-person graduation plans for both the class of 2021 and 2020. We’re excited to hold the Rice Business Investiture on May 14 — and even more excited that the university’s commencement plan recently expanded to allow each graduate to invite up to four guests to celebrate this special day in person. Our ceremony will be held Friday morning at 8:30, and will still be livestreamed for remote viewing by anyone who cannot attend in person.

Meanwhile, this year’s alumni reunion is a weeklong virtual event, from April 18 to 24, with plenty of online programming, including the Rice Business Alumni Awards, school updates, webinars, coffee chats and more.

We are hopeful that the accelerated availability of COVID vaccine doses will lower overall public health risks from the virus and increase our ability to safely gather in larger groups. Along with COVID testing, Rice has been providing vaccines to eligible faculty, staff and students — and doing its part to help vaccinate the surrounding community. On March 15, Rice Stadium began operating as a community vaccination site serving the entire Houston area. The vaccine clinic, one of several operated by Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center, heavily emphasized vaccinating underserved populations in Houston.

The indicators are improving, nationally and in Houston. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The sacrifices we’ve made have helped get us here. It’s no surprise that the Rice Business community has been agile and adaptive in the face of uncertainty. Most importantly, we’ve supported each other through this dauntingly difficult period. We hope that soon we can celebrate, together, our return to “regular life.”

Professor Connie Porter has been named senior associate dean of the school’s expanded Office of Belonging and Engagement. Dean Peter Rodriguez appointed her to the new position, which was created based on the recommendation of the Rice Business Task Force on Racial Equity and Social Justice. Porter joins Lina Bell, who serves as the executive director of DEI.

“I am honored to serve in this new role at a momentous time in the history of our school. The task force established by Dean (Peter) Rodriguez paved the way for the expansion of our DEI office,” Porter said.
 

“I look forward to engaging and partnering with students, staff, faculty, alumni and stakeholders in our greater community as we continue the work to be done to amplify DEI at Rice Business.”

The Rice Business Task Force on Racial Equity and Social Justice was established shortly after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of white police officers in Minneapolis. In October, the task force presented the dean with 33 recommendations meant to improve the racial environment at Rice Business and at the university, including that a new position leading our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts be created and that this leader report directly to the dean

“Adding to the DEI leadership team strengthens our ability to further these efforts in the school and broaden our engagement with the community,” said Rodriguez. “I look forward to working with Connie as she brings her deep insight and thoughtful approach to this new position as we commit to advancing the school’s goals of diversity, equity and inclusion with students, staff, faculty, alumni and beyond.”

Porter joined Rice in 2011 and has taught core marketing, marketing research and customer relationship management courses. Her research focuses on the value of fostering customer relationships in technology-enabled marketing environments, and she has published articles in premier academic journals in this area. For several years, she taught both MBAs and undergraduates at University of Notre Dame. She earned a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with dual concentrations in finance and public policy; an MBA from University of Michigan with dual emphases in operations and corporate strategy; and a Ph.D. from Georgia State University in marketing.

Prior to pursuing a career in academia, Porter spent several years as a management consultant with firms including Gemini Consulting (now CapGemini), Cambridge Management Consulting (now part of Atos) and Xerox. She also worked as an internal consultant with Georgia Pacific and as a commercial banker at National Westminster Bank USA (now part of Bank of America). She will reduce her teaching commitments to accommodate the new role but will continue to benefit the school and Rice Business students in the classroom.

The expanded Office of Belonging and Engagement will further open the important conversation on racial equity and social justice to the community to generate broader engagement. Rice President David Leebron has also outlined the university’s commitment to racial equity and social justice for the good of the institution and betterment of the nation. From advanced training for staff, students and faculty — beginning this spring — to faculty hiring, curriculum, student recruitment and newly defined positions, the university is focused on growth and change.

In early March, Aaron Knape ’08 was at a meeting in River Oaks discussing his tech startup sEATz — what he describes as “the Uber Eats for stadiums,” which lets fans order food from an app and have it delivered to them in their seat.

He was joined by executives from the venture capital firm Valedor Partners and his co-founders, including Craig Ceccanti ’08, to hash out the details of sEATz’s upcoming $3 million Series A capital raise. The company they had founded in 2018 was poised for rapid growth.

sEATz already counted the Rice Owls football team and the Houston Texans as clients. Because of Knape’s platform, their fans were no longer missing precious game minutes while waiting in long concession lines. The company had developed a close relationship with the food services company Aramark, and it had recently added the Houston Rodeo to its client roster. Knape was hiring additional team members and fine-tuning his platform to help stadium concessionaries more efficiently serve their customers.
 

“We were in the starting blocks, ready to grow and scale in 2020,” he says. “It was supposed to be our breakout year.”

Midway through the meeting, however, the news broke that the Houston Rodeo had been cancelled because of COVID-19. “The air left the room,” Knape says. It meant that sEATz had just lost one of its biggest accounts.

Later that day, the NBA suspended its season. The next day, the MLB cancelled spring training games and pushed back the start of the regular season. “That week was the roughest week we’ve had as a company,” Knape recalls. Somehow, he didn’t panic. “I said, let’s just see how this plays out.”

A few months later, sEATz raised nearly $2 million in capital — on top of a $1.425 million seed raise in 2019 — and landed an MLB team as a client.

Business owners and entrepreneurs around the world were forced to tweak their business models to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. Like Knape, those who proved adept in the art of improvising on the fly — who successfully executed a pandemic pivot — managed to not only maintain but expand their business during a difficult year, even while others succumbed to the economic upheaval.

“Plenty of businesses just hunkered down, and they missed opportunities,” says Lorie Clements ’11, principal of Springboard Solutions, which coaches business owners and their leadership teams — about 20 percent of whom are Rice alumni. “The ones that persevered realized that obstacles can make us stronger, and they said, ‘Let’s grab this moment.’ ”

It’s a lesson that applies to entrepreneurs even under ideal circumstances, says Yael Hochberg, the Ralph S. O’Connor Professor of Entrepreneurship at Rice Business and head of the Rice Entrepreneurship Initiative.

“That’s true in normal times, and not just in times of crisis,” she says. “The world isn’t static. As new products and services enter the market, as people’s preferences shift, entrepreneurs have to shift with them. A product or service that is relevant in one year may not be next year.”

Startup ventures, in particular, need to maintain flexibility to adapt, Hochberg says: Getting locked into a particular vision of a concept, or how you wanted something to work, isn’t going to get you far if your customers need something else.

New Features

As the pandemic unfolded, Knape realized that his business model, designed to cut down on lines and crowds at large events, was perfectly suited to the physical distancing measures health organizations were starting to recommend. And he knew that, eventually, sports teams would return to arenas — and so would fans.
 

“We saw that we’d been handed an opportunity to help venues plan their eventual return to live events,” he says.

So instead of pulling back, the company added features to its app, including express pick-up and web-enabled ordering. “A lot of our competitors put their business in idle cash conservation mode. But we didn’t take our foot off the pedal. We said now is the time to grow.”

In May, sEATz attempted a cash raise of $1 million to get it through the end of 2021. It was oversubscribed, and sEATz ended up raising $1.7 million, which allowed it to hire new staff, including a new chief technology officer.

Now back on the field, the Houston Texans are using sEATz, and the company has integrated its app into MLB Ballpark, major league baseball’s app. In December, the company won a contract with the New York Mets, its first East Coast client, for 2021.

It was that same growth mindset that helped Don Porr ’97, the owner of Diamond Fiberglass, an industrial fiberglass tank and vessel manufacturer, decide to add new products during the pandemic.

Porr went through a major setback in 2017 when a devastating fire shuttered his business. But by the second half of 2019, business was back and humming along. That’s when Porr linked up with Lorie Clements at Springboard Solutions. Together, they mapped out an ambitious growth strategy that included expanding his product portfolio to include the service of building large, on-site diameter tanks for clients.

When the pandemic hit, Porr thought about pumping the brakes, but ultimately decided to keep his momentum going. “We said we needed to forge ahead with all our plans,” Porr says, “and we did.”

The company’s manufacturing arm turned a prototype into a fully produced tank and invested $200,000 in upgrading the equipment needed to build the tanks. Sales held steady and revenues dropped by only 10%. The company’s industrial services arm, which requires workers to go on site, was harder hit, with revenues down some 40%. But no staff were laid off after careful expense cutting.

A Lift from Lilie

For both Knape and Porr, help from Rice Business was integral to both surviving and thriving. They benefitted from weekly Zoom meetings organized by the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie), where business owners and entrepreneurs convened to discuss cash conservation, PPP loans and strategies for keeping their businesses open. “We were really working together and supporting each other,” Porr says. Lilie also ran webinars on topics like mental health to help alumni adapt to change.

In March, Lilie moved quickly to help alumni startups secure grants and loans to stay afloat while they worked on their pivots, says Kyle Judah, Lilie’s executive director. sEATz ultimately received a PPP loan, and Knape credits Lilie with facilitating the application process. “The Rice network has done such great things for me,” he says.

For Darrell Morris ’18, the insights he gained from his finance classes at Rice Business helped him keep the burners lit at his cooking school, Well Done Cooking.

Morris and his wife bought the Houston-based business in 2018 and planned to grow the school from one location to 10 over five years.  COVID-19 forced them to halt their in-person culinary classes, and at first the setback felt paralyzing.

Then, “after three days, we picked our jaws up off the floor and put pen to pad and took massive action steps,” says Morris. “We said, we need to play offense on this and innovate and adapt to this new normal.”

They quickly shifted classes online, and to differentiate the company in the crowded space of online courses, decided to deliver cooking kits to customers to better simulate in-person classes. That decision didn’t come without its growing pains, however. Early on in the pandemic, when they shipped dozens of ingredient kits across Texas and Massachusetts for a corporate cooking class, the ice packs melted in transit and the meat arrived warm.

“We took a hit on that,” Morris says, “but luckily the client was gracious enough to give us another chance, and we learned how to pack things correctly.” What’s more, the consulting firm client provided a three-page document filled with feedback that Morris and his wife were able to incorporate into their processes.

In May, the cooking school opened to 50% capacity, and in December, it saw a significant rush, with high demand for holiday baking classes. Morris hired new staff and the company broke even. He’s planning to pick up with the company’s expansion in 2021.

Ingredients for Success

Businesses that excelled during the pandemic have a few factors in common, according to Clements.

Companies that did well were able to move quickly from a fear-based mindset to one of growth and action. They crafted a new vision, made plans, tested solutions and experimented. And they didn’t shy away from communicating with employees.

“This has really been a test of how resilient businesses and their culture were, and how aligned the leadership team was,” she says. “I was seeing a lot of true colors come out.”

Successful companies pursued “nice-to-have” projects, like creating unique onboarding and training videos and redesigning processes to be more efficient. They also hired new talent while competitors laid off staff. “They asked themselves, how can we do more for clients when everyone else is doing less? They took a leap of faith,” Clements says.

That was especially true for Emily Baker ’16, the director of finance and operations at the Houston Botanic Garden. COVID-19 could have foiled the garden’s plan to open its doors to the public in the fall of 2020. But Baker, who joined the nonprofit at the beginning of 2020, made sure planning and construction stayed on track in the spring and into summer so the 132-acre park could open in mid-September.

“We decided to open, and open on time, because the garden is mostly outside, and people were craving places to go outdoors,” she says.

Baker and her colleagues had to make do with an operating budget cut from $2.7 million to $1.9 million and work around construction delays. The team made peace with the fact that the in-person educational programming they had long planned for would largely have to be postponed. An in-person lecture series planned for the opening was delivered to visitors instead through videos on the garden’s website.

Yet the park was able to expand its staff, adding 15 employees since July. Baker says the pre-pandemic installation of new HR software and other automation for the garden’s finance and communications functions made interviewing, hiring and switching to remote work for some employees much easier.

The park exceeded its first-quarter operating goals for admissions and memberships, with earned revenue of $390,000 in the last quarter of 2020. It now has over 2,000 members, half of whom joined after visiting.

“We take that as a huge stamp of approval,” Baker says. “The garden has proved to be a place where people want to be.”

Successes like the Houston Botanic Garden’s may be a rarity during the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late for other companies and nonprofits to pivot. There’s really no wrong time to reinvent yourself, says Clements. She suggests looking at how the landscape has changed and creating a new business plan.

“My advice is to think big,” she says. “Set a long-term target. Plan where you want to be in three years and work backwards from there. And don’t let the uncertainty of today’s times put your plans on hold.”

Deborah Lynn Blumberg is a Houston-based freelance writer specializing in health and wellness and business and finance. 

Owl Have You Know

Season 1, Episode 19

Ritesh Sheth ’04 joins host Christine Dobbyn to discuss his journey from management consulting to product management and financial analyst, and finally to becoming a yoga teacher and focusing on serving others.

Subscribe to Owl Have You Know on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

An application that allows convenience store owners to remotely manage and monitor their businesses from their smartphones took home the grand prize during the 2021 Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC).

SwiftSku from Auburn University was selected by the judges as the startup with the highest investment potential and is taking home $432,667 in cash and other prizes.

The annual event hosted by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship and Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business is the world’s largest and richest student startup competition. This year’s event attracted the highest number of participants ever, with 54 startups vying for over $1.6 million in prizes. The winners were announced virtually this afternoon at the conclusion of the four-day event.

A competitive, high-quality applicant pool led the Rice Alliance to expand this year’s RBPC, offering more student entrepreneurs the opportunity to compete for prizes and receive the quality mentorship, feedback and real-world experience the competition boasts.

Significant prizes this year and the teams that won them include:

• $350,000 GOOSE Capital Investment Grand Prize — SwiftSku, Auburn University
• $100,000 Jon Finger and Finger Interests, David Anderson and the Anderson Family Fund, Greg Novak and Tracy Druce Second-Place Investment Prize — AgZen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• $50,000 Jon Finger and Finger Interests, David Anderson and the Anderson Family Fund, Greg Novak and Tracy Druce Third-Place Investment Prize — FibreCoat, RWTH Aachen University
• $300,000 The OWLs Investment Prize — AgZen, MIT
• $100,000 Houston Angel Network Investment Prize — AgZen, MIT
• $100,000 TiE Houston Angel Group Investment Prize — FibreCoat, RWTH Aachen University
• $100,000 Artemis Fund Investment Prize — Kit Switch, Stanford University
• $100,000 TMC Innovation Healthcare Investment Prize — ArchGuard, Duke University
• $50,000 Business Angel Minority Association Investment Prize — SwiftSku, Auburn University
• $25,000 Southwest National Pediatric Device Prizes — Blue Comet Medical Solutions, Northwestern University; Neurava, Purdue University
• $50,000 nCourage Investment Group’s Courageous Women Entrepreneurs Investment Prize — Shelly Xu Design (SXD), Harvard University
• $25,000 Urban Capital Network Investment Prize — OYA FEMTECH Apparel, UCLA
• $25,000 Pearland Economic Development Corporation Spirit of Entrepreneurship Prize — SimpL, University of Pittsburgh
• $25,000 RG Advisory Partners’ CFO Consulting Prize — SwiftSku, Auburn University
• $20,000 Johnson & Johnson Innovation | JLABS Life Science Award — LFAnt Medical, McGill University
• $20,000 OFW Law FDA Regulatory Strategy In-Kind Prize — Paldara, Oklahoma State University
• $20,000 Silver Fox Advisors Mentoring In-Kind Prizes — Ai-Ris, Texas A&M University; bruxAway, University of Texas at Austin; Karkinex, Rice University
• $20,000 Baker Botts Legal Service In-Kind Prizes — AgZen, MIT; FibreCoat, RWTH Aachen University; SwiftSku, Auburn University
• $30,000 Polsinelli Energy Tech Innovation In-Kind Award — AgZen, MIT
• $5,000 Eagle Investors Prize — OYA FEMTECH Apparel, UCLA
• $3,500 in total prizes for the Mercury Fund Elevator Pitch Competition — Anthro Energy         , Stanford University; AgZen, MIT; Blue Comet Medical Solutions, Northwestern University; EasyFlo, University of New Mexico; SwiftSku, Auburn University; FibreCoat, RWTH Aachen University
• $3,000 in total prizes for Anbarci Family People’s Choice Awards — AgZen, MIT; OYA FEMTECH Apparel, UCLA; SwiftSku, Auburn University
• $3,000 Palo Alto Software Outstanding LivePitch Prize — LiRA, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The seven finalists for the grand prize based on the judges’ overall scores were:

SwiftSku, Auburn University — Grand prize and individual prizes worth a total of $432,667.

The grand prize includes:

• $350,000 Investment Prize from Goose Capital.
• Business plan software provided by Palo Alto Software.
• Opportunity to ring the closing bell at the Nasdaq Stock Market in New York.
• $25,000 in-kind CFO Consulting from RG Advisory Partners.
• In-kind legal services from Baker Botts

AgZen, MIT — second place and a total of $538,667 in prizes.

AgZen’s field-tested and patented spray and formulation technology reduces pesticide usage by 50% while maintaining optimal pest control.

FibreCoat, RWTH Aachen University — third place and $157,166 in total prizes.

FibreCoat developed a fiber coating process to economically produce composite fiber; the first product is a basalt fiber with aluminum coating that performs like full aluminum fibers.

Candelytics, Harvard University — fourth place and more than $5,000 in total prizes, including the $5,000 Norton Rose Fulbright Fourth-Place Cash Prize.

Candelytics is a lidar and 3D analytics startup that aims to pioneer the digital infrastructure that will make complex 3D data accessible, intelligent and impactful.

OYA FEMTECH Apparel, UCLA — fifth place and more than $36,000 in total prizes, including the $5,000 EY Fifth-Place Cash Prize.

OYA FEMTECH Apparel is revolutionizing sportswear leggings with fabrics, designs and innovations that support feminine health.

LFAnt Medical, McGill University — sixth place and more than $25,000 in total prizes, including the $5,000 Chevron Technology Ventures Sixth-Place Cash Prize.

LFAnt Medical is a Canadian biotechnology startup dedicated to revolutionizing point-of-care diagnostics for at-home detection of sexually transmitted infections.

SimpL, University of Pittsburgh — seventh place and more than $30,000 in total prizes, including the $5,000 Shell Ventures Seventh-Place Cash Prize.

SimpL is a digital health company that uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to improve outcomes for people with back pain by recommending home exercise programs based on user-specific biomechanics and pain points.

Additionally, Anthro Energy, Stanford University, won the elevator pitch competition and a $1,000 cash prize from Mercury Fund. The top five elevator pitches in each sector were awarded cash prizes.

All competitors also receive:

• Entrepreneur Futures Network (EFN) mentoring
  • EFN mentors offered pre-competition mentoring and advice to each of the teams invited to participate at the 2021 RBPC. They provided advice in areas such as refining a business plan, refining financial models and improving presentation skills.
• Amazon Web Services
  • Amazon Web Services will provide up to $5,000 in service credits for each of the 54 startup teams for 2 years.

For more information about the RBPC, visit www.rbpc.rice.edu.