Features

They've Been There Six alumni who have run their own successful businesses tell it like it is

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Joe Faro '91

Sold Joseph's Gourmet Pasta and Sauces to Nestle; in 2010 launched Tuscan Kitchen in Salem, N.H.

FOR JOE FARO '91, THE FUTURE began taking shape in an entrepreneurship class during his senior year at UNH. Until then, he knew food was his passion. He grew up working in his parents' bakery in Haverhill, Mass; he had even begun creating his own handmade pasta. Like most college students, however, he had no idea where it would take him.

Assigned to write a business plan, Faro conceived an idea for a company, Joseph's Gourmet Pasta and Sauces, which he entered in the Whittemore School Holloway Prize Innovation-to-Market Competition. "I intended to bring it to a bank, borrow $1 million and retrofit an old shoe factory," Faro says.

Jonathan King '87

Began selling homemade jam in 1991 at the Portsmouth Farmers' Market; now Stonewall Kitchen's products are sold in 45 different countries and shipped to 5,000 retailers.

WHEN POPE JOHN-PAUL II VISITED BOSTON in the late '70s, Jonathan King '87 bought a 50-gallon container of popcorn, stuffed the snack in small brown bags, drew a papal hat on package, and nicknamed his treats "Pope Corn." He was 14.

Three decades later, King is the president and creative director of Stonewall Kitchen, a company with $45 million in annual sales.

While King's instinct for entrepreneurial ventures started early, the Stonewall Kitchen success story began a few years after King graduated from UNH with a degree in psychology. King and James Stott, now his personal and professional partner, were both waiters in the Seacoast area. They met at a Portsmouth coffee shop and soon discovered they shared traits like creative thinking and risk-taking.

Chris Stone '79

An open-source software proponent, he helped develop the foundation for "cloud" computing; now he's with Epic Ventures.

HIS NAME MAY NOT HAVE brand recognition, but after Chris Stone '79 graduated from UNH, his resume has been littered with names etched into the very bedrock of today's technology: Novell, Linux, Open Source, CORBA. After a decade with other companies like Data General (now EMC) and earning a degree from Harvard Business School, by 1989 Stone was on his own, banking on his own ideas.

Ideas, it should be said, that are still relevant now. The very first company he started, Object Management Group, developed the foundation for distributed computing, which, filtered into today's vernacular, is what we common folk refer to as "the cloud."

Robert A. Stern '79 and Roxanne Rorer Stern '77

Sold Micrus Endovascular for $500 million; his new startup, Vascular Dynamics, tackles hypertension.

IN 1979, ROBERT A. STERN '79, A FRESHLY MINTED temore School grad, decided to light out for the territories--namely, Albuquerque, N.M. "I threw all my stuff in the car and drove out west, with maybe $200 in my pocket and no real plans," he recalls.

Looking back, Bob Stern allows it wasn't the most strategic of moves: New Mexico, he soon discovered, wasn't then a fertile environment for would-be entrepreneurs. But that's probably one of the few false starts Stern has ever made. Over the course of his 20-plus years as an innovative health-care technology entrepreneur, Stern has shown a talent for both startups and turn-arounds, for recognizing rare opportunities and solving seemingly intractable problems.

Karen Johnson Macumber '84

Fulgent Media Group was billing $20 million a year when she sold it in 2008; now CEO of the startup SproutShout.com.

WITHIN A COUPLE OF YEARS OF STARTING her own company, Fulgent Media Group, Karen Johnson Macumber '84 found herself hunting around for a new job. Fulgent, a media agency that specialized in online marketing, had soared atop the dot.com bubble only to come crashing down when the bubble deflated in 2001.

"All of a sudden, no one wanted anything to do with the Internet," Macumber recalls. Fearing she would have to close her agency, Macumber anxiously looked around for work. One interview went well enough that she felt fairly certain she had the job. Luckily for her, she was wrong.

Richard E. Tasker '68

He started American Sensor Technologies in his basement in 1999 and now sells his sensors worldwide.

RICHARD TASKER '68 AND HIS FRIENDS KNEW it could be done better. "We all had some dissatisfaction with the way things were done at our previous employers," he says. "We felt that too much of business today is cutthroat and all about price. We wanted to create a company where we worked with the customer and where both clients and employees would be well treated."

So in 1999, Tasker, Karmjit Sidhu and Michael Eldredge started American Sensor Technologies in his basement, funded with $250,000 from their own savings and from "friends and friends of friends." The new company 's philosophy was to make a high quality, high performance product and to "treat our customers and employees like we would want to be treated," says Tasker.