Summer 2015 13

D R E W A N D E N T R E P R E N E U R S H I P : A T I M E L I N E

Through the years, Drew has been a thread connecting a wide range of successful entrepreneurial venturers. Here, just a few.

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The Thread Continues >

Niamh Hamill G’15 founds Institute of Study Abroad Ireland, a company that leads educational and cultural trips to the Emerald Isle.

Michael Dee G’05 takes a break from his

entrepreneurial duties as co-owner of the Smarties

Candy Co. to study evolutionary science.

The Rev. William J. Barber II T’03, president of the North

Carolina NAACP, organizes Moral Mondays, a protest movement

aimed at the state’s moves to restrict voting rights and cut

education spending.Ella and Henry Appenzeller T’1885 embark on a game-changing mission to bring Protestant Christianity to Korea.

Harding: courtesy of eSilicon. Rodriguez-Graham: Rodrigo Ceballos. Moed, Ingrao: Deborah Feingold. Barber: Justin Cook. Abbak, Sailer: courtesy of Paired Media. Knotts: courtesy of Katherine Knotts.Drew, Appenzellers, Baldwins, Cunningham: University Archives. Hamill: Lynne DeLade. Dee: Bill Cardoni.

Wall Street financier Daniel Drew, who built his fortune despite little formal schooling, gives $500,000 toward the founding of Drew Theological Seminary.

New York lawyers Leonard D. and Arthur J. Baldwin, who would later donate $1.5 million to build a college of liberal arts on the campus of Drew Theological Seminary, team with former New Jersey Governor John W. Griggs to form a new law firm, Griggs, Baldwin & Baldwin.

Author, historian and Emmy Award winner John Cunningham C’38 founds Afton

Press (now Afton Publishing) in Florham Park, New Jersey. Cunningham, who died in 2012, wrote more than 50 books, including University in the Forest, a history of Drew.

ABC News calls Omar Rodriguez-Graham C’02 one of Mexico’s “up-and-coming painters,” carrying

on the tradition of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Five years later Rodriguez-Graham is listed in

100 Painters of Tomorrow (Thames & Hudson).

Jack Harding C’77 founds eSilicon Corporation, a privately held

company that designs and manufactures custom computer

chips. Today Harding serves as president

and CEO. Crain’s New York Business names Peppercomm, co-

founded by Ed Moed C’89, a Drew trustee, the “Best Place

to Work” in New York City. “We’re the only company in

the world with a chief comedy officer,” Moed says.

Architectural Digest gushes over a Time Warner Center penthouse apartment that Tony Ingrao C’78

designed for real estate titan Stephen Ross. To wit: “The entry,

extravagantly inlaid with different kinds of stone, sets the tone for the

residence, but the blend of exotic materials doesn’t stop there.”

Katherine Knotts C’01, a resident of England whose consultancy

works with microfinance organiza-tions worldwide, co-authors

The Business of Doing Good.

Yasin Abbak C’09 and Stacy Sailer C’10 co-found

Paired Media, an advertising agency focused on the

restaurant industry.

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ENTREPRENEURS

De’Andre Salter C’92

“The whole Bible is full of enterprises,

startups and ventures.”

Pastor/Entrepreneur

From the pulpit of his New Jersey church, De’Andre Salter C’92 preaches the power of the purse.

It says a lot about De’Andre Salter that one of his first priorities upon becoming senior pastor of Tabernacle Church in South Plainfield, New Jersey, nine years ago was to buy a master franchise license from a commercial cleaning service chain. Salter used that investment to help shepherd 55 unemployed members of his flock through the process of starting their own cleaning businesses. The graduates of Salter’s biblically based entrepreneurial boot camp saw their lives transformed. To-day, he says, some earn incomes in excess of $100,000 a year. Making money isn’t a taboo topic at Tabernacle. Far from it. That’s made clear by the church’s stated mission: “to train people to intentionally use their time, talent and money to make a Christ impact in the world.” The irony? Salter himself isn’t on salary. A Newark native, Salter, 43, left a suc-

cessful corporate career to start his own insurance brokerage in 2001. Today the firm has offices in New Jersey, Maryland and Florida. So Salter volunteers his time at Taber-nacle, where his mother, Emma, preceded him as pastor. “I believe all that I have has been given to me for the purpose of being pastor of Tabernacle Church,” says Salter, a father of four and the husband of novelist Terri Jones Salter. Recently elected as one of the College Alumni Association’s representatives on the university’s Board of Trustees, Salter may be a prosperous minister, but don’t call him a prosperity preacher. His experience as an entrepreneur and angel investor has taught him there’s more to achieving wealth than simply believing riches will come, as some proponents of “prosperity theology” maintain. His recently published book, Seven

Wealth Building Secrets: Your Guide to Money and Meaning (LifeBridge Books, 2015), distills those life lessons into a 176-page guide to merging faith and finances. The book draws from a higher authority than Harvard Business School—namely, the Bible. Salter says the scriptures contain no fewer than 2,300 verses dealing with wealth and money management. Clearly the Lord has opinions on the matter. If “Blessed are the poor” is the passage that springs to mind, Salter says, it bears noting that Jesus was referring to the simple-hearted, not the materially disad-vantaged. “Poverty,” he says, “is no badge of honor.” While he’s been at Tabernacle, unemployment among Salter’s predomi-nantly African-American congregation has never risen above 6.5 percent, Salter notes, even at the height of the Great Recession, when the nationwide jobless rate for blacks was 14 percent.

Among the book’s surprises is Salter’s contention that Jesus wasn’t poor. Consider the evidence. His parents, Joseph and Mary, had the means to trav-el to Bethlehem prior to his birth and stay in an inn (had a room been available). They also made the annual trek from their home in Nazareth to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover, a vacation of sorts that many Jews of his day couldn’t afford. And as a carpenter by trade, Salter argues, Joseph likely would have earned enough money to leave his son at least a small inheritance. “Now, he wasn’t rich,” Salter notes, “but he definitely wasn’t poor.” God wants Christians to prosper financially so they’ll have the resources to “solve the planet’s problems,” Salter writes. “The whole Bible is full of enterprises, startups and ventures.” Shannon Mullen

Emily Blitz had nearly a decade of experience with a Geneva-based AIDS organization under her belt when, in 2010, she found herself rather abruptly unemployed. What to do? Blitz packed up her experience planning large-scale global health conferences and high-level meetings for international HIV orga-nizations and went out on her own as a consultant. The decision matched perfectly her expertise with her ambi-tions. “I like the magic of being part of something big,” she says. These days Blitz keeps pushing herself into new roles, thanks in part to skills she learned as a theatre arts ma-jor at Drew, where she got to “try a little bit of everything. I was props designer, stage manager, onstage, backstage.”

Drew also gave Blitz a passion for helping others around the world. As a sophomore she spent a semester in Thailand, her first visit to a developing country. “It was my first experience in really seeing how people lived with much less than I did, and opening that door for me clicked,” Blitz says. After graduation, she joined the Peace Corps. To expand her client options, last year Blitz signed up for humanitarian operations training run by Save the Children. “We had to turn in our com-

puters and phones and live and work in tents for a week of scenario-based learning,” she says. “It was emotionally hard, freezing cold, incredibly frustrating and I absolutely loved it.” The experience helped her secure her current contract with UNICEF. Self-employment suits Blitz. “I have done so many things I never would have done if I stayed where I was,” she says. “I have a lot more confidence in my adaptability and flexibility than I did five years ago.” Jenna Schnuer

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Making Her Way

Emily (Knox) Blitz C’96 put her experience to work when she started her own consul-tancy in Switzerland.

2010

Summer 2015 15

ILLUSTRATION BY JOE CARDIELLO

ENTREPRENEURS

For Alain Farrelly C’99 and his two brothers, sitting around drinking coffee isn’t slacking off—it’s their business. The trio launched Brewklyn Grind, their artisan coffee roaster and café, in 2010. After Hurricane Sandy wiped out their shop in Red Hook, they relaunched on higher ground in Clinton Hill. “We are three boys from Brooklyn,” Farrelly says, “so we are scrappy, street smart and like a good fight.”

2010

Bread fanatics on California’s central coast beat a path to Kirsten Finberg Frazier’s [C’00] Little Red Hen Bread, where they indulge in loaves of potato rosemary and jalapeño cheddar bread, among other delights. “We kind of live in a fast-paced world,” she says, “and this is something that takes a good deal of time and skill to accomplish.”

Jenna Schnuer

2013

If Kitchen a la Mode in South Orange, New Jersey, doesn’t stock it, your kitchen doesn’t need it. Ben Salmon C’03 opened his 1,000-square-foot shop (which stocks 6,000 items) in 2008. “We have a really great community of customers, much like the great community at Drew,” he says. “I’m drawn to great communities, and I always seem to end up in the middle of one.”

2008

When one of Brandon Michael Arrington’s [C’99] catering bosses found out the former drama student could spin magic from sugar and flour, a baking star was born. Arrington’s business, Danta Bonnier, specializes in a French almond cookie known as a “croquet bordelais.” His cooking career began beside his Grandma Mary. “In the end,” Arrington says, “it turned into doing a 300-person dessert party for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.”

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Summer 2015 1716 Drew Magazine I Drew and Entrepreneurship

George Steiner C’14 facilitated discussions with a little Class Chat.

Some of us cope with life’s annoy-ances—and some of us, like George Steiner, solve them by building apps. An economics major, Steiner says he wanted to be able to talk with his class-mates about lessons and homework assignments “as if you’d all bumped into each other in the library.” In March 2013, Steiner conceived an app that would enable his classmates to do just that. With a programmer partner, Steiner developed Class Chat, a platform for dedicated classroom chat rooms. Students who signed up for the app could post questions and engage in text-based exchanges without having to track down classmates’ phone numbers or connect on social media. Steiner had just finished the app when he began the Wall Street

Semester. Marc Tomljanovich, an associate professor of economics and the program’s co-director, says students in the program used Class Chat to com-municate throughout the semester. It has since been used for both the spring Wall Street Semester and the Wall Street Summer Program. Steiner and his coding partner also developed Glimpse Messenger, which allows users to send “self-destructing” messages in a secure way, much like SnapChat allows people to send photos that “disappear.” Developing the apps, Steiner says, taught him about the challenges of getting users to adopt new applications. Some students were enthu-siastic, he says, others not so much. Class Chat is no longer supported, but Glimpse Messenger is available for iPhone.

Steiner says Drew introduced him to like-minded entrepreneurial students and supportive professors who motivated him to follow his dream of starting the next big tech company. These days he’s studying for his MBA at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he’s learn-ing to code apps himself. He says he has a “few ideas kicking around” for new ones.

Gwen Moran

Q&A With a Crossfit Queen

Brooke Gagliano C’14, a former All-American, on her personal training business, her 84-year-old clients, and her favorite class at Drew.

You graduated in 2014. What are you doing now? I have my own personal training business. I travel to clients’ houses or they travel to me. I’ll basically train them in a personal training 101 session or we do group training sessions from two to five people. I do sports- specific training in field hockey, lacrosse and softball, which I played in college.

When did you start the business? About three months after I graduated. Right now I have about 20 clients. I have a kids group: I train the mother and

the father at different times, and then I train their three kids at another time during the week. I train two 84-year-old women, so I go from actually training a 4-year-old to training an 84-year-old the same day. I love it.

Did you finance the business out of your own pocket? I didn’t have any help financially from my parents or the bank or anything. I had to invest money for my marketing, for my website, social media, clothing, merchandise. But I’d been saving for that throughout college

because I was planning on opening my own business. When I was at Drew, I had a couple jobs.

Given you played sports and majored in business, how do you feel Drew pre-pared you for what you’re doing now? If I didn’t major in business, I would just understand all the athletics of personal training. But because I majored in busi-ness, it gave me the opportunity to actu-ally have my own company. And playing sports in college obviously helped me with the personal training side.

Was there any particular experience at Drew that stoked your entrepreneurial spirit? “Management,” with Professor [Jennifer] Kohn. We had to do projects, and our project was to open your own business. I was like, “Perfect.” I knew from the start I wanted to have my own fa-cility, and I said, “There’s no better class than this one.” Professor Kohn kept say-ing, “Why this? Why that? Change this. Try this.” And that really helped me with my business today because Drew gave me a jumpstart to what I need to do to prepare myself for the real world.

Dustin Racioppi

“Drew gave me a jumpstart to what I need to

do to prepare myselffor the real world.”

Brooke Gagliano C’14

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