Startup savvy: Alumnus describes entrepreneurship experience

It dawned on him during a train ride from Mountain View, Calif. and developed into a full-fledged business plan by the time the train pulled into San Francisco 45 minutes later.

Self-described serial entrepreneur and UCLA alumnus Jun Loayza has used ideas – like the one he and his friend Stephen Johnson, also a UCLA alumnus who interned at Loayza’s first start up and later became his business partner, stumbled upon during the train ride three years ago – to create seven companies in the past six years.

Out of his seven companies, which include social media applications, Loayza said four of the projects were successful. One of his projects, Lionstep Media has worked on campaigns for Sephora and Whole Foods.

But entrepreneurship is not as simple as just thinking of a good idea.

“You think of a pain and figure out how to solve it,” Loayza said.

That’s part of what he said he likes about the profession. He enjoys every aspect from problem solving to hiring and firing employees, he added.

Loayza got involved in the entrepreneurial world in fall 2006, when he was rejected from all of the corporate jobs he applied to.

“Up until then, I was used to getting everything I wanted. I got into the university I wanted, the fraternity I wanted, but I didn’t hear back from any of the businesses I applied to,” Loayza said. “When I went home and saw all the rejection letters, a strange feeling hit me.”

He said the rejection – and his desire to support his parents who had immigrated from Peru – inspired him to do something of his own.

So Loayza founded the club Bruin Consulting, with Yu-Kai Chou, his fraternity brother and future business partner, to provide undergraduate students on campus with consulting experience.

By starting the club, he realized that he enjoyed working for himself, which led him to consider entrepreneurship as a career for the first time, Loayza said.

He got a job with a consulting firm called Navigant, but the initial feeling of rejection continued to haunt him.

He decided to go into business for himself with Chou.

Loayza and his business partners said they did not get very many entrepreneurial opportunities when they attended UCLA almost a decade ago.

“UCLA is a public school with a lot of hard-working students on the path of studying and getting a job,” said Chou, who graduated from UCLA in 2007 with a degree in international economics. “Students didn’t think about crazy (entrepreneurial) ideas.”

Entrepreneurship at UCLA has changed since Loayza and Chou were in college, with an increase in communication between different groups in and around UCLA, and because of an expansion of startups in recent years.

“When I was a graduate student, students from engineering didn’t mix (with students from other fields),” said Brian Shedd, technology transfer officer of the UCLA Office of Intellectual Property and Industry Sponsored Research. “To be an entrepreneur you need connections between business, technology and law.”

Shedd earned his masters and doctorate degrees from UCLA in 2005 and 2008, respectively.

The Office of Intellectual Property and Industry Sponsored Research at UCLA has different programs and opportunities geared toward student entrepreneurs. The office originally focused on licensing and patenting the technologies produced by research at UCLA, but has now expanded to encourage entrepreneurial activities as well.

“I think UCLA is a very entrepreneurial campus but there is not a lot of awareness about all the things that are going on,” said Brendan Rauw, associate vice chancellor and executive director of Entrepreneurship at the UCLA Office of Intellectual Property and Industry Sponsored Research.

The department is trying to bring aspiring entrepreneurs together and connect existing startup groups on campus, including the Entrepreneurship Association at the Anderson School of Management, Sigma Eta Pi, Technology Entrepreneurship Community and Startup UCLA.

The advent of Silicon Beach in Santa Monica, which many people have likened to the San Francisco Bay Area’s Silicon Valley, has made startup culture more accessible to students through its accelerator programs, Rauw said.

When Loayza, Chou and Johnson started their first company out of an apartment in Westwood in winter 2007, most of the resources did not exist at UCLA.

“(Our company) failed miserably and fast,” Loayza said. ”We were young, inexperienced and focused too much on building a business plan and funding rather than the actual product.”

Johnson said he admired Loayza’s passion but has had conflicts with him when they have worked together.

“(Loayza’s) greatest strength is he will try new ideas really quickly, but that can get you into trouble too,” said Johnson. “You can get inconclusive results or do something before you’re ready and be unable to complete it.”

To build his online reputation, Loayza started an entrepreneurship blog in 2008.

Through the blog, Loayza said he hopes other entrepreneurs learn from his failures so they do not make the same mistakes he made through trial and error.

He said he is currently working to develop hardware that skilled photographers can use to convert their iPhones into professional cameras. His goal is to use his passion for entrepreneurship to create a product that will change the consumer market.

“Entrepreneurship is my lifestyle, not just my career,” Loayza said.