A Public University’s Online Journey: Hunt Lambert of CSU (Part 3)

SM: At this point of your career, the Internet was not yet in full swing but you had done a lot of work with telecom companies. What comes next?

HL: I came back to the States in 1991 and headed strategic planning for US West. The biggest focus we had there was building the businesses that would leverage the Internet. I spent the next four years helping start companies such as Trip.com. We had a long track record of investment in Internet businesses, including Time Warner investments, which gave Time Warner 25% of HBO. We eventually sold off $35 billion of shareholder-realized gains in our portfolio.

In 1995, I basically retired. I was tired of flying all over the world. I was paid very well not to compete for three years. I just went off and did projects of personal interest. I re-engineered an aluminum die cast factory, and re-engineered a life insurance company and took them from number 7 to number 1 in global market share in 18 months.

I got the startup bug again, so I started a consulting company, which I later sold. I did another startup in 2000 that did not make it. It was my first failure. We hit the inability to raise money in late 2000 and 2001. We decided to shut down that Internet-based startup rather than fight the capital markets.

That is when I went to CSU and started teaching. In 2000, a friend became an associate dean at the business school and asked me if I wanted to teach. He wanted me to take all the stuff I used to do in strategic planning and startups and turn it into a course. I did that, and it was very successful. Students loved it and seemed to learn a lot, and I really enjoyed the teaching. The next year my friend asked me to build students an entrepreneurship center, so I built that center within the College of Business.

I went back my theme: the identification of rapidly changing technology, policy and markets. I built up capability and partnered with our research office and technology transfer office to find the high-potential startups coming out of our research and get them launched properly.

Over the next three years, we launched 15 companies out of CSU based on our proprietary technologies out of our research. A couple of those are well known today. The one I am the most proud of is Envirofit. It is rated by Stanford as one of the top few social enterprises in the world. It was started as an undergraduate business plan in my entrepreneurship course.

SM: What is the thesis of the business?

HL: Could we take a piece of technology that made natural gas line compression engines burn much cleaner and apply it to the two-stroke one-cylinder motors in Asia to clean up the 50 million scooters there? They produce the same amount of pollution as 4.5 billion cars and cost billions of dollars in respiratory health care across Asia. We figured out how to do that. We raised the money and launched the company successfully, but we built a company that was bigger than two-stroke engines. We built a company that was designed to sustainably accomplish social entrepreneurship in a non-profit model. The next year, we had another business plan team come through that did clean cooking stoves as their project. That project culminated in the Shell Corporation committing $50 million to a global rollout of clean cooking stoves.

This segment is part 3 in the series : A Public University’s Online Journey: Hunt Lambert of CSU
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