🐦 🎓 Pomona College: An Entrepreneurial-first Biography

From an uninhabited hotel to an entrepreneurial hotbed…the early bird gets the worm

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Pomona is widely acknowledged as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the world. What’s under-acknowledged, however, are its alumni’s contributions to the fields of technology and entrepreneurship. Pomona was the first and founding college in the Claremont Consortium, which as we’ve already published, has one of the most entrepreneurial alumni communities in the world. But, as the first college in the Claremont Consortium, I guess the early bird really does get the worm. 🐛 What’s the worm in this outdated colloquialism? $20.5B in venture capital raised….what a worm! Sagehens are chomping on some colossal-sized worms these days and it’s hard to keep track. In this essay, buckle your seat belts because we’re going to take you on a ride through Pomona’s earliest days to some of its most exciting contemporary successes amongst its technology-focused alumni.

First, a few key stats. Pomona alumni have founded 260+ start-up companies that run the gamut in geography and industry. The most prevalent sectors in this ecosystem are Media & Advertising, Healthcare, Biotech, and Fintech. Notably, the south of 6th Street alumni also do not limit themselves to the United States and have started over 25 international venture-backable businesses. Of these ~260 start-ups, we’ve identified 100+ companies that have raised publicly announced venture funding. 82 of these have raised above $1M, and 14 have raised over $100M. These companies have also reached significant milestones, including over $600M in acquisitions and three IPOs over the last five years.¹ These public companies currently have a combined market capitalization of over $13bn, and all three of these companies were founded by Jennifer Doudna.² Doudna, a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, is arguably one of the most consequential people in biotechnology of all time. Doudna, however, is just one of the many impressive Pomona founders!

Enough about the stat sheet, though. Let’s take a journey back in time to Pomona’s entrepreneurial founding story…

An audacious and entrepreneurial start

Like most great epics, Pomona College started with a dream, and it was a dream of a handful of gumptious Congregationalists who set out to create a college based on their experiences from the northeast. Congregationalists are a branch of the Protestant community that traces their roots back to the Puritans; those oh so daring individuals who, along with the pilgrims and strangers, established perhaps one the greatest entrepreneurial upstarts of all time — the United States of America.

The Pilgrims arrive at Plymouth, Massachusetts on board the Mayflower, November 1620.

By the 1800s, Congregationalists already had a storied (dare I say, entrepreneurial? 😉) tradition of standing up some of the country’s most well-known education institutions like Harvard, Yale, Bowdown, and Middlebury. These institutions were established initially to train up Congregational Clergy, but ultimately, most of the establishments became non-denominational as Pomona eventually did.

Pomona College’s founding was in anticipation of the coming hordes headed to Southern California in the late 1800s,³ hordes pursuing their Manifest Destiny and arriving via the most significant technological innovation of that era — the transcontinental railroad system and the steam engines that chugged along on them.⁴ This regional group of Congregationalists wanted to bring the New England school spirit out to the best coast…the west coast. 🌴

“Transcontinental Railroad of 1869” History on the Net

And so it was that in 1888, Pomona College was established in a rental house (Ayer Cottage) in Pomona, California, led by founding trustee Charles B. Sumner. The town and the college were appropriately named for the goddess of fruitful abundance in Roman Mythology. Shortly after Pomona’s establishment, though, the bursting of a local real estate craze led the college to relocate to an unfinished hotel (presently Sumner Hall, the location of Pomona’s admissions office) in the nearby town of Claremont.

The Goddess Pomona By Nicolas Fouché — The Yorck Project (2002)

The small start-up of Pomona grew steadily in the succeeding decades. While it faced the adversity and challenges that many upstart educational establishments do, the institution ultimately prevailed; and early on, Pomona committed formally to a liberal arts model, rolling previously different schools into departments at one college in 1912.

By 1924, Pomona’s fourth President, James Blaisdell, was fourteen years into an exceptional tenure during which he had helped grow the college’s finances and visibility. Standing at a crossroads between keeping enrollment small or growing Pomona into a more prominent university, Blaisdell pioneered a fresh and innovative approach to solve for both. Blaisdell took inspiration from the Oxford model, which comprised a collection of independent colleges that shared centralized resources (think Hogwarts and the four houses 🧙🧙‍♀) and formally established the Claremont Consortium in 1924.

In Between the Lines’ next article in this 7-part series, we’ll hear more about Claremont Graduate University’s (CGU) founding in 1925. In the meantime, now that we all know some of the early college history, we’re going to boogie our way to the 1980s. Not only were Pomona students wearing big hair and tuning into The Wall, Thriller, Born In the USA, and Whitney Houston, but some of Pomona’s earliest venture-backed entrepreneurs began architecting businesses that would baffle the muggles of that and succeeding eras…

Technology-minded alumni lay some exciting groundwork

By the 1980s, Pomona was well on its way to increased prominence on the national stage, with out-of-state students beginning to outnumber in-state students, and some of the first alumni we’ve identified were founding venture-backed technology companies. These early pioneers were jumping into the start-up world during the truly romantic ‘garage era’ years (primarily, but not entirely, in Silicon Valley).

In true liberal arts fashion, these start-ups were in diverse industries from day one. The six companies we’ve identified founded in the 1980s ranged from Gaming, Consumer Goods, Media & Advertising, Biotech, Marketing Technology, and Fintech. There isn’t much publicly available data about these early companies. Still, they include the first acquisition we’ve tracked in the Pomona community of AOC software, a conferencing technology founded by Will Price, which he notably founded while in high school and sold the software rights to while still enrolled at Pomona College. Some of these other early Pomona founders include Keesup Choe, who today is the CEO of PredictX, a London-based machine-learning company; and Betty Kayton, a serial CFO and financial consultant who has partnered with legendary companies Zoosk, AngelList, DropBox, Patreon, and many others.

Like the rest of the world, the 1990s were a boom time for Pomona-founded companies, and we’ve tracked nearly 4x (27 total) the number of companies founded by Pomona alums during this period compared to the preceding decade. This period saw a significant rise in Media & Advertising as a specialty for Pomona alums. Information Technology, Proptech, Fintech, and Security, Infrastructure, & DevOps also emerged as areas of interest for alumni in this decade. The biggest break-outs from this era include:

• Corrigo, a mobile SaaS tool for the commercial real estate market founded by Gregory Roufa and eventually acquired by JLL.
• Pretty Good Privacy, a security company founded once again by Will Price
• Rentals.com, an online residential property management pioneer founded by Vadim Axelrod
• Entropia, an early distributed super-computing company to accelerate biotech R&D founded by Scott Kurowski

Nearly all of these alumni have founded subsequent companies and/or hold senior leadership positions in the technology industry. Other pioneers from the ’90s include Zwift founder Alarik Myrin, Fintech and Analytics leader Hugh Olliphant, Sales Leader Woody (Yuichiro) Deguchi, and too many others to name.

By the 2000s, Pomona was firmly entrenched in the echelon of top liberal arts colleges. Pomona led the way amongst many educational institutions in its long-standing tradition of ‘doing well while doing good,’ and was an early pioneer of initiatives like LEED certification and partnering with DEI initiatives like Questbridge.

During the decade, its alumni also founded more than double the number of start-ups as they did in the 1980s (57), with new specialties emerging as web 2.0 began to eat the world. Over 10% of the companies founded in this decade were E-Commerce (6) and Collaboration Tools (6) respectively. Media & Advertising (8) would still lead the way, though, and overall this period still saw a considerable diversity of companies across over 23 industries. We’ll shout out a few companies from this period, though there really are too many to name!

• Biosplice Therapeutics (formerly Samumed), a tissue-regeneration company founded by Osman Kibar
• PAX Labs, an app-controlled vaporization technology company founded by Adam Bowen.⁵
• Zannel, an instant media communications network founded by Adam Zbar.⁶
• ClearAccess, a mobile infrastructure technology business founded by Ken Hood.

Pomona alumni continue to carry the torch to new heights

From 2010 to the present, Pomona alumni have ascended to very rarified air. We’ve identified 197 venture-backable companies that have been founded by Pomona alums since 2010. 🤯 These businesses employ well over 7,000 employees (including 141 Claremont alumni). Healthcare (21), Fintech (18), E-Commerce (16), and Biotech (14) have emerged as some of the most popular industries for Pomona alumni to build companies in the preceding decade, though the industries continue to run the gamut. Below are a few diverse companies we’ll highlight:

Mobile capabilities of Run the World

• Run The World, a one-stop-shop company for virtual social gatherings founded by Xiaoyin Qu
• Coursedog, an AI-powered schedule management platform founded by Nicholas Diao
• Stellar Health, a healthcare company empowering providers and practice staff founded by Ben Kraus
• Arkose Labs, a cyber-security company bankrupting the business model of fraud founded by Matthew Ford
• Zippia, a professional training and career coaching company utilizing machine learning founded by Christopher Kolmar
• Playco, the world’s first instant gaming company founded by Michael Carter

Playco founding team

Ahh…Pomona really is a special place

In sum, regardless of which Claremont school you attended, we all owe a great deal to Pomona College. Not only is the contemporary and recent history of the entrepreneurial success of Pomona’s alumni worth learning about, but entrepreneurial education pioneers like Blaisdell and Sumner are the reason why we even have a side of 6th street to argue over. Perhaps these early, entrepreneurial roots played a role in the outsized success of the alumni community. Pomona College helped start the Claremont Consortium, and they are continuing to help lead the way for Claremont in more ways than one. From an uninhabited hotel to an entrepreneurial powerhouse…this early bird sure got the worm! 🐦

[1] This number in truth is far greater, but over 35 of the acquisitions do not have the amounts publicly available. If you’re a Pomona founder and believe we may not have access to the acquisition numbers behind your startup, feel free to email us so we can improve the Between the Lines dataset 😉

[2] Doudna has now founded 3 public companies and 2 others remain private with monster valuations. She has helped co-found, Caribou Biosciences, Editas Medicine, Intellia Therapeutics, Mammoth Biosciences, and Scribe Therapeutics. Move over, Musk and Bezos. 🤨

[3] This and other historical tidbits are drawn from https://www.pomona.edu/about/brief-history-pomona-college as well as from the Pomona College and Claremont College Wikipedia pages.

[4] Incidentally, a great book that Miles recommends to aspirational technologists and VCs from the Claremont Colleges is Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, which has a terrific section on the role that railroads and canals played in the technology landscape during this era.

[5] An article on Pomona founders would be remiss to not mention that PAX and Juul, founded by Adam Bowen, hold some pretty noteworthy records. Both companies broke records for some of the fastest companies to each a unicorn status, and the growth of these companies is incredibly impressive. Juul also takes the cake…or I guess the worm…worm cake? (we’ll stop now 🤭🐛🎂) with the highest valuation by a Pomona-founded company and the largest amount of venture capital dollars raised ever by any Claremont founder.

[6] Adam Zbar is another incredibly prolific founder worth shouting out. He’s a 5X founder of brands like Sunbasket, which empowers people to live their healthiest lives by starting with what’s on their forks. 🍽️ He started Sunbasket after already founding, Zannel, Tap11, and Lasso. He isn’t stopping and recently founded HamsaPay last year to solve the problems he encountered in B2B eCommerce.

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