John Highbarger didn’t come to the business school expressly to build a new business slingshot, it just turned out that way. Highbarger teaches entrepreneurship to undergraduate students at the McCombs School, and three or four of his students turn up every semester with a business plan scribbled on a napkin in their back pocket.

Highbarger counts 16 known businesses that have germinated in his class over the last six years. “I don’t know the success rate of all of them,” he admits. “I suppose people who have failed aren’t likely to chase me down to tell me about it, but some of them have been quite successful, and others are in startup mode.” Tom Serres, CEO of Piryx (right), a social commerce company that has been termed democracy’s PayPal, was a student in Highbarger’s first class at McCombs. “Being an undergraduate business student and building a company at the same time is probably one the smartest things any young entrepreneur can do,” he says. “Our professors are world class consultants who are literally at your disposal. Advice I would wince at paying for in the corporate world, I was able to get for the cost of a college education and a few cups of starbucks coffee.”

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