Some recent grads will regale you with war stories about happy hours that turned into happy evenings, making it to the office at 6 am after an all-nighter playing the new Madden game, or paychecks blown on a must-have pair of Jimmy Choo’s. Samuel Reeves’s war stories involve, well, war.

Only a few months out of college, he has already seen and experienced more than many other entrepreneurs. Commissioned by a think tank based in Geneva, Samuel and his business partner spent the summer before his senior year traveling to landmine-laden regions of the world to determine if their concept—a machine to demine fields—could actually work. That’s how he found himself in a pitch-black compound in the middle of the night in Kabul, Afghanistan, watching a man with an AK-47 cross his courtyard.

“I thought back to the movie Patriot Games where the guys are trying to get to the Prince of Wales,” he remembers of his first evening in the war-torn city. “I flashed to this scene where they turn off the lights and storm the house with night goggles and guns, and I’m thinking this is what this guy is doing. But he didn’t seem to be in a hurry, so I just went back to bed. I found out later that he was actually the security guard, and the power turns off every night because it’s just poorly planned and poorly maintained.”

Not an average evening for an American college student. But Samuel is anything but average. An altruistic entrepreneur, he’s working to solve the world’s landmine problem using a machine designed by his company Humanistic Robotics. While Afghanistan may be a unique experience for him, being an entrepreneur is not.

Have you always been
interested in business?

Yeah. When I was 5 years old, I distributed fliers around my neighborhood, asking people to call me to water their plants and feed their pets and take care of their houses when they were away. You know, the typical five-year-old jobs. I got a few clients, and I enjoyed making money.

How much did you charge?

I probably got paid whatever they wanted to pay me. [laugh] I was a five year old, for Pete’s sake.  Then in high school I had a landscaping company, so I mowed lawns and I did flower beds and I planted bushes. At the same time, I had a little auto detailing thing.  I never worked for anyone. My parents didn’t give me money. I made my own spending money. I always enjoyed that.

Is that why you decided to go
to Wharton to study business?

I always read a lot about business. Sophomore year of high school, I was that kid who got Forbes in the mail and read the Wall Street Journal. I got to know more about business and I liked it for my own experience. That’s why I applied to Wharton.

What did you like best about undergrad?

I got into the whole entrepreneurial program in the last two years of Wharton, and it was tremendous. I took one entrepreneurial class with Ian McMillan—he is an amazing professor. He knows a lot about entrepreneurship and has a practical viewpoint. He’s very well-respected intellectually in the entrepreneurship field.

In the Venture Initiation Program, through Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs, you had to write a business plan about a real business you wanted to start. It’s an incubator where they advise you about what you should be doing to start your business, and they keep you on track.

This was the practical side of Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs, and it seems like in the last two years, it dovetailed with my interests perfectly. It was great because some people think you can’t do it right out of college—you can’t start your own business, you don’t know what you are doing, you’ve got to have lots of experience first.  But Wharton is great in fostering your interest and helping you cultivate your own ideas if you have an interest in entrepreneurship.

And the business you were trying
to start was Humanistic Robotics?

Yeah.

How did you develop an
interest in landmine clearing?

I got to know Josh, my partner, through his parents. He’s in design school, getting his master’s in industrial design. We started talking about his designs my sophomore year. I was having this personal transition about what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to be in the financial world at first, but then I started rethinking what I really wanted out of my career. I realized starting a business would be something I’d really enjoy doing and probably be good at.

Josh and I recognized the synergy that we had—me being more the business guy, him being more of the creative idea guy. So, we started talking about starting a business with some of his designs. We played around with his sketchbook and things that he had thought about over the years. Eventually we talked about this idea he had for clearing landmines with ground pressure—basically creating something that would put pressure on the ground and detonate minds just like your foot would.

Were you skeptical at first?

He talked to me about it, and I said there is no market for that. And he said, “It’s a great idea, so why don’t we investigate it.”  And so I did investigate it, and it turns out there is a market for it. We just proceeded from there.

Did you set out to start a business
with such an altruistic end goal?

Oh, absolutely. That’s why we are doing it. There are plenty of other businesses that would be much easier to do, but this is very compelling to us. The truth is we didn’t start with the idea let’s solve the world’s landmine problem, but when we were discussing the idea, that’s definitely something that jumped out about this one. This is a huge social problem and if we solve it, we can make significant gains for humanity. It’s definitely something that gets us up in the morning.

Were the professors at Wharton
supportive of the idea?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I talked to a number of them.  Ian  McMillan was my professor in social entrepreneurship, and so he was intimately familiar with my project and super-encouraging. And everyone I talked to was encouraging as well.

That was one of the main things I was enthusiastic about during these past two years—especially when you are hearing from the outside world that maybe you should go get some experience before you start a business. It’s kind of a Catch-22 that young entrepreneurs feel. You have to have a certain amount of self-confidence to get past these people who just don’t know what to think about 22-year-olds starting businesses like these. I never got that from the Wharton faculty at all. It was great. It was super-supportive, and I really appreciated that.

How did you take your business
from the theoretical to the practical?

We’ve been working on this for a year and a half. First, we wrote a business plan and that took months and months. As we were doing it, we talked to people in the field, specifically a think tank in Geneva. Their job is to know everything about mine clearance and come up with new ideas about mine clearance, know the trade-offs and methodologies—basically know everything about how it’s done.  I was talking to them about rollers—rollers are our cornerstone technology for detonating mines because they create a lot of ground pressure—and their initial reaction was very negative. They said things like “nobody uses them” and “they don’t work.” I kept asking why, because from a practical standpoint they seem so simple and cheap to produce.

They realized they didn’t really know for certain the answers that they were giving me about rollers. They decided that since it’s their job to know, they should do a study about whether rollers are a viable clearance technology, where are they used, and where are they successful. It was something they needed to know. So they hired us to do the study for them since we were asking about them. They sent us all over the world. We went to Geneva a couple of times to meet with the think tank, and they sent us to Afghanistan, Thailand, Cambodia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Canada.

When did you do all of this?

The traveling started in June 2004. We were traveling in June, July, and August, and we finished up the report at the end of the year. Through that whole time we were sharpening our go-to-market strategy and talking to people, bouncing our ideas off them.

Did you have an actual model
that you used during this study?

We had a model that wasn’t functional at all. It was just visual to present the idea. We’ve since moved down the road to prototyping. We did a first generation proof-of-concept prototype that was more to test our own configuration. After producing this, we satisfied ourselves that our motor-battery configuration will work and we can now invest more money in another prototype. It’s a little insurance before we spend a lot more money.

Now we are working on the second generation, and Josh, my partner, is spending a lot of time getting it designed so a steel manufacturer can cut it. We intend this version to be a prototype that can be put on live mines and tested all over the world in theoretical and live-mine conditions.

Who funds all this?

We are self-funding all of this because we got paid a certain amount for doing the study last year. We’re putting everything back into the business.

Does that make you nervous?

Well, you know, you can’t get anywhere without risk. There’s a chance it won’t work out—like any start-up business. But it says that we have confidence after going around the world, looking at rollers in some of the most desolate war zones in the world, and we still have confidence in our technology and are willing to put our money into it. Does it make me nervous? Of course, because it’s a start-up business.  I don’t know if it will succeed, but it’s worth putting our money into it.

What do your parents think?

I think they’re a little worried about me going to places like Afghanistan and Bosnia, but I think they’re proud of the progress we’re making.  It was hard to get them to buy into the fact that I could do this right off, that I didn’t necessarily need a big name on my resume at first. That’s just the way they think, and I think differently. We have differences of opinion, but that doesn’t necessarily men they’re not supportive.  Parents are parents. What they’re most worried about is me going to dangerous places. That far outweighs any worry they have about my career.

Were you nervous about
going to Afghanistan?

Of course I was!  Who wouldn’t be? We had an interesting time. When you fly into Kabul, you have to go to Dubai first. And it was all fun and games to Dubai because Dubai is great. Then we jumped on a plane to Afghanistan and it was a little different. You fly over Kabul, and all of the sudden you do this corkscrew landing down from 35,000 feet. You don’t just drift in like a normal airplane does. And we’re in a DC-10, a huge plane. We found out later that they are trying to avoid the surface-to-air missiles. Sometimes people wait around the airport to shoot down planes. But we were escorted by some South African special forces guys who knew their way around, and we stayed in a compound that had big walls and guys with AK-47s. But yeah, I was very nervous.

What happens next?

Well, we got the top manufacturer of demining equipment in the entire world to agree to sell our product when we have it tested and approved, so that’s a big deal for us.

Did you have a big celebration
when this went through?

[Laughs.] This is important enough to us that we went over to Croatia to meet with them in their offices. When we got them to agree, we drove to Italy and had a nice Italian dinner and that was the extent of the celebration. It’s a great thing for us. We’ll finish the second generation prototype. We got a researcher in the Canadian armed forces to agree to test this thing free of charge to us in both theoretical conditions and live-mine conditions. We’ll get that done, and then hopefully we’ll get six demonstration models in the field for four to six months, free of charge to the users, to produce some demo results. After that we have full deployment.  That’s the timeline.

Personally, I’d like to get this off the ground and have other businesses going on at the same time. I really enjoy the whole start-up process, and I think each time you do it you’ll get better at it. Josh and I are playing around with some other ideas for other businesses we’d like to start as well.

Anything in particular?

One of them is through our business relationship with these guys in Croatia—they have a machine that is working in mining operations, like gold and platinum mining. It’s working in South African mines, and they want distribution in the United States. So, as a good faith effort for them distributing our machine, we agreed to be their distributors here.

That represents a completely new business for us. So I’d like to get some sales of that up and running. We have scheduled to test the thing in the Colorado School of Mines later in the fall, which is really a good thing because people look to the Colorado School of Mines for new technology. We’ll get it tested there, and hopefully we’ll get a few early sales and then find a person to take on this whole product line so it’s independent of Humanistic Robotics. It’s all been a tremendous learning experience, and I would like to translate that into more and more and more ventures.

When was the last time
you had a vacation?

Oh, goodness, well… [laughs] I think when you have your own business and you actually say you’re on vacation, you’re not really because you are working 24/7—at least your mind is. There’s probably not going to be a vacation in the cards in 2005.

You’re a 22-year-old guy. Do you feel
like your social life suffers because
you are starting your own business?

I honestly don’t work that much on the weekends. I have a girlfriend in New York so she and I travel to see each other. I work a lot more than a 40-hour week, but the social life is fine.

I’m sure Afghanistan has a
booming night life?

You’d be surprised. There are some parties that the Westerners have. Those global security contractors are a wiley bunch. It has a surprising social life.

Do you have any parting words
for a young entrepreneur?

They’ll learn more by doing it, so if you are thinking about it and you have a sound business model that you’ve thought through, then you should push the self-doubt aside and just do it.  I don’t think people should be worried about not getting the name on the resume early in their career.

I work part-time to pay the bills at the Wharton Small Business Development Center—about 25 hours a week consulting for start-ups and small businesses. It’s great because it enables me to see a huge breadth of entrepreneurship, and we see a lot of people who have had experience in the business world who want to get away from some big company and start their own. And it’s just two completely different worlds. The big company job may feel like it’s preparing you to do your own venture, but the truth is the only way to learn about starting a business is to do it. It’s not like you get all the answers if you work for a big company. So that would be my advice: Just do it if you are thinking about it.

^back to top