Looking Back at a Forward-Looking Class

Alumni from the Farley Center’s 2010 NUvention: Web reflect on how their class project “Present Bee” set the stage for their careers.

In 2010, a new class was formed at Northwestern University's Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation: NUvention: Web. This interdisciplinary course challenged students to build a web business from the ground up, and was just getting started.  

That NUvention: Web class was taught by professor Todd Warren and former Farley Center Director Mike Marasco. Neither the professors nor students realized that the experimental class would become a core part of the Farley Center's curriculum. The NUvention series of today is a flagship offering of the Farley Center that draws students from across Northwestern's schools into interdisciplinary teams each year. 

Building something real 

Among NUvention: Web’s early students were Jeff Eiden (’12), a communication studies major; Christopher Sell (’12), a political science major who had been delivering environmentally friendly supplies out of a rented U-Haul between college classes; Swathy Prithivi (’10), a master’s in marketing  student at Medill School of Journalism, Media & Integrated Marketing Communications; Will Zhou (’10) and Chandra Janakiraman (’10), both MBA students at the Kellogg School of Management; and Alex Zylman (’12), a computer engineering major. Together, the group dove into a challenge none of them had tackled before. Now, more than 15 years later, members of the team reflect on how that class changed the course of their career today.  

"I have to give them so much credit for the creation of that class and that concept, at that time," Eiden says. "It was very forward-thinking. And I'm so grateful for that experience in so many different ways."  

This team's idea was a group gifting platform called Present Bee, designed to pool purchasing power around life events like weddings and birthdays. It was ambitious for 2010, before Venmo existed, and aimed to help people combine their resources to buy larger gifts together.  

"I remember being intimidated," said Eiden, now an AI product leader at Twilio, a customer engagement platform. "I went to the McCormick building and saw there were Kellogg students who've worked in consulting and investment banking. From the get-go, I thought we are not messing around here." 

That sense of seriousness was baked into the class. Warren and Marasco, Eiden and Sell recalled, aimed to create an environment that felt professional, not just academic. Northwestern alumni and seasoned entrepreneurs cycled through as guest speakers. A final pitch competition featured judges with connections to the Chicago technology ecosystem, including Techstars. The message was clear: your ideas can go as far as you want to take them.  

"There was no way to combine gifts," Sell said. "If we collectively want to give a bigger gift, how do we do that?"  

The problem was real. The solution, it turned out, was hard to build. 

With one computer science major on the team and everyone else starting from zero on the technical side, they hustled. One student's wife helped with CSS. Sell taught himself a web application framework. They eventually brought in a PhD student through Marasco to help part-time.  

"It was scrapping it," Sell said. "Which is the real world, right?"  

“I always advise others to embrace the spirit of a builder, no matter what technology paradigm we find ourselves in. Builders find meaningful problems to solve, invest in figuring out the inner workings of something even if you’re not the ‘expert,’ and relentlessly pursue your vision. Step into that abyss and trust that you'll figure it out." — Jeff Eiden ('12) 

Lessons learned 

For Eiden, that technical gap became clarifying. Sitting in the Farley Center, watching their one engineer translate team ideas into a product, he realized that if he could gain technical skills himself, he could be far more effective. He bought programming books and took a web development course at Northwestern. After graduation, he joined Deloitte's technology group and leveraged his NUvention experience to land a software engineering role. 

"I cannot overstate how much that experience propelled me in the direction I'm still on today," Eiden said. "I learned about the role of a product manager in that class. At the time, only a handful of companies in Silicon Valley even had that concept. I remember tucking it in the back of my mind and saying: I want to be that one day." 

For Sell, the class's impact was also formative. He used stories from NUvention to earn a  job at Google.  

“I told the recruiting team a story about being an entrepreneur through resourcefulness,” Sell said. “I told them what I had built, why it was interesting, and the challenges I saw. It completely changed how I presented myself."  

Sell went on to join a Y Combinator company later acquired by Pinterest, then self-funded two companies of his own. His current venture, GrowthLoop, is an AI-driven marketing platform now used by enterprise clients including Costco, Ford, and Google itself.  

Prithivi, another member of that original team, joined Uber as one of its first 100 employees before going on to start her own company, a trajectory that mirrors the ambition of those early NUvention days. Janakiraman is currently Chief Product Officer and EVP at VRChat, and Zylman is now principal engineer at Uber.  Zhou also headed to the Bay Area, where he worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company and in product roles at Dropbox and Google.

“I learned how to be a product manager and interface between business considerations and engineering considerations," Zhou said. "So even though I’d never done product management before, it was a way of simulating the role and later on in my career, it would be incredibly valuable as I converted to product management.”
 

An experiment that became a blueprint 

What started as an experimental course has since expanded into a full suite. NUvention: Medical (which preceded NUvention: Web), NUvention: Energy and Sustainability, NUvention: Arts + Entertainment, NUvention: Media, and NUvention: Launch. 

"It just makes me so happy that students are continuing to have that experience," Eiden said. "And that it's only grown."  

“If you truly want to be an entrepreneur, this is the path,” Sell said. “You can find out what you're about to find out in the next five years, while you're still in school. And that will change how far you get and how fast you get there."