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ARCHIVED NEWSSenior turns ORFE into a winning hand  Senior Robert J. Moore, who will graduate June 6 with a degree in Operations Research and Financial Engineering, is already an established entrepreneur (and sometime rapper). During his undergraduate career, Moore has juggled a number of enterprises, from a website that dispenses college admissions advice to online sales for poker software. We caught up with Moore shortly before he left for China with four fellow Princeton students over spring break to hammer out details of a licensing deal for their WetterVac invention. What follows is an expanded version of an interview with Moore that appears in the current EQuad News. First things first. How did you get started rapping at Princeton? [Fellow senior] Nate Domingue and I became friends in a class on satire. We made up P-Unit as a parody of G-Unit and rapped a song that dug into Top 40 rappers. We put it online mainly because we didn’t have any other way to turn it in to the professor. Within two to three months a quarter-million people had downloaded the video. It was being passed around strictly by word of mouth. I hosted it on the University server. The Office of Information Technology called us up and said, You’re using more bandwidth than the entire Princeton website, you’re bringing our servers down! It was our 15 minutes of fame. We opened for Vanilla Ice when he played Colonial. Now Nate and I are producing a sketch comedy called Grounds for Expulsion. We’re going to try to get the kind of attention for these skits that we got for P-Unit. What is your most profitable business? Definitely the poker stuff. My Mooraculator improves your chances of winning Texas Hold’em poker by calculating the odds that a given hand will prevail against other players. How did the Mooraculator come about? The original desktop software is based on a concept used in operations research called expected value. In poker it’s called pot odds. It’s a really simple principle that I built into a piece of software. Summer after freshman year of college, I worked for a guy named Jimmy Lesser, who is an incredible serial entrepreneur, a multimillionaire. He said, “I’ve got this buddy who imports electronic devices and he’s been trying to build something like this in a handheld device. But he outsources all his programming to China and the programmers he has hired haven’t been able to do it.” It’s a very complicated problem. How do you know what the probabilities are when there are billions of possible outcomes? On a desktop computer it’s not a problem because if you’ve got a 2 gigahertz computer you can do 2 billion calculations per second. You might have to wait 2 or 3 seconds but you really can brute force every single possible outcome. With a handheld device when you are looking at something like a 16 or 33 megahertz processor, you’re talking days to make this calculation. So these guys in China were going at it the brute force way and it was impossible. I got in touch and said I thought I would be able to develop a few tools that make this work in a handheld. I signed a licensing deal that gave me a royalty on every unit sold wholesale. At the time, I was a young junior in the ORFE department so I had not really got into the practical stuff on how to do this. I would sit in class, take notes, walk back to my dorm room and send an email to the device’s manufacturers in China saying, “Okay we’re going to use Monte Carlo simulations,” and teach them what I had learned in class about 20 minutes earlier. What does your dorm room look like? There’s a bed, a dresser, a television. No filing cabinets and boxes of paperwork? All of my operations are out of my laptop. Every business I own is in my backpack right now. People say, How can you juggle all these businesses at once? I put an enormous amount of time in at the front end and then sit back and reap the benefits. A lot of these businesses I spend zero hours on once I have started them. My mom is my accountant. Can you point to any specific experiences that were important to encouraging your entrepreneurial inclinations? I went to a small pubic high school in Glassboro, N.J., which is a real melting pot. Probably less than half of my class went to college and probably only half of them will actually graduate from college. But it was like no other high school in the world. If you were a good kid and you showed a lot of creativity you got a lot of leeway. Freedom has always been really important to me. How did Yesletter.com originate? That came out of a project that [classmate] Adam Ludwig and I did in freshman seminar FRS 129 “Sex Money Rock ‘n Roll: Information Technology and Society.” It was taught by David Dobkin [professor of computer science who is now dean of the faculty] and Paul Dimaggio of sociology. The course was designed to blend these techie people from the Engineering School and social analysts from the AB side. We got a decent amount of signups for the website but it wasn’t enormous, so we started a guerrilla marketing campaign and created the Yes Letter Scholarship for Outstanding Peer Service. The key to the scholarship – though we didn’t come right out and say it – was basically that anybody qualified to apply. You just had to write 500 words or less on why you deserved to win. We posted it on Fastweb.com which is a scholarship network where students put in their GPA and extracurriculars and it spits out all the scholarships they qualify for. Our scholarship showed up on everyone’s list. The deadline was March 15; we got 25,000 essays. Speaking of wasting spring break on business ventures! Adam and I had to read 25,000 essays, which was impossible. We wanted to reward someone with a lot of entrepreneurial spirit so we built a list of synonyms and ran a filter on the essays to yank out only those that hinted at some kind of entrepreneurial public service. And from that pool we were able to extract a winner. It was an eye-opener on the market side for us because it resulted in fewer signups than an article in the Daily Princetonian would have. We realized that the people who will pay for yesletter.com are parents, not kids. The kind of kid who is willing to push forward on his own and who gets excited about applying for scholarships is not necessarily our target customer. Our ideal candidate is the parent of a child who may not be so motivated. The conversion rate of scholarship applicant to signup was abysmal. It did a lot for brand building though. It pushed our Google page rank through the roof and led to Yesletter being highlighted in The New York Times and Newsweek. What was your first real job? The summer after sophomore year in high school I was a mover on the Heavy Lifting Team at Rowan University in Glassboro. I moved filing cabinets and tables across campus. I worked out a little but, to be honest, I’m a tennis player not a weight lifter so for the most part my job was the door-opener/door-holder guy. The following summer I worked for a division of NER Data Products that recycles toner cartridges. I did a decent amount of painting. One of the hardest jobs in the world is painting a toner factory. I had toner on my in my nose, in my ears, on my tongue. I painted a huge room. I started at one corner. By the end of the summer I got to the opposite corner but by then the first corner looked just as bad as it did when I began. How did your web design business start? I was and still am friends with Mike Lucidonio, who went to Glassboro High School with me. Mike’s dad and his brother started Tony Luke’s, which now is one of the biggest cheesesteak places in Philly. Their website was not terribly attractive. I was sitting around one day at Mike’s house and I said to his dad, “Look, I don’t mean to be too forward or anything but I can make your website much more attractive than it is now.” Tony Luke’s was my first big deal job. I was 16 years old. How did WetterVac come about? The core idea came from [classmate] Lawrence Azzaretti . This was the first business I have ever been involved with where the idea didn’t originate with me. I love bringing on incredibly smart people but I normally I like working with my own babies. I was brought on because of my business expertise. Have you ever taken Ed Zschau’s class on High-Tech Entrepreneurship? Actually almost all of my business partners on campus and I were in his class this semester. I was concerned that it might be a lot of repeat information. But it is not. Zschau is phenomenal. His resume is astounding – former congressman, entrepreneur, venture capitalist. Once the new ORFE building is established I think there will be more opportunity for business courses. A business-focused ORFE-focused certificate program would be great. Why did you decide to do your thesis on Texas Hold’em? I was NOT going to do poker for my thesis. I enjoy having a million different things going on and I thought I had pushed the poker thing to its limit. We had a big meeting with the department, and all the professors talked about the areas they were interested in. [ORFE Department Chair Robert] Vanderbei got up and started talking about poker. He said, “This is fascinating to me because it’s a complex multi-stage dynamic stochastic process -- there’s no way to get an optimal value because there are unknowable uncertainties in your opponent’s brain. However, can you approach a near-optimal solution so that you can make money on this thing? It’s a really interesting proposition!” By the end of his speech, most of the room was staring at me. What is beautiful about Texas Hold’em poker is that it uses all these ORFE tools that are incredibly valuable in industry and finance generally. In fact, [classmates] Frank Macreery, Sameer Shariff, Kevin Shi and I are using Mooraculator-like tools on our website whatsmyimage.com [a website that allows viewers to vote on what their first impression is of people appearing in photos that are anonymously posted to the site] . We passed our 1 millionth vote count the other day -- that’s a million different data points. It’s a huge amount of information. Why did you choose to major in Operations Research and Financial Engineering? ORFE has been like Glassboro High School in that the department has allowed me a lot of freedom, and freedom is very valuable to me. Sure, my thesis is on solid academic ground but still -- it’s a thesis on how to play poker. The academic merit of that might have been questioned elsewhere, but I have never hit even a speed bump at ORFE; I have had nothing but encouragement from the department. I can’t name a professor I had who hasn’t been an important mentor. Rene Carmona and Warren Powell taught keystone, rigorous classes. I probably learned the most in classes from those two guys. They are both [involved with] the corporate world and they shared a lot of their industry experience. Alain Kornhauser’s course on E-commerce was really informative; he is very motivational. I took a course called “Optimization under Uncertainty” taught by Alexandre d’Aspremont. Talk about allowing us freedom. We had a course review in the middle of the year and d’Aspremont said, “Look, I just want you to tell me how I am doing now that we are halfway through the course.” Some student wrote in the course review, “I know you’re from Europe but your pants are waaaaay too tight,” -- kind of like a private joke to him. The next day in class d’Aspremont was going through all the critiques -- he has a French accent – and he said, “Apparrhentleee my pants ahr way too tight.” So for my final project in that class, Steve Lambe and I built an optimization of a professor’s pants size. There were all these different variables, like the professor wants to wear tight pants because of the culture he was raised in; however the tighter the pants are, the more distracted the students are, so the lower the class grades are, so the less happy the department chair is, and the less funding d’Aspremont will get for his class. So we found an optimal waist size of pants for him to wear. Not many professors would have allowed that kind of thing. But I learned as much doing that as I would have learned if I my topic had been pricing options. Why are you taking a job after graduating instead of starting a new business? Initially when Insight Venture Partners offered me a job I said, “I can’t do it.” But they said, “Look, you can start your own business right now and it will be pretty big. But think of what you’ll learn and what kind of contacts you will make if you come and work for us first.” After spending [last] summer working with them, I realized that the prospects they were offering were very real. When I’m done at Insight, which is a terrifically smart venture capital firm, I will be able to hit the ground running with something tremendous in size. |
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