Two weeks before Samuel Reeves' senior year at Penn, he and his business partner Josh Koplin were strapped into a DC-10 airplane spiraling over Kabul with cigarette butts still in the armrests, back from the days when you could relax with a smoke during a particularly rough landing.
Before they left, Sam's mother threatened to lie down in front of the airplane. Josh's dad made them call experts from around the world to assure them that Afghanistan was a safe place to travel. Sam talked to Alexander "Griff" Griffiths, the Mechanical Studies Specialist from the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining, who was sending them to Afghanistan to do some research for their business. Griff, a former member of the British intelligence, scoffed at the idea that Afghanistan could be unsafe.
"You know," he said, in his clipped English accent, "You could get killed easier in West Philadelphia than you could in Kabul." Griff even referred Sam and Josh to a few guys who had been in and out of Kabul a couple of times to further reassure them. They warned them that "Afghanistan's not the problem. It's the landing that hurts."
Sam and Josh weren't really worried about the State Department Web site's warning that "the security situation remains critical for American citizens" in Afghanistan. They were more concerned, as they entered into Afghanistan airspace, about the contents of their stomachs -- planes flying into Afghanistan, they learned, do not simply coast in for an easy landing. There are evasive maneuvers -- spirals, loops and sudden drops -- to avoid surface-to-air missiles.
The captain has advised that all passengers buckle their seatbelts at this time. It's going to be a bumpy ride. But, of course, any entrepreneurial venture that could change the face of an industry should have a few bumps along the way.
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Samuel Reeves, 22, and Josh Koplin, 28, are the founding partners of Humanistic Robotics, a company "dedicated to solving social problems through innovative product designs." Their first project: a cheap, self-propelling landmine deminer that uses interlocking rollers and a remote control to detonate landmines through ground pressure. If their model is successful, Sam and Josh could revolutionize an industry still based on removing mines by hand. Their goal: to eradicate effectively the 100 million landmines sprinkled two-to-three inches beneath the ground, spread throughout 68 countries, according to the United Nations. Their combined age: less than 50.
It's not surprising, then, that the two guards assigned to protect Sam and Josh in Kabul seemed a little miffed to see that these two international demining experts-in-training looked more as though they belonged in college. (Which, in fact, they did -- Josh even had to write a letter to his professors explaining he'd be a week late for class because he'd be in Afghanistan).
"Most demining experts are between 50-55, have 20 years of experience in the British military or something like that," Josh explains. "Maybe a Ph.D. They definitely weren't expecting us."
"They looked at us," Sam says, smiling, "and they thought we were like the secretaries for the guys about to get off the plane or something."
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How did Sam Reeves, who entered the Wharton School originally to become an investment banker, and Josh Koplin, a newly-minted industrial designer, end up in Kabul to do on-the-ground research for their demining apparatus -- an apparatus which seems poised to change the way landmines are removed around the world -- at a time when most of their classmates were finishing up their summer vacations?
Well, in order to start a successful business, you have to have a successful design. The two go hand and hand, like Sam and Josh, the business guy and the design guy who finish each others' sentences. Sam is the former, the manager of business development of Humanistic Robots. He came to Penn after having odd jobs in high school in Fort Worth, TX -- a landscaping company, an auto-detailing business, a few things here and there. Of course, he thought about Wall Street and the stock market and investment banking, which at first sounded great. But after a year of learning more about them, Sam realized that the hours, the lifestyle, the lack of impact on the world -- it wasn't him.
But what else can you do coming out of Wharton? Consulting? Maybe. Then there's starting your own business. And even though it's risky, Sam is the type of guy who likes a big risk.
"I'd always had this idea that it'd be great to start a business while I was still in Wharton because I was young and then you have someone else supporting you .... There are a lot of advantages to doing it while you're in school," Sam says from his office in the Small Business Development Center in Vance Hall, on Penn's campus. Sam works part time at the S.B.D.C., which consults with entrepreneurs to get their small businesses off the ground and into the air in manageable stages.
When Sam was a junior at Penn, he won a grant from another program at Wharton, the Venture Initiation Program. According to advisor Leslie Mitts, the program is designed for "entrepreneurs from across the university who need to start and gain support for building their high-potential businesses that are accepted into that program."
After working with Sam for almost a year, Mitts thought that he would succeed as an entrepreneur, despite the risk. "Part of being creative is can you see around the corner -- can you see what's not there?" she says. "[Sam's] got enough of a feeling of safety net in his own professional confidence that he's not looking for 'how do I solve the problems that I haven't faced yet?' .... He was able to go out and find that there would be demand for the product he was selling."
And going out there means Sam had to do on-the-ground research with Josh in Afghanistan, Thailand, Cambodia and Croatia -- all countries where landmines affect the way that people go about their daily business.
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The idea for the landmine removal device came five years earlier in Copenhagen, Denmark, where Josh -- the current head of design development at Humanistic Robotics -- was working at a furniture-making facility.
Josh is a Jeff Spicoli-look alike. He has a goatee and wears wooden beaded necklaces that he makes himself. He had just graduated as a Sustainable Architecture concentrator, an interdisciplinary degree he designed himself at Hampshire College, a small, liberal-arts college with no curriculum and no majors. He decided to become a woodworker. And one day, he took a trip to Croatia where he saw people who looked slightly different than the people in America.
Croatia is one of several countries in Europe which has a major landmine problem, from the Balkan war in the 1990s. Josh would walk down the street and notice a guy missing an arm, a leg or an eye. All he could think about was how to fix it.
As Sam put it, "he sees all these people with limbs blown off ... so he thought, 'What if there was some way to detonate mines by rolling over them?'"
Josh sat on that idea for a couple of years but didn't really do anything with it -- after all, it's hard to start a business without a background in the field. He moved to New York to start an industrial design graduate degree at the Pratt School of Design when he watched the planes strike the World Trade Center. He thought, "Oh my God, I could die tomorrow, I better be doing something interesting with my life." He started to work on things useful to people with real problems. He just had no idea how to sell them.
He met Sam at a lunch his father dragged him to and realized that the two could work well together. It clicked for Sam as well. "We could make something together with our complementary skill sets," he says. "It was a long evolution of 'I don't want to do I-banking, starting a business would be cool too,' to meeting Josh, to thinking 'we have mental synergy,' to deciding an idea for a month, recalibrating, kicking around ideas for an entire Saturday and then landing on landmines."
At first glance, the landmine demining prototype sitting in the glass lobby of Penn's Weiss Tech House looks more like a tractor on steroids. Which is, in fact, partially true.
When it was time to build the prototype, Josh went on eBay and bought tractor chains. He and Sam learned several little things. "Don't put the chains on the outside of the wheels, that kind of stuff," Josh says. He rigged the chains to a Plexiglass chasse after teaching himself how to use the laser cutting machine. Then he attached the weights -- each roughly 40 pounds -- to the front of the chasse so that they interlocked and formed a tight weave.
"We didn't go out and raise $20 million to hire a fleet of engineers that are going to sit around and fiddle with thumbtacks all day and make something that might work, maybe not," Sam says. "We thought about the problem and approached it like engineers would and solved it ourselves."
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For now, it's time to raise capital, to get the project off the ground. The minimum estimate of clearing current landmines is $33 billion. According to Sam, the company's goal is to raise $5.2 million in 2005 and by August, 2006 to have "six demonstration models in the field -- two in a desert environment, two in an arid environment, and two in a jungle environment -- working with results that we can tell the world about."
Josh knows the skies ahead are difficult. For every mine cleared, around 20 more are scattered, like pixie-dust, in the ground. He also realizes that landmines are cheap to produce -- around three bucks. "It's very risky, this venture," he says. "It's kind of like going into the future without a safety net. It's a bit scary."
But Sam and Josh continue to look ahead, past the possible turbulence. "Five years from now we need to have hundreds of machines working around the world working to solve the landmine problem." Sam says. "And we will."
