Cornell Business

Issue date: 4/14/08 Section: Features

Being at business school is all about multitasking. But that's nothing new for first-year MBA Matt Dacey, who started three businesses while still an undergraduate at Syracuse, and another one shortly after graduating. Though three of the businesses are officially still in existence, Dacey only runs one of them while a student at the Johnson School. Of course, he still balances his CEO responsibilities with being president of the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital club, scoring a consulting internship with Deloitte… not to mention classes.

Dacey, whose father and uncles were successful builders on Cape Cod, has always been interested in starting businesses. But the first -- the one he started during his sophomore year at Syracuse -- was an odd one. Dacey and two partners spent about $14,000 to buy a 2000 sq. ft. inflatable laser tag arena, which he and his partners would truck around to area fairs and large-scale events.

The enterprise carried a lot of lessons about entrepreneurship, and about life. "I got into that [laser tag business] without knowing anything about laser tag, or knowing my partners," says Dacey. "It ended up being awful," he adds. But not so awful that it discouraged him from venturing out on his own again. And not so bad that he didn't make a tidy profit on the deal, when the three unlikely partners sold the piece of apparatus for $22,000 just a couple years after they'd bought it.

No doubt, it was the experience of owning a small business with two people he didn't know that led Dacey to conceive of his next business, One Click Video (oneclickvideo.com), an on-demand movie rental business based on the Syracuse University campus, with his close friend from school. Dacey was beginning to realize that he wanted his next venture to meet real market needs. In movie rentals around Syracuse University, he identified an obvious one. There were no on-campus movie rentals, and 60% of the student body didn't own a car. So Dacey did the research and cost analysis surrounding opening up a traditional store on campus. What he realized was "you just can't have that overhead" of owning a storefront, holding thousands of DVDs in inventory, and paying employees to run the place.

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