By Scotty Schenck, news correspondent
Chatting over coffee comes naturally to the Entrepreneurs Club, especially when its speaker helped make a $4.4 billion company that’s dedicated to making the caffeinated beverage. Dick Sweeney, co-founder of Keurig, joined members on Oct. 21 at the Curry Student Center to talk about his success in the industry.
“What’s the fundamental business model for Keurig?” Sweeney asked. “It’s really very simple: you identify a legally addictive substance, you put it in a portion pack and you collect the royalties. Where’s the challenge?”
The crowd laughed along with Sweeney before he began to speak about his life and the events that led up to co-founding Keurig.
Sweeney was born in New Jersey alongside three siblings. After completing high school, he was draftedto serve in Vietnam in a long range reconnaissance team. Throughout the event, Sweeney stressed that the ideas he learned in the military were influential to his views of business: the core values of teamwork, the different types of management styles, the importance of decision-making and leadership.
“I spent my first nine months [in the service] as a team medic, so you’re confronted with somebody who just got hit and you have to make some quick decisions,” Sweeney said.
He took several jobs once he returned to the US in 1968, which shaped his interest in the manufacturing process. He would receive his college degree in industrial engineeringfrom the New Jersey Institute of Technology, formerly called North College of Engineering. He would then become the vice president of manufacturing at the Scientific Lighting Company and start his own consulting company. However, it wasn’t until he was sailing off the coast of New Jersey when he talked to a man who had two colleagues looking to start an appliance company.
“I said ‘man, I’ve been in the appliance business, it’s really awful, tell them to fold their tents and get a real job,’” Sweeney said.
Regardless of skepticism, that man got his colleagues and Sweeney to meet, and they talked to him about their ideas for a single-serve coffee machine. Years of work and many management changes later, Keurig became a multi-billion dollar company, with business in both the home and office coffee markets.
About 145 people attended the event, one of which was freshman Nikki Shah, an international business major. Shah said it was interesting and gave her a good view into the entrepreneurial side of business.
“I thought it was really inspiring,” Shah said. “[Sweeney] said he wasn’t the top of his class. … And now he’s probably a billionaire.”
Executive Vice President of the Entrepreneurs Club and fourth-year Northeastern student Conor Huvane helped to bring Sweeney to campus. Huvane said that a series of cold emails, or emailing multiple people with no connections hoping for a response, led to Sweeney enthusiastically responding, agreeing to come speak for the club.
“I think a lot of people here are looking to start their own business,” Huvane said.
Huvane also noted that seeing others who succeeded at making their own business proves to him and the audience that entrepreneurship is feasible and not an unattainable goal.
“Who better to hear from than someone who has succeeded in starting their own business,” he said.
Sweeney was more than happy to give his advice to the students at the event. He said people should look for good role models, advance themselves and learn: all things that he did for himself.
“Stay curious, stay open to ideas and be part of a good team,” he said. “I started Keurig when I was in my 40s… It’s never too late.”
Photo by Scotty Schenck.
