This week’s top tech pick is a talk by a former Princeton student (left, Steve Papa) who cooked up an idea in his Harvard MBA dorm and sold it to Oracle for perhaps a billion dollars. It started as Optigrab but by the time of the Oracle sale was known as Endeca. The Keller Center notice: 

Steve Papa ’94: Luck Favors the Prepared
Thursday, October 18, 2012 at 4:30 p.m. in the Carl A. Fields Center Room 104 (campus map)The Keller Center is pleased to welcome Steve Papa ’94, founder and CEO of Endeca Technologies, Inc., to the Princeton campus on Thursday, October 18 at 4:30 pm. Reception to follow. Steve will share his story and some of the lessons learned for aspiring entrepreneurs and anyone interested in the good, the bad, and the ugly when building a successful technology company. Steve Papa ’94   founded and, with the help of a very talented team, built the software company Endeca from an idea in his grad school dorm room to Oracle’s 6th largest acquisition when announced in 2011. 

From this list of opportunities, the only one I’ll guarantee to attend is Saturday’s UFAR 5k to Combat Riverblindness. Registration starts at 8:30 and the starting gun goes off at 10. It’s OK to walk, and if you keep a steady pace it takes less than an hour. It’s going to be extra fun this year, with extra prizes! There’s no prettier route — starting and returning to the seminary. But there’s lots more going on this weekend.

In the Pink Fashion Show on Friday, October 5, 6 p.m. benefits the very worthy Breast Cancer Resource Center of Princeton.

Three back-to-back dance concerts and I can’t attend. (Does anyone want to write about them for this blog?) American Repertory Ballet premieres two works from the Joffrey repertoire on Saturday, October 6, at Raritan Valley College. Yes, it’s worth the drive. Outlet Dance Project offers new work at Grounds for Sculpture on Sunday, October 7, at 2 p.m. There is also another site-specific concert, this one at Trenton’s Cadwalader park on Saturday, October 6., cosponsored by Passage Theater.

Palmer Square has its Birthday Bash (75th) on Sunday afternoon, October 7. I have mixed feelings about this and am saying so here.

On a more serious note, the Troubling Issues series at Princeton United Methodist Church presents a forum on world economics, with economists native to three different countries. It’s Sunday, October 7, at 4 p.m.., at Nassau & Vandeventer.

Next week’s business opportunities:

NJEN offers “Where’s the Money?” at lunch on Wednesday, October 10, at the Marriott. It’s highly advisable to register ahead for this one, so your contact info is on the handouts.

Eileen’s Sinett’s day-long presentation training intensive, Speaking That Connects, is on Friday, October 12, and I can attest you will be a different and better speaker after that day.

Such a small thing as a traffic ticket, even a couple of parking tickets, can wreak terrible financial hardship for some families in today’s economy. That was the lesson I learned from sitting for 2 1/2 hours in traffic court today, watching the mini-dramas unfold.

Say you get fined $500 and can’t pay the fine, it mounts up. Pretty soon there is a warrant for your arrest, you lose your license, and now you owe more than $1,000. If you have lost your job, where do you get the money? The court can’t, or doesn’t care. Pay or lose your license.

What could you do that would amount to nearly $500? Merely fail to yield to a pedestrian in the crosswalk. A Manhattan resident who was delivering her daughter to Princeton University did that, in a moment of confusion. The fine was $250 and a point on her license. To avoid the point, she could pay a “surcharge” of $156 plus $33 in court costs for a total of $439. Fortunately this woman could afford it.

Others were not so fortunate. One speeding ticket, including the surcharge, cost $469. About half the people claimed they couldn’t pay their fine, and bleeding heart liberal that I am, I believed them. The response from the court: “Make some phone calls today. Owe someone other than this court.”

I don’t blame the judge or the court officials. They are doing their job. Nor the police officers. But such high fines result in just another case of The Rich Get Richer, the Poor Get Poorer. Delay in paying your fine because you can’t pay your rent, because you don’t have a job, and it doubles, then triples.

I realize the general lesson is, drive very. very, very carefully. Don’t get a ticket. But the specific lesson for me is, avoid Nassau Street like the plague. If I should fail to see a pedestrian in the crosswalk, perhaps because another pedestrian is darting out in front of me who is NOT in the crosswalk — well, I wouldn’t be happy paying $250 to $439. I’ll stay on Wiggins and Hamilton where pedestrians don’t lurk behind parked cars.

Check out the NYT special section today, DealB%k, about the future of white-shoe law firms, especially the terrific full-page graphic White-Collar World on page 4 by Guilbert Gates (under the direction of the reporter, Peter Lattman). The excerpt at left shows about 20 percent of the fascinating diagram of “big trouble lawyers” and the scoundrels (or the accused but acquitted) financiers they defended. (Aside: only two women are in the former group, only one — Martha Stewart — in the latter.)

Since I devour Style’s wedding pages for any mention of brides or grooms from Princeton,  I pounced upon this with similar intent and found, yes, one person that I knew from the late 1980s. Well, I didn’t actually know him, because he never would talk to me, but I delivered papers to Jay Regan at Princeton/Newport’s third-floor office on Spring Street, corner of Witherspoon.

It was during the 1980s insider trading scandal, when then attorney general Rudy Giuliani was going after “everyone and his brother,” including Richard Milliken and Martin Segal. (For an in-depth account of one of those trials, see this Money-CNN piece. Michael Powell detailed Giuliani’s excesses in a 2007 New York Times article) . Regan and Princeton/Newport got caught up in the prosecution. Powell wrote:

It was a very tense time around that office on Spring Street. When you deliver papers for U.S. 1 — and every staff member was a deliverer in the early years — you taste the vibes in an office as soon as you open the door. For that route I went first to the three-story building on Palmer Square, then in and out of the retail shops along Nassau and Witherspoon, chit chatting with the real estate people and the hoagie people — but when I opened the Princeton/Newport door — immediate shut down, icy cold. Initially I didn’t know what was wrong. Shy folks, I thought. Then I read the papers and realized what was going on.

I never got to do the Diane Henriques thing (Henriques is the NYT financial reporter who wrote the book on Bernie Madoff). I never did get to interview Jay Regan, the little fish caught in the Millken pool; it was a NYT and WSJ story. Thanks in part to “big trouble” lawyer Theodore V. Wells Jr. of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, Garrison (headshot in the excerpt above), all but a few of the charges were dropped. It cost Regan six years of litigation; he is now general managing partner at Harbourton Enterprises on Hulfish Street.

Postscript I:  Diane B. Henriques is keynoting the Mercer Institute’s Executive Leadership Summit on Tuesday, October 9.

Postscript II: I can’t help but compare this account of the White-Collar World with The New Jim Crow, as exposed by Michelle Alexander. Untold millions are spent on defending against charges of white collar crime. Very little, reports Alexander, is spent on defending African Americans snared in the legal quagmire of required minimum sentences. For instance, statistics show showed that black teenagers disproportionately represented in the juvenile justice system in New Jersey.

Since the survey was done in 2004, some efforts have been made to correct the problem of how black juveniles are treated differently from white juveniles, but overall, I believe, this is a scandalous state and national problem. So do others in Princeton who are working, not just to raise everyone’s consciousness, but to actually change the system. I’ll be posting blogs about their work at Not in Our Town Princeton, and you’ll be hearing more about it from various sources in the coming months. It will be the topic for Continuing Conversations on Race on Monday, October 1, 7:30 p.m., at the Princeton Public Library. In the meantime, mention this post and get a discount on the Michelle Alexander book at Labyrinth Books.

Not everyone indicted for white collar crime is a criminal in our town. The same is true for those accused of other crimes, but not everyone has the money for the good lawyer. This results in a new caste system that can be far more damaging to African Americans than the indignity of separate drinking fountains

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I first met Savraj Singh at an Einstein Alley Entrepreneur’s Group meeting– or was it first at NJEN? and then in September, 2010, at the World Day of Prayer (photo at right), where he was representing his Sikh congregation. Full of energy for his company, WATTVISION, he was struggling for funds. 

Earlier this year he emailed me about his Kickstart program. Kickstart is the social media version of asking friends and family to chip in on your new venture. An article by Lynn Robbins in U.S. 1 Newspaper reported that his company had raised $37,000 as of September 4. 


Good news! Singh and his partners (shown left) passed their $50,000 goal yesterday, raising $67,293 from 497 contributions, ranging from $1 (which gets you listed on the website) to more (which gets you discounts on the product, a gateway and energy sensor.) Some of the higher end contribution categories are still open. 

Today another would-be Kickstarter emailed me — dancer and choreographerny, Jamuna Dasi, the producer of a very successful annual concert at Grounds for Sculpture on Sunday, October 7. She seeks a modest amount — $5,000 . 
Says Dasi: I have been producing The Outlet Dance Project for 8 years. Until today, the dancers and myself have never been paid and I have barely been able to cover the costs of producing this popular, well-attended, and highly valued community event. This year I would like to be able to give a $200 stipend to each choreographer and not have to worry about covering our modest production costs. ‘=

It’s not the first arts cause to do a Kickstart (Robbins’ article reported on 4 local efforts) and maybe this is a viable alternative to waning corporate funds. The minimum pledge of $1 will receive a dance-related haiku, but sponsors of $500 will have a dance especially choreographed for them at any location they choose.  If Singh’s venture gives you the opportunity to be the next Rockefeller, the arts ventures let you be the next in the line of the Medici family. The deadline is October 4, the performance is October 7. 

If there are two kinds of college basketball coaches, those who recruit well and those who are fired, Courtney Banghart must be recruiting well. In an article in U.S. 1 Newspaper by colleague Kathleen McGinn Spring, Banghart shares the leadership lessons she used to transform Princeton University’s women’s basketball team into champions. 

Point: Genuinely care about the people you lead. There is “just no way to fake this,” she says.  

Point: Choose the harder right over the easier wrong.

In probably her only “free” month, in between recruiting and coaching, Courtney Banghart speaks to the Princeton Regional Chamber on Thursday, September 6. We will all be intrigued to hear the from the court” stories that she’ll tell.