‘Babson Success Story’: What Happens When Two MBA Alumni Collaborate
It’s a cold January afternoon, days before the new semester begins, and it’s awfully quiet inside The Ralph Z. and Charlotte R. Sorenson Atrium at Babson Commons.
The only two people inside sit at a table—meeting, planning, getting to know one another.
Sebastian Gomez-Puerto MBA’14 and Aleksandr Malashchenko MBA’24 have been working together for the past several months. But this is the first time they have met in person.
“He reminded me a lot of myself 10 years ago. It’s like I’ve known him 10 years,” Gomez-Puerto said. “That’s the thing about Babson. You just know someone, and it’s just the Babson way. I don’t know how else to describe it.”
They may have just met, but their kinship and Babson roots run deep and have led to a fruitful collaboration between their two startups— Malashchenko’s ReviMo and Gomez-Puerto’s General Populace.
“This is a Babson success story,” Gomez-Puerto said. “It’s incredible—10 years apart from graduation, and Babson is still doing its magic.”
Starting with a Problem
Malashchenko first arrived at Babson in August 2022, from Siberia, Russia. “Basically, the other side of the planet,” he said. He had a technical background, mostly in aerospace, but he wanted to start a company in the United States, so he chose to attend Babson because of its entrepreneurial expertise. He sought skills, knowledge, and most importantly, connections.
“First of all, I need to know people. I needed a network,” he said, knowing that it could be critical to enhancing his access to information and resources.
It also pointed him to the first step toward creating a startup. “We were taught at Babson that the business should solve a problem,” he said, “so I was thinking about the problems that I had.”
He immediately thought about his grandfather, who was paralyzed by a stroke and confined to his bed. As a caregiver, Malashchenko knew how embarrassed his grandfather was having to ask for help getting out of bed and how much he desired independence and dignity. “It was one of the biggest problems I had in my life,” he said. “I decided to use my technical background to create a device that helps people like my grandfather be more independent.”
During the New Venture Creation course in the second semester of his MBA program, he started ReviMo to create a robotic mobility device that people could use independently. Malashchenko took advantage of Babson’s network of resources, especially through the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship—Rocket Pitch, the Fast Track Cohort, the John E. and Alice L. Butler Launch Pad, the Summer Venture Program, and the B.E.T.A. Challenge, which ReviMo won last year.
ReviMo since has completed the Techstars Physical Health Fort Worth Accelerator, and it recently was accepted to the MassRobotics Accelerator.
“The main thing for me is access to the network that Babson has that can open doors for you and give you answers to the questions that you have. There is lifetime support from Babson.”
Aleksandr Malashchenko MBA’24
The Entrepreneurial Bug
As Malashchenko was developing his company and raising money, he knew he would need help getting his product to the next level and eventually to market. “We needed someone who could help us to create a beautiful, attractive design appearance for our customers,” he said.
So, Cindy Klein Marmer MBA’02, the interim executive director of the Blank Center within The Arthur M. Blank School for Entrepreneurial Leadership, made a vital connection to another Babson alumnus.
Enter Gomez-Puerto. He had first arrived at Babson for his MBA a decade earlier than Malashchenko with the same aspirations to create a startup.
“It was the best two years of my life,” said Gomez-Puerto, who also was the student speaker at the Class of 2014 Commencement ceremony. “Babson will always be a spiritual home for me and my intellectual journey.”
While on campus, he and his co-founders created Cafe X, a robotic coffee vending machine
company still in operation. Gomez-Puerto went on to exit Cafe X in 2017 and started Sun Vessel, a micromobility company in Miami that created infrastructure for small Segways. “Once you get bit by the (entrepreneurial) bug,” he said, “you can’t stop.”
Next, he started General Populace, a design studio focused solely on entrepreneurs and startups to get ideas to market quickly, “so they can test it the ET&A (Entrepreneurial Thought & Action) way, the way we’re taught here.
“General Populace is the company I wish existed when I began on my own entrepreneurial journey,” he said, noting the addition of invaluable resources at Babson such as the Weissman Foundry since his graduation. “Back then, it was hard to build this.”
A Lifetime Network
“This” is the latest iteration of ReviMo’s signature product, which Gomez-Puerto and General Populace have helped rethink and redesign. “We worked hand-in-hand with Alex to try to come up with something that respected his engineering and gave this life,” Gomez-Puerto said. “How can we give this personality and a soul?”
The two Babson alumni collaborated remotely and focused on two key words: empowered and safe. “We were trying to create a product that would welcome people to use it,” Gomez-Puerto said. “We basically created this whole idea of hugging the user, and I think that was very powerful in terms of a design language.”
The collaboration resulted not only in a new design concept but also a rebranding of the company’s visual identity. “It helped a lot in terms of our marketing and our presentation to investors and stakeholders,” Malashchenko said.
General Populace now is based in Savannah, Georgia, but Gomez-Puerto is eyeing a move back to Boston. ReviMo, meanwhile, remains Boston-based, as Malashchenko takes the next steps, including product development, raising capital, long-term testing, navigating Food and Drug Administration and medical insurance regulations, and taking deposits for a growing waitlist.
“If things go well, we will deliver the first serial devices by the end of this year,” Malashchenko said. “I feel quite satisfied with what we have, but it’s still a ton of work to bring it to market. I’m thinking not about what we’ve done, but what we need to do.”
He’ll always have his Babson network, including Gomez-Puerto, to call on.
“The main thing for me is access to the network that Babson has that can open doors for you and give you answers to the questions that you have,” said Malashchenko, who still engages with the campus, working at the Foundry and with consultive professors serving as advisors. “There is lifetime support from Babson.”
Posted in Entrepreneurial Leadership, Outcomes
