A few years ago, while I was a first-year Ph.D. student in the engineering school at Johns Hopkins University, I had a business idea. I had taken two excellent courses on microelectronics, and decided that I could build a business around them in my native Nigeria. As a college student in Nigeria, I had wanted to master developing microcontroller-based systems, but had never had the opportunity in practice, because no company there offered it. As the first year of my Ph.D. program progressed, I became more and more confident that there was no need to spend four years in the program, since the first semester seemed to have already prepared me for my dream. So, at the end of the academic session, I developed a business plan and sent copies to potential investors in the U.S.