ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: Shaun So and Paul Harrison

Shaun So and Paul Harrison are alumni of the Full Time Honors MBA program (Class of '11). After two years of planning and development, they launched Cubby: An Urban Pop-Up Experiment - Bag Check & Personal Courier. The Cubby App is also available on Android and iOS.  

Before coming to New York City, Shaun worked for the Department of Defense, he also did a tour in Afghanistan in 2005 in the Army Reserves. Paul worked  in LA in real estate for several years after graduating from USC. They both came to Zicklin knowing they wanted to be entrepreneurs. One of the factors that drew both Shaun and Paul to Zicklin was the excellent quality and affordability of the school as well as the 2010 Baruch College Entrepreneurship Competition, in which they took third place. Shaun also participated in the Executive Student Partnership Program; he still keeps in touch with his former ESP mentor Sandy O’Hearen.

Paul and Shaun founded Cubby because they realized there was no short term-storage solution; people in New York City were constantly schlepping stuff.  

Shaun: My wife is an actress and had days when she’d have to carry two or three heavy bags throughout the day to multiple locations in the city for auditions. At the end of such a day we’d meet for drinks or dinner and have nowhere to place these bags safely. I thought:  “why isn’t there a place to store all these bags!?” We saw a problem and started thinking about a practical solution. 

How did you get Cubby off the ground?

Shaun: Participating in the Baruch College Entrepreneurship Competition was how this all started, Professor Rob Foskey was a great advisor. Paul and I spent our first year at Zicklin researching and coming up with a business plan. We needed to validate our idea. The competition forced us to do research, analyze price schemes; it showed us that our idea was not only viable, but could actually be profitable. Our second year at Zicklin was spent pitching our idea.  

Paul: We tried to approach the idea of Cubby as realistically as possible. I spent a ton of time doing financial projections, as conservative as possible—to show how in reality this idea would not work, but all this work lead to the same place, the same conclusion over and over again— it showed that it would work.

Tell us about your pop-up store at 303 Park Ave South and how it fits into your strategy and goals.

We are contracted to stay at 303 Park Ave South until October 31. A pop-up store was the most economical option for us. Our initial strategy of developing a mobile app evolved in the two years we've been working on it. At first we considered a fixed site locker concept, but ran into issues of cost and image: lockers have a sort of a dingy image and we wanted to provide a nicer, cleaner, more personable experience. We wanted to build a strong brand. We also explored the peer-to-peer model - where using the mobile app, we would have bag check at hotel and restaurants, but that proved difficult. We decided to revert the fixed site concept, (no lockers!) and opened the pop-up store. Our goal is to grow into a permanent location, a courier hub with a relationship, via mobile with restaurants and hotels.

What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?

Paul: If being an entrepreneur is your chosen path, you have to embrace it—don’t give up! You have to know that it’s very hard but also very rewarding: the downs are really, really low, but the ups are extremely high. 

Shaun: You must have the internal fortitude to handle being an entrepreneur. This is a “no-business’ where you’ll hear a lot more “no’s” than “yeses”. You have to have the endurance and most importantly: a good sense of humor.