Looking ahead toward a decade of development

Tim Stojka ’89 has a bold plan: Launch one new AI-driven company annually for the next 10 years. If it goes as he hopes, those companies will be full of graduates from the MBAi Program, a joint AI-focused MBA degree from the Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering.

Tim is a tech entrepreneur who has hired three MBAi graduates as interns—and then later as full-time employees. “I’ve been really happy with the quality of these students,” he said. “They've been well-educated and had some prior tech experience, but beyond that, they understand how to apply the technology and how specifically AI is going to transform industries.”

Tim shares and guides that understanding in his businesses. He has spent the past three decades creating and growing companies rooted in the emerging technology of their time. The first was called Commerx PlasticsNet, which he started in 1993 in the early days of the internet and ecommerce. The company served as a marketplace for the plastics industry to buy and sell materials. Tim sold the company in 2001.

He then started Sertifi, a web-based signature and payment company that featured software designed for hotels to coordinate payments and contracts. In 2009, Tim launched Agentis to capitalize on newly developed advanced metering infrastructure in the energy industry. Agentis relied on the explosion of data coming from smart meters to offer energy data analytics to businesses and utilities.

Tim sold both companies earlier this decade. He currently is CEO of Nexus3 Capital, a business he built in 2023 that was the birthplace of his 10-companies-in-10-years strategy. Nexus3 is an AI platform that serves as a holding company to build and operate vertical market AI companies. Its first venture was in the legal industry. The company is now looking at energy, healthcare, robotics, and other markets for its next steps.

“We go into a domain, we build a thesis on a business so we can build and operate a prototype, and then we scale it,” he said. “We bring in a team, and we grow it and operate it.” Those teams are where the MBAi students and graduates come in.

Northwestern: A lifelong connection to real-world innovation

Tim has deep ties to Northwestern Engineering. He is a member of the McCormick Advisory Council, and in 2021, served as the commencement speaker for the school’s master’s and PhD students. He earned a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering in 1989. Mere months later, he started his first company.

Through the years, he has stayed connected to his alma mater — and the birth and growth of the MBAi program. “One of the real value points in my business is how you get product-market fit. Finding products that really are going to transform industries and transform the way people work is hard to do,” Tim said. “MBAi students have gotten really good exposure to real-world companies and are good at thinking about marketing and product development and product management.”

Designing products people actually need, not just want

To explain what makes the MBAi program, its students, and its graduates different, Tim uses an analogy of the difference between creating a vitamin and creating a painkiller. A “vitamin” is a product that solves a problem but that isn’t vital to a consumer. “You can make some money with a vitamin,” he said. “You can make a lot more money with a painkiller.”

“Painkillers” aren’t just good to have — they solve a legitimate problem, creating a much stronger connection between the product and the consumer. The key to developing those types of “painkillers” is having a firm understanding of the target customer.

“There is a process of how you get to know your customer, understand how they solve problems, and iterate your product so it becomes more and more valuable to them over time,” Tim said. “In the enterprise world, you've got multiple stakeholders, and you've got to really understand how they do things and then build the software to be able to make those things more efficient.”

That, Tim said, is where MBAi graduates are at their best. By hiring MBAi students and graduates, Tim finds tech-savvy business leaders who share his enthusiasm for entrepreneurship. He said he is excited for where the next decade will take him—and the MBAi students who join him for the ride. “I love building businesses and creating products that are innovative and that make the world better,” he said. “It’s exciting. I’ve done it three times now, and I want to work with great inspirational, passionate leaders to do it again.”  

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