Distinguished Alumni : Paul Kirchoff

Paul Kirchoff on starting a business: “Meet people who have been in your shoes and learn from their successes and failures—better to learn from theirs than from your own.”

Proceeds from ‘Corporate Thriller’ Go to Cancer Research

“Entrepreneurship has always been in my DNA,” says Paul Kirchoff (’93), currently vice president for product management of the Digital Lifestyles Group (www.dig-life.com). A veteran of software and hardware product management and marketing at companies such as Dell Computer and United Devices, Kirchoff was also the founder and CEO of Yehti Corporation, a marketing automation software company.

Now Kirchoff finds himself straddling the worlds of entertainment and business technology. His new book, Leapfrog—published in November 2003—has already netted $50,000 for the National Foundation for Cancer Research, to which Kirchoff is donating all of the proceeds.

Leapfrog, a “corporate thriller” according to its author, is self-published under the pseudonym Kirch P. Andrews. Kirchoff also has a “religious thriller” in the works with the working title Blind Faith. He has finished the outline and now is in the process, he says, of “putting meat on the bones.”

This isn’t Kirchoff’s first authorship venture. He wrote, directed, and financed a film, Midnight Sunrise, which was the basis of his McGuire Entrepreneurship Program business plan. In part, the film is a commentary on racism, which Kirchoff (who is “one-half Hispanic, one-half German”) has experienced firsthand. “I root for underdogs,” he says on the his literary website.

Learn more about Kirchoff and Leapfrog at www.kirchpandrews.com.

  
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