Phil Santoro is empowering the next generation of innovators

But even as his career has blossomed, Santoro is intent on empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs. The resources he devotes to his two alma maters, Madeira High School in suburban Cincinnati and the Lindner College of Business, reflect that mantra.

“My journey really started with an obsession for building and helping people,” he said.

After Santoro constructed a computer from scratch for his grandparents, he built one for himself with a purpose befitting a typical adolescent boy — to play video games. More specifically, the strategy game Age of Empires.

When organizaing an online forum for Age of Empires users, Santoro found the setup process difficult. Thinking he could do better, Santoro created his own forum hosting service in 2002. Five years later, Santoro, now a Madeira student, launched FreeForums.org, an upgraded platform.

“It took off instantly. We had all kinds of forums. The largest was a 'Twilight' moms forum, but we had cyclists, gamers, sports leagues — anything you could think of. At our peak, we were doing over 125 million monthly pageviews,” Santoro said. “This taught me my first lesson about business. If you take a technical problem and solve it with an easy product, people will use it.”

Santoro’s startup ethos was bolstered by business & media communications teacher Jennifer Jordan’s entrepreneurship class at Madeira. Jordan organizes students into groups, who are tasked with creating a nonprofit and presenting their organization to a panel of entrepreneurs.

“He had this vision for his life and what he wanted to do. He knew he wanted to work for Google and go to Silicon Valley,” Jordan said of Santoro. “He was always willing to try new things and to take risks.”

Santoro’s decision to attend Lindner and UC was based on proximity, the ability to run his business and a meeting with Center for Entrepreneurship founder Charles Matthews, PhD, who impressed Santoro with his vision for student entrepreneurs.

“What Lindner gave me was a more structured approach to business. I had the first principles. I was running a business, but I didn't know how to read a balance sheet,” Santoro said. “Having that ability to make mistakes and learn from things in school and then apply that later really gave me that more formal business acumen and education that I didn't get running Free Forums.”

According to Matthews, Santoro embodied what he referred to as an entrepreneur’s “3D vision.”

“Entrepreneurs are driven, determined and dedicated to a vision that they translate into a mission and pursue with a passion,” said Matthews, distinguished teaching professor and professor of entrepreneurship and strategy. “Phil’s entrepreneurship journey is a great example of creating a path in life of his making. He took all that his family, friends, teachers, professors, experiences and more had to offer and made it into his life and career journey moving forward. That continues to this day.”

Santoro quickly became friends with David Kolodny, a Google co-worker. The duo had lunch every Wednesday to brainstorm startup ideas. Armed with a surplus of concepts, Santoro and Kolodny decided they would create a startup studio. So began Wilbur Labs, with Santoro and Kolodny spending the company’s early days working on Santoro’s couch.

Wilbur Labs aims to take the startup process — which Santoro likens to "bottling lighting" — into a systemized, repeatable procedure. Wilbur Labs supplies its companies with funding, resources and operational expertise. The studio, which has built and invested in more than 20 companies, only backs businesses searching to solve “real problems.”

“And that's easier said than done,” Santoro added. “I think there's a lot of very smart people, especially in [Silicon] Valley, who are building very complicated solutions to problems that nobody really cares about. Our teams work on things that are actually impactful. They can see their work; they can see the impact they're having on others.”

In 2020, Wilbur Labs surveyed 150 startup founders on a variety of challenges. Three years later, they conducted the survey again. According to the combined reporting, 84% of founders who faced potential failure would be willing to launch another venture.