A monument to modern business education. Business as both science and art — where clarity, communication, and professional presentation are the whole point.
The Myers-Thorne Building stands as a monument to modern business education. Its architecture reflects contemporary corporate design — clean lines, glass walls, professional finishes. Glass-wall partitions create a sense of transparency and open communication while specialized glazing keeps the acoustics controlled. The interior design communicates professionalism, innovation, and collaborative thinking.
The building’s architecture sends a message: in business, clarity, communication, and professional presentation matter. Every detail — from the lighting to the furniture to the coffee — is chosen to reinforce it. Dean Mike Thornton (gas-station philosopher, Memphis Standard, Arkadelphia Food Mart operator, entrepreneurship pioneer) runs the college. Details matter.
A simulation room with real-time market data feeds and professional-grade terminals. Students execute simulated investments on real feeds — the tension, the energy, the constant flow of information.
Dedicated workspace, high-speed internet, collaborative whiteboards, and mentorship access for student entrepreneurs. Reconfigurable walls flex as startups grow, pivot, or launch.
Professional AV, staging, and lighting — the main theater seats 150 with professional sound and projection. Students practice pitches until they deliver with confidence and polish.
Finance, Business Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Accounting, and Management. Each combines theory with practical application — students don’t just learn business concepts, they apply them to real situations.
AI sandbox environments where students test business models against artificial market simulations — supply and demand, competitive dynamics, market disruption, and economic cycles.
The business side of OPA’s campus trading card project — inventory management, pricing strategy, market analysis, and supply chain. It generates actual revenue and becomes a capstone.
Students crowdfund small business experiments and run GoFundMe campaigns to the broader community — learning entrepreneurship in its most vulnerable form: pitching to strangers. Part of the FlipSuite family (with FileFlip, VoiceFlip, and Beautiful Word Garbage) — the convert-what-you-have-into-what-you-need toolkit.
The flagship case taught in Myers-Thorne is the one Travis lived. In August 2025, working with the machine, he wrote a full business plan for a “Democratic Science” platform — citizen-science bundles (Earthquake Insight, Climate Researcher, Quantum Analyst, Flood-Drought, Satellite, Solar Eclipse), AI validation that lets a five-year-old’s butterfly photo carry the same weight as a professor’s lab data, and a market thesis with the numbers to match: a $2-trillion market, $100–200 billion in annual revenue, a $3–5 billion raise, 25–50% IRR.
The numbers were the machine’s — blown big, written in a weekend, never the point. What matters is the shape, and what the human did with it. Travis didn’t raise three billion dollars. He built a dozen of those bundles himself, on a phone, for $535, and gave them away: SnapBasin, Watershed Pulse, QuakeSimulator, QuantumPulse, the PT trackers, FileFlip — the working tools index.
That flip is the curriculum. Before SnapBasin, a homeowner who wanted to know how much water was projected to reach their house had StreamStats and no idea where to start; now the answer is one click, and a junior or senior engineer can run the same tool as a second check. The aggregation model says give us your data and we’ll tell you what it means. The built model says keep your data — here’s the tool, you tell us. Students work both sides: the marketing language of “what they say,” the receipts of “what I did,” the pros, the cons, and an honest self-audit of a build that cost $535 and a year of nights.
Two more cases sit on the syllabus. The Cincinnati program that lost millions in seconds — written by a brilliant schematic thinker, trusted by the whole room because it was elegant — is the cautionary twin to GFAS: a confident system, unverified, at scale. And Professor Matrix Thompson’s wife, an executive at Merkshire Bathaway, guest-lectures on capital allocation from the other side of the table: what patient money actually looks for.
Two cards of the school you can actually touch. Business Math — turn an endowment until the cliff disappears, weigh renting vs. owning across the whole range, and find the subscriptions you forgot you pay for. The Sampler — a taste of marketing, international business, regulation, and the AI reality, with a guest lecture from PHIN0.
The business wing’s browser labs — each a working instrument, not a slideshow: endowment math, rent-vs-own, and the economics of the AI transition.
The Business Sampler · The Other Side · The Ticker Lab · What Business Are You In?
The dean’s office, faculty, and the full business program live in Myers-Thorne. PHIN 10.247 teaches PHIN 202 (Documentation & Collab Logging) here as a cross-listed course — though PHIN’s home is Building 9, College IX (Stephens Science Center).
“In business, clarity, communication, and professional presentation matter.
Every detail has been chosen to reinforce that — because details matter.”