My Alma Mater: High Honors

Sam Walder combined his love of music and knowledge of computer engineering to create the music-teaching software Trala. (Image courtesy of courtesy of Sam Walder)

Thank god for the HoHo.

Thank god for that rickety, wooden house on Oregon Street, which kept me in school and gave me friends, love, education, and a great place to cry (the basement).

HoHo is short for Honors House, headquarters of the Campus Honors Program. Every room in that building helped to make me who I am today.

As you walk in, immediately on your right is the director’s office. When I was an undergrad, the director was Kim Graber. Kim worked long hours, and if I was up at 2 a.m. studying for a midterm or feeling lonely, I’d go by the HoHo and look for a light on in her room, tap on her window, and she’d let me in. Then she’d give me chocolate and dating advice.

Continuing down the hallway, you enter the living room. There, I would sit on a couch and read books all day or talk with whomever else happened to be around. I made my best friends in that room, and if not for those friends, I wouldn’t have graduated. Also, there was endless Folgers coffee.

The first thing that got me interested in running my own business happened in that room. One day around lunchtime, Professor Paul Magelli, ’59 LAS, MS ’60 BUS, PHD ’65 BUS, gave a talk about his life. Fifteen undergrads sat on the floor and listened to his amazing stories.

I forget most of what he said, but I do remember with absolute clarity what he said about ethics. In business, he said, always act as if anything you do could show up on the front page of The New York Times.

As I started my own company, raised $20M in venture capital, and grew our team to more than 100 members, that always stuck in my mind. I had many opportunities to act unethically, but every time, I would hear Professor Magelli’s voice and know the right thing to do.

But back to HoHo: If you walk up the creaky stairs (taking care not to bump your head) and turn left, you’ll find yourself in a small classroom. There, I took some of the best courses of my college career: Japanese Tea Ceremony, Polynesian Island Navigation, and, my favorite, Business as a Force in American Society, with Professor Joe White.

Coming into that class, I thought business was evil and soul-sucking. I even said that to Professor White on the first day, and he took me on as a project. In the end, he taught me the nuances of business and showed me that a company is simply a collection of people working towards a common purpose—that a business will reflect the values of its staff.

By the end of his class, I felt sure that I wanted to start a company. The next semester, my friend Vishnu Indukuri, ’16 ENG, and I founded Trala, a music education company that builds software for self-learning musicians. We ended up teaching music to more than a million people in 193 countries before selling it in 2025.

Where did we go to brainstorm, drink Folgers coffee, and dream up our future? The HoHo, of course.

Sam Walder was CEO of Trala.com.