Moomba, the dinner club and lounge he launched with his brother and a third partner in November of '97, is the toast of Manhattan. Madonna attended the opening. Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio drop in regularly.
Moguls line the raw bar, and critics rave about the food.
But Russell wants to take the Moomba concept and expand into other upscale hospitality ventures. That, he figured, would require a broader set of skills and contacts than he could acquire in the trenches, where he has negotiated leases, managed designers, and shucked his share of oysters. History may suggest that entrepreneurs are born, not made, but try telling that to the scores of aspiring capitalists streaming into business school for formal lessons in the art of the start-up. Some 22 percent of the M.B.A. class of 1998 planned to launch a company within five years, according to a survey last summer by the Graduate Management Admission Council, which oversees the GMAT test. And the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business saw 1,248 students seek seats in four entrepreneurship classes last year that had room for just 874.