A couple of hundred University of Michigan students and community members gathered Friday morning for UM's eighth annual Entreprelooza event -- which may be the best free source of advice for would-be entrepreneurs on the planet.

Keynotes from two successful enterpreneurs and four panel discussions from local and national experts kept the crowd engaged at the event, which wrapped up with a students-only lunch.

Roger Newton, who helped build Esperion Therapeutics Inc. from its start to a $1.3 billion buyout, then bought some of its techology back and restarted the company for a fraction of that, led off with a history of his entrepreneurial experiences.

Pre-buyout, he said the hardest thing he had to do was lay off some staffers in 2002, once the company discovered it had hired too many researchers but not enough developers.

Newton offerd his lessons as bullet points -- never lose your passion, live your mission, keep your values alive, focus on your purpose, avoid unneccessary reorganization, and communicate, communicate, communicate.

Pfizer Inc. bought Esperion in February 2004 but in March 2008 abandoned the company's most promising drug candidate -- a protein discovered in Italy that not only raised HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, but showed signs of actually removing fatty plaques from partially clogged arteries -- and related chemicals. Pfizer took a $400-million-plus writeoff in the process.

Newton raised a little over $20 million in venture capital and bought a different small-molecule compound from Pfizer and is developing it. The new Esperion is now at eight employees and is housed in a former Pfizer building in Plymouth Township that's being developed into a life sciences incubator.

Newton said there's still a "huge unmet medical need" because there aren't drugs today that do a good job of raising good cholesterol.

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Later, a panel covered the special problems on growing new companies in tech, the life sciences and energy.

Levi Thompson, co-founder of Ann Arbor's T/J Technologies and Inmatech and professor of chemical and mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, said the basic problem is coming up with "a viable concept that will allow you to do good and make money." Coming up with the right scientific personnel, community networks and financing are also challenges.

And, Thompson said, entrepreneurs should consider asking for funding when they don't really need it -- because it's so hard to get when you do. "It's like that old saying, don't go grocery shopping when you're hungry," he said.

Jeff McDaniel, a 1997 Michigan MBA graduate who is now director of business development at Velocys Inc., a Plain City, Ohio developer of biofuels, said that "what's unique to this sector is the time scale. The rule of thumb is that a new technology in renewable energy takes a decade and $100 million and maybe more." Energy companies also must pay close attention to government policies and regulatory frameworks that can make or break markets.

William Brinkerhoff, COO of Cerenis Therapeutics, a French developer of a new cholesterol drug with an ofice in Ann Arbor, also emphasized community and industry contacts. And he said startup executives need strong communications skills -- because startups feature a fast pace, rapid change, and people with strong wills.

The three panelists agreed one upside of a down economy is tha there's lots of great talent in a variety of industries that's out there sitting on the sidelines.

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The event closed with a talk between Tom Kinnear, executive director of the Zell Lurie Entrpreneurship Institute at UM's Ross School of Business, and folksy billionaire, philanthropist and conservative financier Sam Wyly.

Kinnear guided Wyly through some of the tales in his new book, "1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billioniare."

Wyly grew up in rural Louisiana, son of a smalltown newspaperman, and told how his only goal early in life was beating the next town over in football. When that goal was achieved he set his sights on a state football title, which came his senior year. After that, "there was no market for a 155-pound nose guard, so my (football) career was over." So he decided on Louisiana Tech University, where he studied journalism and accounting, intending to take over the family business.

But at Louisiana Tech, he met the author of his accounting textbook, a professor at the University of Michigan. He came to UM on a scholarship named for that professor, and graduated with an MBA in 1957.

After graduating, he worked for IBM and Honeywell, before coming up with the big idea of his book title: shared computing. Or, as he said, computer services the way they sell real estate -- buy by the acre, sell by the square foot.

He founded University Computing Co. in 1963 on a $600,000 bank loan in the era before venture capital -- and described the hoops he had do jump through to get that loan, including a $250,000 upfront payment from an initial customer, Shell Oil Co., and cheap student labor from another initial customer, Southern Methodist University -- and even a bond bought from a persistent insurance salesman.

Wyly and his brother charles later had numerous entrepreneurial exploits, buying the restaurant chain Bonanza Steakhouse in 1967 and growing it to 600 locations before selling it in 1989,

Later. in 1973, he devided University Computing into four companies, including Datran, which began construction of a nationwide network of microwave towers to transmit data around the country in competition with AT&T. The legal dispute between Wyly and AT&T helped lead to the breakup in AT&T and the telecommunications reovolution.

Wyly also founded Sterling Software, a company set up specifically to buy other software companies, which was sold to Computer Associates in 2000 for $4 billion.

He also bought, built up and sold the arts and crafts chain Michaels, and today is involved in the clean energy provider Green Mountain Energy.

Kinnear noted the recurrent theme in the book is Wyly's battles with "recalcitrant, myopic monopolies in both business and government that didn't see the value Sam sees." Wyly has also donated millions to conservative and Republican causes over the years, according to several press reports. But in March, he told Forbes magazine that the most important issue facing the United States today is being environmentally friendly. (That same magazine estimated his net worth at $1.2 billion.)