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- Summary
Marketing and business development professional working across the US, Asia, LatAm and Europe. Previously raised seed funding and built a software company between the Bay Area and Santiago, Chile. Particular strength in combining growth strategy and product execution with leadership, hard financial skills and cross-cultural communication.
MBA from London Business School, former investment banker on Wall Street, occasional independent consultant on Japanese and Asian markets.
Specialties: Startups and Entrepreneurial Finance, International Business Development, Marketing/Strategy, M&A, Product Development
Experience- Jan 2013 - PresentMarketing Manager, CRM / Gilt Groupe
- Oct 2010 - Dec 2012Founder, CEO / PingPigeon
- Jan 2008 - Jan 2010President / Komada International
- Jul 2009 - Sept 2009Summer Associate / Founders Club
- Mar 2005 - May 2007Analyst / Nomura Securities
- 2003 - 2004Associate / BHG/BVHG
Education-
2008 - 2010London Business School
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1999 - 2003Middlebury College
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2001 - 2002慶応義塾大学
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Posts
Does Authenticity Exist (anymore)?
Came across this great video, which applies not only to our work, but who we are. Today, when so much of our personal and professional lives exist on the foundations of social media and the internet in general, it would do us well to keep de Zengotita’s opinion in mind: Authenticity today consists of “being honest about the process of fabricating who you are.”
“We are who what pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Vonnegut’s observation 50 years ago rings all the more true today, and this sense of responsibility should be something we all consider.- Twitter in the Dark Ages
Back in the Middle Ages, monks laboriously creating illuminated manuscripts would occasionally scribble notes in the margins. This great piece gives a summary, with the image below. It is so striking how similar these notes are to the twitter and Facebook status updates we see every day, 700 or so years later: “I am very cold,” “Give me a drink.” If the ubiquitous “FML” or “best.x.ever.” were in use back then, surely these would have been written in the margins as well. Like us, these monks knew they were “broadcasting” their status, opinions and complaints to an audience. The need for social broadcasting is, apparently, timeless…
- How I finally "got" Twitter
I went to a meetup last week where I met the founders of a startup called Weendy. They pitched it as a “mobile social network for the weather” which I thought was amusing, but they then sold me on the application’s utility as well: most of the current ~1,000 users are surfers. When a surfer gets to the beach, he takes a video of the weather and the waves and uploads it to Weendy so other surfers can see and decide whether to come out that day or not. It’s easy to see this expanding to skiers, skydivers, rock climbers, etc…not to mention weather channel addicts.
My A-ha moment came when we got around to discussing partnerships and integrations. They are in the process of integrating into twitter so that users can publish to twitter through Weendy. The obvious question from my end was: Why not the reverse? Why not pull data on a location’s weather from twitter and integrate that into the informational feed on the Weendy app? Users would get more complete, recently updated data on the weather. A lengthy discussion over cheap beer ensued.
My key realization was the twitter offers utlity in real-time. Of course, I’d read all about this before, but it was not until this conversation that it really hit home. I constantly hear twitter will be huge, and it is clear why: Imagine all the current and future twitter data that already exists for flights, for traffic, for where taxis are concentrated on Saturday night; imagine a customizable mobile dashboard where all of this info is visualized. I would certainly pay for that. The possible uses of twitter data are endless, and, importantly, they are very useful. The twitter of tomorrow will not be for celebrity stalking or talking about breakfast.
However, going on this logic, for most future users the greatest value will be provided via applications built on top of twitter data, not twitter itself. Even at this early stage, I exclusively use tweet deck; the amount of information from following only ~250 people is like drinking from a fire hose when using the twitter client (yes, I know twitter owns tweet deck). Thus from a monetization/business model perspective, I don’t see how advertisements can fit into twitter’s big-picture value proposition. This only leaves two choices for twitter itself: get busy building or buying new ways to consume its own own data or end up charging for data/API calls. Is there any other way?
- There is nothing honorable about failure, unless…
Entrepreneurs, former and future Entrepreneurs, and regurgitators of silicon valley conventional wisdom, please take note: Failure is not an honor unless you:
1) Truly put in 100% effort at building and growing your company, and
2) Have honestly and openly reflected on your failure and subsequently learned from it.
So many standardized sound bytes have become embedded in SF/SV lingo, that we sometimes forget the substance behind those words. “Oh yeah, I failed.” (“No big deal” is implied). Did you produce the blood, sweat and tears needed to make it work, or just throw something against the wall to see if it stuck? Did you focus on building your company, or was it just a hobby? I think the answer is the latter more often than we like to admit. Have you gone through the 5 whys to see what your personal and commercial deficiencies were? Do you have a plan to improve on those? This painful step is all too easy to skip, and if you don’t go through it, you are guaranteed to fail again. While serious effort is a pre-requisite for just about anything, self-critical reflection is key to squeezing honor- and future success- out of failure. - Enterprise Social and Innovation
One takeaway from my organizational behavior classes in B-school was the importance of informal company networks on both corporate culture and innovation. There are probably hundreds of academic articles on this- googling will turn up papers like this one- and corporations understand the importance of these networks. Many larger multinationals have an innovation process or management in place, including emphasizing inter-divisional and international collaboration. Companies also realize personal relationships formed via global rotational programs and corporate social interest groups are vital for innovation.
Working on PingPigeon and looking into potential partnerships brought me in touch with many companies falling under the “Enterprise 2.0” category. While applications such as Yammer, Jive and salesforce chatter help with collaboration and general communication, they have an important secondary consequence: creating and fostering informal networks across the company. Through these tools, If I’m in the New York office, I can easily begin a relationship with someone in London or Tokyo simply by asking questions, posting ideas, responding to others’ posts, etc. Likewise, If I’m in marketing and wondering about an aspect of supply chain operations, I can interact with people from that department; over time, we begin to enjoy collaborating more. Innovation never happens in a vacuum and it is oftentimes through diverse groups repeating these spontaneous, informal interactions that ideas and conceived, refined, and ultimately implemented.
However, looking at the websites of the major E2.0/Enterprise Social players doesn’t tell this story in its entirety. Most benefits described include increased communication between employees- across geographic barriers- and time savings through cutting down on email and searching for information (Yammer, to its credit, does list a couple case studies where innovation and informal network building are mentioned).The benefits mentioned are real, important and some are one part of the innovation process. That said, perhaps the collaboration story isn’t carried fully to its conclusion to include increased innovation as one of many benefits. Importantly, innovation adds to the top-line while most other benefits described are cost-savers. From a sales/marketing perspective, innovation is often the panacea that many C-level executives yearn for when competition or the macro economy turns tough. Given, this is a vitamin, not a pin-killer; increased productivity is the painkiller and is rightfully given prominence. However, while I’m not familiar with the internal sales tactics of any of these players, if these applications were positioned more as greasing the wheels of innovation, and not as simple tools to cut down on email, more customers might be willing to pay a greater amount for them. Just a thought.
- NYC
I’ve been spending the past week in New York, catching up with people, getting re-acquainted with the city and doing some thinking. I’m closing up shop in Santiago later this month and will make a decision to move to either New York or San Francisco. For everything I’ve been working on, the obvious choice is SF, but I just love being in NYC so much.
During dinner last night with an old friend and her boyfriend, an (enterprise) tech executive, we talked a bit about the technology scene here. His perspective was very interesting since he spends lots of time in the Bay Area (Mountain View company HQ) and to him, tech in NYC still seemed “flat.”
This is probably true. There are obviously some visible initiatives trying to change that; as a tech entrepreneur himself, Bloomberg knows the potential that innovation brings to a city. One thing that is not talked about is the amount of tech talent already here, and the reason is that all of that talent is tied up in finance. Hedge funds, prop trading groups, exchanges and even some commercial banking functions require immensely talented IT people to build and maintain their systems. These engineers aren’t just “agile RoR hackers who can pivot and iterate” to build the next facebook for dogs or whatever, but are professionals who have been seriously challenged mathematically, algorithmically, and architecturally while building extremely robust enterprise-class applications that need to scale to epic proportions. And this is pure speculation on my part, but with the shrinking of the finance sector- and those of prime entrepreneurial age especially affected- there may soon be a big talent transfer from closed financial innovation to more open entrepreneurial initiatives here in the future. Again, just an opinion, and there surely are more engineers of this caliber in SV/SF, but perhaps NYC does deserve some more credit.
Then there is just that energy and drive that NYC gives you. Everyone sings about it. Everyone feels it. And I’m sure it is great for potential and current start up founders.
- Silicon Valley’s Innovator’s Dilemma
I’ve repeatedly told people that I would never have gotten this far working on PingPigeon if I hadn’t started the company in the Bay Area. (Specifically, this involved couch surfing for 2 months, and 3 months of moving between apartments in the Mission and Redwood City.) Staying in London, or hanging out longer in Tokyo would have been non-starters. In SF/SV, I met programmers who worked on the product with me, I got feedback on the idea from potential customers and other entrepreneurs, but I think the most important thing I got was the emotional support from an entire entrepreneurial community built over the course of 60 or so years. Talking to people on the entrepreneurial journey provided inspiration, opportunities for commiseration, and most importantly let me put my vision to words which in my mind helps to make them come true. I’m pretty sure Paul Graham wrote about this in one of his essays but I can’t remember which one. I also think there are parallels with the Japanese notion of Kotodama. Like I said, much of this made my success to this point possible.
I do believe there is a downside, though, however small. And this does not relate directly to my own experience, so would love to get feedback. I think the word for what the Bay Area offers is “institutionalized entrepreneurship.” This encompasses attitudes encapsulated in all the usual sound bytes like “failure is accepted as a badge of honor” “working for a startup is not unusual” along with an ecosystem of investors, entrepreneurs, partners, advisors, etc. All this happens in person there, but much of the ecosystem is also diffused online in various blogs, essays, etc. We know all about the good this does, but what, if any, are the negative parts?
One case I want to make is that certain parts of the ecosystem in the Bay Area are falling into traps of conventional wisdom or even dogma. There is more and more an attitude of a “formula” for starting, building and selling a successful business. The lean startup movement is the best example I can think of here. While on the whole I think the Eric Reis Steve Blank methodology is great, I really believe that no system or theory is powerful enough to capture something so dynamic as doing a startup. Even after hundreds of years, economics itself can’t be reasonably predicted or explained. The “data-driven” mentality, popularized by Google, is also starting to become dogmatic.
On the whole things like data-driven-lean-customer-development etc. do work well; they are not easy to execute but they do work. However with this rinse and repeat feeling of security comes complacency. “Have an idea, succeed/fail fast with a local team” is taken as the only way to do things and many will call you crazy if you are taking another path; there is an example [http://www.plurk.com/t/English#hot] of a previous successful startup by another Startup Chile entrepreneur that breaks all those rules (a globally distributed team that has only met in person once, and worked together for a year before runaway success).
All of this reminds me of Clay Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma. The comparison is not perfect, but the Bay Area can be seen as THE established global center of innovation/entrepreneurship and it has developed a clear set of “value networks”, practices and standards it uses to replicate past success. However, there are other models of entrepreneurial ecosystems out there; the dilemma for Silicon Valley is that the success from these other models is so small compared to their own that they don’t merit attention. The ecosystems of China, India, and even what Chile is doing are different in very specific ways from the Bay Area model. In time, these models may grow more effective and eventually take over the Silicon Valley model. There are plenty in the old and new guard of Silicon Valley who think the ecosystem is getting complacent and innovation there is becoming stale.
This is likely not even a problem. But the biggest surprises always spring from the least likely places. Perhaps its time to open a VC firm in Chile? - Running a Global Startup
View Yoshi Komada in a larger mapOne of the great things about working in the Startup Chile acclerator is being surrounded by entrepreneurs from all over the world. We’ve got people from India, the UK, Brasil and elsewhere. All of us are going after different markets and are focusing on different niches; some have all local teams and some have distributed teams. In fact, its like being in business school, but everyone is building a business instead of studying business.
I was talking to a Chilean contact the other day and during the course of our conversation, we kept coming back to the challenge of building a company in Chile primarily for English-speaking markets. Yes, it is hard- but as all of my startups/entreprenurial companies I’ve worked for have been international to some degree, I’m not sure if it is significantly more difficult than a local venture. I can offer a few observations, though.
I solidified the plans for PingPigeon in Tokyo, I started building the company in San Francisco and moved from a proof-of-concept prototype to a beta version with customers down in Santiago. Along the way, I was working with engineers in the UK, Serbia, and Chile + designers in Macedonia and Serbia along with a business intern who went between Vermont and Santiago. What helped me along in this journey?
1) Over-communicate. This is, by far, the most important rule for smoothly working across borders, time zones and cultures. This means being clear-even redundantly/annoyingly clear- in everything that is written and said but also to be consistent in the delivery of the communication. This means no slang, American business-sports metaphors, and no cutting corners in laying out specifications. We were agile about building PingPigeon, but before development started I still wrote a 40 page document explaining the wireframes + the high-level application architecture. Of course things changed and came up during development, but because we had all started off on the same page, things went smoothly.
The consistency of communication was helped by religiously using productivity/communication tools throughout the process. For development we use Pivotal Tracker which is really just about the best tool I’ve come across for dynamic, highly-collaborative project management. Tracker is obviously at its best when it is used for “building things” but I would be curious try it in other contexts- executing M&A deals for example. For other communication and minor projects I used Wedoist, an application being built by another Startup Chile participant. Most importantly, we’ve been disciplined about keeping most of our communication on these tools (not email), which makes the process highly collaborative & deliberately transparent, helping along the communication.
Other communication tidbits: After two mis-understood/unclear messages, always have a quick Skype chat. Always assume it is your fault; if something is not progressing smoothly go back and see how the original communication was conducted and see what can be improved- there will always be something, and this exercise will almost always help the project as a whole, if not the specific off-track task.
2) Be Flexible. There is a tendency among the business press to assume that everyone working globally never sleeps and has a Blackberry glued to their hand. In my experience, the only time this happens if the project degenerates into constantly fighting fires. The more important aspect is to establish a disciplined schedule, creating a flow everyone can get used to. Stand-up calls, daily status postings (WeDoist is great for that) that happen no matter what make life predictable for everyone. BUT, inevitably the need to “be flexible” will come up. Be ready for that.
On a startup level, being flexible involves many other small things like buying one way instead of round-trip air tickets (your dates will change), taking a short-term let instead of signing a lease, and keeping your team as lean as possible to maintain that flexibility.
3) Still talk to your customers. This has probably been the most challenging aspect of doing a global startup. As my main customer is English speaking, getting feedback while in Chile vs SF has been hard. Basically, this means I need to work harder to talk to customers while in the states. Also, talking to anyone through Skype has been surprisingly good at getting qualitative insights. Usability testing has mostly been through my peers here in Chile. Still, this hasn’t been detrimental, but it has taken a good deal of effort.
Startup Chile has great parties as well (again, just like B-school), and as always, I have trouble answering the question “where are you from.” At this point, the fact that I’m not “from” anywhere is almost set in stone, and I’m sure this has helped me work on PingPigeon from different parts of the globe. There is so much opportunity everywhere, and all it takes is a bit more effort to run a global startup. - Feature Wars
Facebook just suggested that I “subscribe to” Mark Zuckerberg. The first reaction I had was “the only reason FB did this is because Google+, twitter and a few others have this kind of functionality.”
I use Facebook in different ways than these other services, and I’m sure there are other people whose use differs greatly from mine (any of you play Farmville?). But adding another feature in the UI mess that is Facebook- just to keep up with the others- does not do anything for me, and there are likely many others who feel the same way.
When you are as big as Facebook, you can do anything you want. But when you start thinking and acting based on this logic, a dangerous complacency may be sneaking in. Just look at MSFT now vs 15 years ago. Will Facebook subscriptions be around in 15 years? Will Facebook itself be around in 15 years?
- SocialStream Investment
Last week, I took a due diligence trip to Vina del Mar with a Chilean investor who was interested in a potential investment in a firm called AltaVoz, a web design and engineering consultancy. AltaVoz had developed several products internally and we wanted to explore the potential of these assets. The majority of our discussion revolved around two products: a web CMS and a social streaming service, which I can best describe as “TiVo for Twitter.” As CMS is just not a good business to be in, we focused the majority of our investigation on the streaming product.
The product is currently being called SocialStream, by AltaVoz. In a nutshell, it offers users the ability to tweet during a live event, and attach a video of the live stream to the tweet; anyone reading that tweet would have the ability to watch the moment of the event referred to by the tweet plus the remaining portion of the event stream.
Obviously, the twitter + video combination has been explored in numerous ways by numerous companies, most notably UStream and Justin.tv. Both are well known and are on their way to discovering sustainable monetization solutions. Both target content creators looking for a way to monetize their content with a Pay-per-view model (a user will pay some fee to watch the live stream). Twitvid and SnappyTV also come to mind. SnappyTV in particular has made inroads with major content networks to help layer social interaction via twitter over their content.
Examining the product, usage cases and monetization were the areas we looked to understand first. Watching TV, conferences, or sporting events would be great foundations for using SocialStream. If I’m at an LA Kings game and want to tweet about a great goal, and want my followers to see it as well, I can use SocialStream (assuming the game is being streamed live over the internet as well). Monetization brainstorming led us to similar conclusions as the existing players, but leaning more towards monetizing from major content creators, not independent artists (i.e., Fox & NBC, not the local garage band).
Monetization is where we saw a major advantage from AltaVoz. For a user tweeting these events, the experience is much the same as existing players. However, from a content creator point of view, the benefits are much greater. First, consider the more specific nature of live events vs. regular programming. Producers of live content have one opportunity to monetize their content: from the time it begins to the time it ends, and many times a viewer won’t watch the entire live event unless he watches either from the beginning or immediately after a very interesting part. First, SocialStream drives more traffic to the streamed event; SnappyTV, by posting a short video clip of the event, provides a similar benefit. However, since followers discovering the stream via SocialStream can watch the entire event from the time of the tweet until the end, the “eyeball opportunity” for content creators (to show ads, charge a fee, etc) becomes much longer than the actual event itself. For example a user tweets a great goal in the first period of a hockey game, and a follower reads that tweet six hours later; long after the game is over, the producer is still monetizing that hockey game since now the follower is watching that stream again.
Ultimately, while the product seemed promising, there were no definitive conclusions on investment. The biggest drawback was the company itself. AltaVoz is very much focused on the consulting business, and company leaders are likely not in the position give SocialStream the focus it needs. Perhaps organizations like Startup Chile and CORFO can play a role in this by finding business-savvy entrepreneurs to take a stake in this idea and run with it. Until that happens, SocialStream may remain an exclusively Chilean phenomenon. Great article. But Gabler should also take into account how academia itself has changed in the past 50 years. Part of the lack of “Big Ideas” has to come from the fact that one can’t survive in the ideas world without an almost depressing amount of specificity in specialization.
- Debt, Federal Investment & Startups
This has been a terrible week for the United States, specifically the US Economy. For the first time in modern history, US debt was downgraded. Earlier, the Dow dropped more then 500 points in one day, continuing a downward trend - officially a correction- of the past couple months. Our political leaders have shown themselves to be inept…And as we stand, unemployment is still hovering above 9% nationally.
I was lucky to have been in business school from Fall 2008 until July 2010. Having been working for a boutique securities house (that subsequently folded while I was in school) I knew that not only my job but my company was at risk. Indeed, it turned out the entire industry was on shaky foundations. The economy has come a long way from that brink in 2008, but this week has reminded us that many important improvements haven’t yet been made, and we are nowhere near where we- and I mean we in the Global sense- need to be.
Friedman brought up an obvious point this weekend- one that Bill Gross has been particularly vocal about- that we are not working on solving the right issues in our economy, political culture, or society and government is doing too little, not too much. “We’ve let our five basic pillars of growth erode since the end of the cold war — education, infrastructure, immigration of high-I.Q. innovators and entrepreneurs, rules to incentivize risk-taking and start-ups, and government-funded research to spur science and technology.” On a more immediate note, Friedman goes on to cite Kenneth Rogoff at Harvard: “the real problem is that the global economy is badly overleveraged, and there is no quick escape without a scheme to transfer wealth from creditors to debtors, either through defaults, financial repression, or inflation.”
I find a link between these two issues: our need to restructure our personal balance sheets can go hand in hand with the need to get the US back on a more competitive innovation-driven economic trajectory. Let me give one example that is near and dear to my heart (and bank account): Student loan debt.
Last year, around this time, student loan debt in the US surpassed credit card debt. The actual figure from a year ago was $829.785 billion, while credit card debt was $3billion less. I’m going to make an argument that we can hasten our deleveraging while spurring job and GDP growth at the same time by selectively forgiving portions of federal student loans.
The proposal: the federal government will forgive all or a portion of the student loans of any individual starting a business, employing more than 3 people and raising more than $50,000 in equity venture capital*.
What will this do in the short-term? First, the program would de-risk the process of starting a technology business for thousands of young entrepreneurs. Coming out of college or graduate school with thousands of dollars of debt puts starting a company out of reach for thousands; the very practical need for an immediate salary to service and pay down that debt is too great. Better yet, it would provide a huge incentive for many with entrepreneurs with a few years of savings behind them to go out and start a company.
Second, the companies started under this program would be of high quality; the private (semi-efficient) markets for venture capital would take care of vetting the promising companies from the mass of potential applicants to this program. The kinds of startups that attract venture capital are ones with the potential to revolutionize entire industries, creating exponential effects on the economy, technology and innovation for years to come. For improving competitiveness as well as advancing the general welfare, these are the kinds of investments the government should be making.
Let’s take Google as an example: had Larry & Sergey started their company under this program, just this one success would have paid for the entire program itself. Suppose that under this program 10% of all student debt holders qualify, go on to do startups, and raise VC; this would equate to a government investment of around $83 billion. Fast forward a few years later, and not only does Google have a market capitalization of $187 Billion, but the ecosystem that google supports is worth a vastly greater amount. Just look at what Android has done for the telecommunications industry.
But of course not every startup is a Google, so here are a couple more benefits of this program. In the short term, this program would create jobs. Over the past 15 years, small businesses have generated over 64% of net new jobs . If the government really wants to make a dent in our high unemployment, this would be a good place to start. Lastly, this would help in de-leveraging part of the population who qualifies; if standards were less stringent that I’ve proposed this would surely have a remarkable effect on raising consumption around the country.
The obvious criticism of this plan is that the debt is just moved from ex-students’ bank accounts to the Federal balance sheet; this is true, but to the extent that innovative companies created by this scheme add to GDP, this situation is likely temporary and minor. Another is the small size of the potential beneficiary pool. My response to that is to say, let’s lower these standards; even if the whole ~$800 billion was absorbed by the government, I’d lean towards this being a net benefit for the economy by removing the debt overhang that keeps some smart & motivated people from innovating.
At the end of the day, the structural problems in our economy require much more than what I’ve described here. And, effectively, the scenario I’ve described amounts to a wealth transfer to debtors, as described by Rogoff (not exactly a default, but debt forgiveness is just the same thing with a nicer name). But I strongly feel it would be a good way to start dealing with some real issues instead of the political bickering we’ve been whitening lately.
*In practice, this would likely involve a slightly complicated structure of the Federal Government purchasing its guaranteed loans from Sallie Mae. - The Startup MBA
I was browsing Facebook last Sunday and realized it has been just about one year since I graduated from London Business School. In October 2010, after a three-month summer vacation I began work on PingPigeon. While this is so far the most rewarding work I have ever done, it has been extremely tough going, especially before getting funded by Startup Chile. In fact, the year since LBS has been one of the toughest of my career to date.
Thinking about how I could have been more efficient, or what I could have done better over my career to lead to this entrepreneurial opportunity was spurred by some other fellow entrepreneurs on the program. There are some teams from other top MBA programs (HBS, Wharton, Anderson) who are spending their summer vacation down here building companies, ostensibly instead of taking a summer internship. It occurred to me this is what I should have done in the summer of 2009.
Seeing these teams made me consider the MBA process in general and how those two years can help in executing a startup. While schools positioning their MBA program as a bridge to entrepreneurship is well established, unfortunately like most MBA-admissions marketing much of what is said is basically fluff such as: “the MBA will teach you to analyze entrepreneurial opportunities,” “you’ll gain the business skill-set needed to succeed,” or “you’ll get the network you need to raise money.” Yes, all of these are true, but what about the nuts and bolts of building a company during B-school? I think one of the reasons there is so much MBA-bashing in Silicon Valley is due to the fact that MBAs and B-schools abstract things too much; sometimes to the point where we ourselves can’t differentiate between concept and reality. Hopefully this post will spur some thoughts on a few more real-world, unconventional ways business school can help you start a company.
1) Take advantage of the time
You have two years to basically work on whatever you want. Yes there is schoolwork, but if you think B-school academics are challenging, odds are you don’t have the intellectual or emotional intelligence required to be an entrepreneur. Start as fast as you can building your ideas, and fail/validate as fast as you can. You’ve got time for several iterations.
Take the time to network the right way. If you are doing a technology startup, it may be challenging to find the core competencies (engineering, design) you need to build a company. There will likely be people in your program with these skills: first, try to convince them to work with you. If this does not work out- likely because they came to B-school in order to be more of a “business guy” instead of an engineer- get them to introduce you to people they used to work with. Go to meetups, get online and contribute to some communities. As you can see, much of the important networking happens off-campus. However, the basic way networking works is that you add value for other people and they reciprocate. How do you add value in this context? You have a unique ability to bridge the business school and outside communities and this position will help immensely with networking.
Don’t network the wrong way. Don’t go to events and networking sessions just because “everyone else is going/making a big deal about it.” Don’t go to too many “exploratory” events far removed from your interests. Focus on quality over quantity (this can be harder than it sounds at B-school).
And use your summer vacation correctly. The line of thinking/indoctrination in B-school goes something like “get an internship in the industry you are interested in and then ‘leverage’ that to get a full-time offer in that industry.” Unfortunately there are several caveats to this which are hard to discover: 1) Unless you do banking or consulting, getting a full-time offer from the same company is often a long and involved process 2) unless you work in both the industry AND the functional area you are interested in, you won’t learn anything that will help you as an entrepreneur. If you want to do a consumer internet startup and you spend your summer working in finance or sales at Google, you will likely learn nothing of value to your goal. If you somehow get to spend the summer as a product manager, that may be a different story. 3) you make a lot of money during the summer internship: only true for banking or consulting
What is the solution? Spend the summer working on your own startup (duh). Many B-schools have programs that help with this; LBS has an “entrepreneurship summer school” which I’ve heard good things about. Even better is something like Startup Chile, where seed funding is part of the package. Actually getting a company off the ground is a much deeper educational experience- in both entrepreneurship and general management- than being a temporary spreadsheet/powerpoint jockey at a well-known firm.
2) Take advantage of the Money
This advice is especially applicable to Americans, but there is likely some insight for other nationalities as well. There is also a bit of a grey area here, so let me make it clear from the beginning that I’m not advocating any specific financial plan, only commenting on the possibilities.
Many students will likely take out loans to finance the MBA. These loans can get quite big- to the tune of over $100,000. B-school tuition is expensive, and depending on location, cost of living can he high as well. However, there is ample opportunity to use a portion of student loans as seed funding for a startup. This is especially applicable in internet businesses where the capital requirements and initial running costs are extremely low.
There are two ways to go about this: borrow the exact amount you need for school only, and then live extremely frugally, or simply borrow enough for school + a bit of seed funding. There is an extreme amount of leeway in budgeting and applying for student loans so either of these scenarios are realistic. Additionally, if you have good credit, interest rates are low and most importantly, repayment terms (in the US) are very generous.
The obvious issue is that you are not officially allowed to do this. Student loans are not supposed to be used to fund activities outside of studying and living while being a student. So while this is an individual decision, if you do some thinking on your own, you will likely see that this is more of a personal ethical issue and not an actual legal risk.
3) Know before you go
So, you have money, you have time, and you have a good platform to access people. What else do you need to start a company? Well, there is the question of the entrepreneurial idea itself and effectively managing yourself during school. I can’t help you with the first part, but let me close with a short list of miscellaneous advice for doing your startup/MBA:
- Unless you are dead set on changing to a full time job in another industry, the importance of the summer internship is drastically overblown.
- There is a lot of “noise” during business school. There is a lot of peer pressure and group-think. Be sure to actively separate the signal from the noise; this will likely be harder to do than you think.
- Grades, reputation, academic honors and such are of no importance, especially if your goal is to do a startup. Many schools don’t even allow you to disclose grades to potential employers. If you are pining after the deans list simply to be on it, you are not an entrepreneur; you are just insecure.
- If you mess up your startup during B-school, you have a built-in exit plan: get a job with the help of career services. So relax, and commit yourself to getting your company off the ground!
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Tweets
- Japan has "opted out of" producing a global elite class http://t.co/cBhhZESK0J
- The US discovering what Argentina already knows: Grass-Fed Beef is better http://t.co/QM3EplAivS
- It’s official: Everyone loves the CMO. But should they? http://t.co/BajP8FTmCT
- Tea, Sugar and Death: Cafe Groups Ponder the End, via @nytimes http://t.co/4Yql55nI6m
- Abenomics for Women Undermined by Men Dominating in Japan http://t.co/mHU5a4SHFh
- Back at NRT http://t.co/fIuRjM49ti
- Just posted a photo http://t.co/xhzwXOsOMf
- I love Vermont http://t.co/u9nmN89cok
- Back at hillcrest http://t.co/gho334RMd0
- Back in the city http://t.co/C59atqlwMa
- @ayumiwalnuts I think you are overdue for a vacation yourself. When are you taking time off??
- This is what I call a layover... http://t.co/BwPUEuJhVR
- First, they gave us targeted ads. Now, data scientists think they can change the world http://t.co/ypCwf02rfh
- New floor move- in dat at Gilt JP http://t.co/O3krsQm8s0
- Seven & I Sees More Than Doubling North America Stores http://t.co/qdUzsWk0Fz
- BOJ Split Highlighted as Central bankers & the market call BS on Abenomics http://t.co/EHeBg9AqW9
- Its official: Krugman is retarded http://t.co/I0L8urBLco
- “It took more than a month for the market to realize the dark side of BOJ policies" http://t.co/ty0I8wzDq2
- Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World http://t.co/2K0Rg3OkjO (via Instapaper)
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Reading
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Companies and locations
- Current Geography
Presently working on activation, retention and monetization at Gilt Japan.
PingPigeon Relationship management application running on the LinkedIn & Facebook platforms. Stay in Touch. Add Value. Strengthen your Network.
Komada International Bespoke management consulting services focusing on the Asia Pacific region.
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