The big theme for today is entrepreneurship because that topic has been on my mind a lot lately. One of the classes I’m taking, “Managing Growing Enterprises”, has had me thinking about an entrepreneurial career since writing my final paper last week and some other events have kept the topic in my head…
Last night, I, along with my entire section of MGE, were invited to the home of our professor for a reception thrown by him and his wife. Professor Ellis is a GSB alum from the Class of 1992 who jumped into entrepreneurship a year out of Bschool and never looked back. I knew that he was a heavy hitter, but didn’t realize how much of one he was until we did a case on his company yesterday in class. He and his business partner bought a small roadside assistance company back in 1994 and, through a series of acquisitons and a change in strategy, turned it into one of the biggest wireless insurance companies in the market. He and his wife were great hosts and it felt great to know that a faculty member cared enough about getting to know his students to invite us into his world like that. I hope to have the chance to return the favor one of these days.
Earlier today, i had coffee with my man Seth, who started off the MBA program with me last year but left back in September to launch his own company, Meebo. Many of you have probably used Meebo, a web-based IM client, by now and the company has grown tremendously over the past 9 months. We spent an hour catching up and it was great to see how well he is doing. I’m still a little shocked that he dropped everything, including the MBA program, to pursue his entrepreneurial dream, but it is one of the most inspiring things I’ve witnessed in a long time. He was giving me all kinds of insights into what it’s like to deal with funders, employees, headhunting firms, and other companies at such a young age and it got me really excited about pursuing that myself one of these days. I’m taking the much longer (read: “safer”) path of working for a few years before making that move, but, with friends like Seth to help me get my mind around it, I’m sure I’ll have a ton of friends to lean on for support once I’m ready to start a company.
Finally, I want to send a HUGE shout out to Professor George Parker for winning this year’s Distinguished Teaching Award, which was announced yesterday at noon. Prof. Parker was my Corporate Finance prof in the Fall and he has, by far, been my favorite professor at the GSB. All of the profs bring their own special “thing” to the classroom, but Prof. Parker is one of the truly great ones here. He took a topic that no one would ever call fun and made each of us enjoy learning about it. Also, he made it approachable to “mere mortals” like me who don’t have a knack for the numbers side of business. He’s been teaching here for going on 40 years and it is exciting to see him rewarded after such a long tenure here. When i was in his class, it became a running joke for most of the quarter that he couldn’t say my name correctly and I’ve been able to develop a pretty good relationship with him since taking his class. he’s definitely one of the profs that I’d like to keep in touch with after my time here is finished. he’s taught so many of the GSB alum heavy hitters that I know he’s got a wealth of wisdom to pass along to a young gun like me
Last night, I, along with my entire section of MGE, were invited to the home of our professor for a reception thrown by him and his wife. Professor Ellis is a GSB alum from the Class of 1992 who jumped into entrepreneurship a year out of Bschool and never looked back. I knew that he was a heavy hitter, but didn’t realize how much of one he was until we did a case on his company yesterday in class. He and his business partner bought a small roadside assistance company back in 1994 and, through a series of acquisitons and a change in strategy, turned it into one of the biggest wireless insurance companies in the market. He and his wife were great hosts and it felt great to know that a faculty member cared enough about getting to know his students to invite us into his world like that. I hope to have the chance to return the favor one of these days.
Earlier today, i had coffee with my man Seth, who started off the MBA program with me last year but left back in September to launch his own company, Meebo. Many of you have probably used Meebo, a web-based IM client, by now and the company has grown tremendously over the past 9 months. We spent an hour catching up and it was great to see how well he is doing. I’m still a little shocked that he dropped everything, including the MBA program, to pursue his entrepreneurial dream, but it is one of the most inspiring things I’ve witnessed in a long time. He was giving me all kinds of insights into what it’s like to deal with funders, employees, headhunting firms, and other companies at such a young age and it got me really excited about pursuing that myself one of these days. I’m taking the much longer (read: “safer”) path of working for a few years before making that move, but, with friends like Seth to help me get my mind around it, I’m sure I’ll have a ton of friends to lean on for support once I’m ready to start a company.
Finally, I want to send a HUGE shout out to Professor George Parker for winning this year’s Distinguished Teaching Award, which was announced yesterday at noon. Prof. Parker was my Corporate Finance prof in the Fall and he has, by far, been my favorite professor at the GSB. All of the profs bring their own special “thing” to the classroom, but Prof. Parker is one of the truly great ones here. He took a topic that no one would ever call fun and made each of us enjoy learning about it. Also, he made it approachable to “mere mortals” like me who don’t have a knack for the numbers side of business. He’s been teaching here for going on 40 years and it is exciting to see him rewarded after such a long tenure here. When i was in his class, it became a running joke for most of the quarter that he couldn’t say my name correctly and I’ve been able to develop a pretty good relationship with him since taking his class. he’s definitely one of the profs that I’d like to keep in touch with after my time here is finished. he’s taught so many of the GSB alum heavy hitters that I know he’s got a wealth of wisdom to pass along to a young gun like me
here is a comment that my boss told me when I said, Im off to do my mba!
“if you wanted to start your own company, you would have already done that/would be working on that! you dont need an mba to get that spirit of entreprenuership in you”
ofcourse im doing an mba from a general management perspective of running a large corporation.
do you think an mba helps you build that spirit from scratch or reignites a passion buried inside, under a layer of “safety issues”?
Hmmmmm…good question, Ash. I don’t know if an MBA would help you build the entrepreneurial spirit from scratch because there is so much in Bschool that would lead a person toward a regular job. I do believe that business school has a way of helping you uncover the entrepreneurial spirit that you’ve got buried deep within you though. A lot of people here had faint thoughts of starting companies when they got here but were still all set to go into the working world. Now, after having been here for 6 quarters and being around classmates and faculty members who’ve started their own companies, that faint thought of entrepreneurship turned into a plan for the future. A lot of people look at business school as a chance to learn a lot about business. i prefer to see it as a chance to challenge yourself and open your mind to a set of possibilities that you would have never considered before.
haha…couldn’t resist responding to ash’s question. the gsb for me definitely lead me toward entrepreneurship. 1. it got me out to california, an environment in which you see other people doing it and figure out that you’re not that different from them, so you can do it too. 2. bschool’s a great time to reflect. you can look back at the jobs you’ve done and ask what parts you really liked and what you didn’t. 3. you get to do a summer internship in the field you thought you’d love (other than entrepreneurship), only to find out that it just didn’t cut it next to what your real passion is.
so the net for me is that stanford definitely played a key role in getting me to go the entrepreneurial path. i wouldn’t revisit the decision to go there for a heartbeat.
seth