My Story: From A Dot-Com Bust To Harvard

There are professors here who are really excited to help facilitate what we’re interested in. In my first week on campus, a professor who studies startups and teaches “Launching Technology Ventures”—Tom Eisenmann–read my Twitter feed and reached out and contacted me.  ‘What you’ve been writing about on Twitter sounds interesting,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you stop by my office for a talk?’ This was just a week into school. To have a professor reach out to you as a student, and not even one who taught my section, that’s one of those very salient examples of the quality and the engagement of the faculty here.

By the time I actually went to see Tom, I had already heard from two or three other students who also knew him. By the time I went in, I had put together some thoughts of what I was looking for as a student. We were looking for things individually but we were also looking for a community and we didn’t have to get anyone’s permission to build that community. As soon as we realized that, we started having events and meetings as the Startup Tribe.

The students in Startup Tribe are very much planning on launching companies in school, as soon as they graduate or after they graduate. A number of us aren’t on campus for interviewing. We are a support group for each other. We sought each other out and realized that many of us if not most of us are not doing traditional campus recruiting. That was a pain point we filled.

I want to see more students come to HBS because they believe it’s a place where they can either become or continue to improve as entrepreneurs. We have a two- plus-two student (one admitted on a two-year deferral while still an undergrad) who hasn’t even started who has joined us. This is her area of interest and she is hitting the ground running. She is starting in the fall. And we have someone who took a leave of absence from the school. We have people who drop in from MIT, from the Harvard master’s program in computer sciences. We have faculty who would consider themselves active in the tribe. And we have recent alumni who view this as part of their identity.

What ultimately matters is the quality of the startups out of Harvard, not necessarily the quantity. Plenty of people start things and they don’t work out. That’s not good for anybody. We are going to see people drawn to HBS because of the entrepreneurial momentum and the entrepreneurial activities among the student body.

How much of the learning is applicable to an entrepreneur in the first semester? Plenty of the cases are social enterprise cases where the goal is doing something other than driving earnings per share. The reason that’s relevant is that in a startup your milestone isn’t earnings per share, but it’s to launch a product or to drive adoption. A venture capital firm might say we’re giving you $5 million, but you get the first million after you get the first 400,000 users, which is not tied to earnings. Those cases are interesting because they help you to focus on objectives other than revenue.

The management cases have been incredibly helpful because they deal with sticky situations, or difficult personalities or underlying beliefs that need to be unpacked. When you are dealing with a small group of people that is under resourced and over stressed, you need to be able to understand where people are coming from especially when you have to depend on each other so much. From my perspective one of the biggest benefits of the first year learning has been the structure of learning in the classroom: to be concise, to anticipate how others will react to your comments, learning how to sway a conversation when you don’t have influence. These are all things that are relevant to startups. That is a critical part of the learning in the first semester.

I don’t think that me having the formal knowledge that goes with an MBA would have necessarily kept happier.com live were everything else the same. However, the exposure to successful entrepreneurs, lifelong mentorship opportunities and access to capital networks would have radically impacted my decisions and experience with happier.com, if I had an HBS MBA when we got things started.  My team and I certainly would have made some different decisions, especially around our capital structure and “runway” (amount of money in-hand and the number of months’ burn rate it would cover).  But, that’s all behind me now.  I feel unbelievably lucky to have been exposed to so many ups, and downs, early on in my career and to have worked with such great people.  And by starting business school within 8 months of the company collapse, I was afforded a rare, and valuable, opportunity to reflect on what happened in a supportive and well-resourced learning environment.  I’m thrilled this semester to be taking a class called “The Entrepreneurial Manager”!