Creating 'The Netflix Of Baby Clothes'

Our biggest challenge thus far has been running our business while balancing the commitments of my wife’s job and my classes and extra- and co-curricular activities at HBS. It is easy to be so excited about working on your business that you de-prioritize your class or work. While I am enrolled full time in business school, my wife works full time; that is a trap that we have worked very hard to stay out of so that I am mindful to excel at both.

Another challenge of being a married couple who runs a business together is making sure that we set aside time for “us” that does not involve the business. We’ve had to force ourselves to not talk about our company while taking an evening or weekend off. We are fortunate to have a strong friendship component to our marriage that has allowed us to be able to do a good job of that.

Loans are an issue of concern for most would-be MBA entrepreneurs. To be honest, I think that people often over estimate the impact of their loans without thinking critically about what is really in front of them. My advice would be to look at your monthly obligation, when it starts and what salary could you realistically live on and also manage paying those loans.

Funding is also a factor. If you get a round of VC funding, investors tend to be very sensitive to the fact that they don’t want their entrepreneurs starving—especially for the first couple of years, which can be critical to the foundation of the company’s success. As the entrepreneur, however, you need to be able to deal with delayed gratification for several years. If you do things right, you’ll be glad you did in the end.

Your most valuable resource is not money anyway-it’s your time. If you can create a situation that allows you to make the most of the few years you have after school to cut your teeth on business ownership and learn as much as you can, THAT is the best use of your most precious resource.

As a part of the Rock Accelerator, you get access to several dedicated mentors from the vast Harvard community. This includes VC firms, serial entrepreneurs and other startup founders among others. While your official time under their tutelage is the 10 weeks that you are in the program, the actual mentor/mentee relationships often last much longer than that. Our mentors have included a serial entrepreneur, and venture capitalists from Bain Capital Ventures and Polaris Capital Ventures.

HBS also has an Entrepreneur-in-Residence program where Harvard alums who have built successful companies hold office hours on campus. The early feedback that we received as a result of the program has been critical to the upward trend of our growth trajectory thus far.

Harvard’s new FIELD program is an entrepreneurial experience that all first year MBA students are exposed to. We were put on a team of our peers and given seed money to start a business. FIELD was great experience for me because it was one of the first times that I started a company and brought it from concept to transaction. It ended up not working out, but just getting a taste of the process was enough to help me see that entrepreneurship was definitely for me.

My biggest lesson has been that starting a company can actually take much less (in terms of actual resources and knowhow) than one might think. In the beginning, you can do a lot with a few thousand dollars if you know what to do with it. With that amount, you can get a website up and running, get some traffic from Google and even start serving customers. Few people realize just how much that even a modest amount of money can be leveraged to create value for a skilled entrepreneur.

My advice to the budding entrepreneurs who will come behind me and Teva is to GO FOR IT. Set aside a small amount of money and just start building something; if you are (or will be) an MBA student, definitely make good use of the resources on your campus. Connect with other entrepreneurially-minded people within your business school’s community.

During my first semester, I got with a group of students from HBS and MIT who went out once per week, had a beer and talked about startup ideas. That simple interaction with like-minded individuals helped me pick up ideas, learn what markets were interesting and ponder where and how I might start a company within that competitive landscape. Just like in life, your network is everything in entrepreneurship. The people who you hang around will significantly impact your future.

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