My Story: Founding A Startup At Oxford

Said has four terms. At the end of the second term, there is a mandatory entrepreneurship project that lasts two weeks. You basically have one week to come up with an idea, then you go on break, and the second week you have to build a minimum viable product, which you present for a grade. Oxford brought in people from different accelerators and taught us lean startup methodology.

You generally have a lot of courses at once, so you don’t have time to immerse yourself fully in one course. But this course is after second-term exams, and you’re working on it full time.

Oxford also has pitch events, a co-working space, a seed fund, and a digital marketing class that I found very useful. During the pitching events, they bring investors to Oxford, and you have to submit your startup idea for consideration. If it’s selected, you present it in front of a panel of investors. I did that, and it proved to me that there was investor interest in Wizit from day one, when it was really in the proof-of-concept stage.

They also have Silicon Valley Comes To Oxford, where senior people from Silicon Valley visit campus and hold workshops and different activities. There’s also this amazing course, Strategy & Innovation, taught by ex-Stanford Professor Marc Ventresca and former venture capitalist Tippo Felin. That really changed my thinking about innovation.

The main entrepreneurship competition is called Venture Capital International Competition, it brings together students from all over the world to compete in the U.S. Oxford has the biggest qualifying contest for that – we had 70 teams from across the university that participated, and only one got chosen to go. The university basically brings in startups from around the U.K., and students are judged on their ability to select the best startups for investment – it’s learning about startups from the other side.

In the final quarter, all students are required to complete a strategic consulting project. They now permit you to do it on businesses you’ve created, and you get the support of an advisor. I decided to spend mine working on Wizit. I’m also doing a summer project with Google in San Francisco. I plan to move out there after I finish my degree in September.

At the outset, I had no intention of moving to the U.S. That’s the funny thing about business school: You have all these thoughts before coming in, but when you leave, you have very different ideas.

Wizit is already generating revenue, so we’ve decided to bootstrap instead of accepting investment. But if you go that route, you can’t pay people’s salaries, so I’m working on it only part-time for now. I decided not to go back into consulting because there’s not enough space and time for me to work on my startup.

I knew I wanted to go the tech route. I talked to big companies and small startups. I went to a few recruiting events, and I interviewed and got offers from several big tech firms. But I found out that I was very passionate about my idea – more than I was about other people’s startups. It’s not that I think my ideas are better than anyone else’s, but there’s just a drive behind working on something that you nurtured from the beginning.

The most challenging aspect of starting a business in business school is balancing your time. It’s answering the question: What do I sacrifice for what? When I started, the director of the MBA program, Stephan Chambers, told us that the Oxford experience is doubled – you’re integrating with university students and MBAs on top of class work and searching for a job – so something has to go. It was a constant sacrifice: There’s an interesting speaker, however, I need to go to this course because that’s more suitable for what I want to do. Even in things like deciding between a full-time job, or going back to BCG, or doing the startup part-time, or seeking investment and doing the startup full-time.

The diversity of people at Oxford surprised me the most. Some of my favorite mentors in life went to INSEAD, but I knew there would be a lot of students there with my exact background – a working professional who’s lived in more than one country and speaks several languages. At Oxford, I was in the minority, and I’d say I learned the most from interacting with people from completely different backgrounds, who are all doing amazing things.

Overall, I think the MBA was worth it. I don’t know if I would be where I am today without it. There’s this osmosis that happens with ideas and the people you interact with. However, there’s a big “but” there. I know that as a result of the MBA, I need a job now because I need to pay back my loans, so there is that balance.

What I would say to other people interested in entrepreneurship is that there are great MBA programs out there that can help you accelerate and build an idea and give you a supportive network. However, you have to understand that unless you’re going into a multimillion-dollar idea straight away, you’re not going to go back to your previous salary. The money investors offer is quite tight, and the measure of your success is how much you can stretch that money. I couldn’t take my previous salary at BCG while bootstrapping.

I would have chosen the MBA again. Coming from a consulting background, you do a generalist job, and an MBA is a generalist degree. So people often ask, ‘What was the value for you? Didn’t you get a lot of those things in consulting?’ But the degree is larger than the sum of its parts. I met astounding people. It changed my thinking in terms of innovation, and I had interesting classes and conversations. I don’t know if I would have had the time or space to pursue my startup if I was still in consulting.

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