Columbia Flexing Entrepreneurial Power

Columbia University. Ethan Baron photo

P&Q: And since taking over the Lang Center a few years ago, what are some of the accomplishments you are proudest of?

Ponzo: At a macro level, putting Columbia Business School — rightfully so — on the map as a destination for entrepreneurship. Again, for 20 years, we’ve had entrepreneurship curriculum. We’ve had a center, we’ve had some programming, I just don’t know that the story was ever really stitched together and told in a holistic way and I think that’s something that we’ve done over the past three years — to the point that when people talk about entrepreneurship and business school, Columbia Business School is part of that conversation. They know the success stories of our alums and they know we have people in venture capital. We’ve changed the perception a little bit. We will always have an amazing finance and consulting pathway, but I think we’ve expanded it to also include entrepreneurship. That’s something that, collectively, we’re all proud of.

On the back of that, we’ve built an amazing online community. We built an amazing off-line community — mostly in New York City — but again, that’s something we’re looking to now expand to the West Coast. We’ve expanded entrepreneurship beyond just the Lang Center at the Columbia Business School as well. It’s permeated the rest of the school. The career management center is now thinking about entrepreneurship as a career path. Again, not that they weren’t in the past, but it’s more embedded in their DNA, placing students at startups. We launched a startup networking night a couple years ago where we bring in 20 or 30 startups from New York City and 100 or so MBAs and we don’t charge for it, but there’s a cap for registration and that closes in about an hour. That’s run with the career management center and is a way to get students connected to startups that are going to be hiring.

It’s also working with the admissions office and getting a rubric for entrepreneurs and not using a banking rubric for an entrepreneur. The successful entrepreneur might have more success outside of the classroom than inside the classroom. And maybe there is a layer you can peel back if somebody doesn’t have the best GPA or GMAT, but you can tell by just digging a little deeper that they are going to be an amazing entrepreneur.

Even just what we did out here this week, it was a team effort across a number of departments. It was a very well-organized series of meetings and events. Another piece of that is getting more faculty involved in entrepreneurship. We expanded the definition of entrepreneurship to be more than just starting a business. We have that framework: think, start, scale, and invest. And what that’s allowed us to do is not just bring more alumni into the fold, but it’s also allowed us to bring more faculty into the picture. There is more faculty than ever before teaching entrepreneurship classes at Columbia Business School. There is more faculty than ever doing research on the topic. We introduced a grant for Ph.D. students doing research in entrepreneurship where we award them a grant. So we’re building a pipeline of research at the Ph.D. level that’s manifesting at the faculty level as well.

What I didn’t know as a business student — and maybe other people realized it, but I didn’t know it — is that faculty research is a big part of the school’s culture. And to have faculty doing research in entrepreneurship is a really important pillar if you want to embed entrepreneurship into the culture of the school.

P&Q: You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that both the media and business schools don’t do a good enough job in revealing or preparing students and readers for the “darker” side of entrepreneurship — that is, that most startups fail. What are you all doing to embed that in what you’re doing at Columbia Business School?

Ponzo: We’ve introduced quite a bit of experiential learning in the entrepreneurship program over the past few years. The reason for that is that you don’t see a lot in the media — it’s there, but it’s not the celebrated stories — about the people who fail or the companies that go sideways for ten years and the founder is paying his or herself half of the market-rate salary and ten years after launching there is no liquidity, so what do you do?

The other side of the same coin is that those cherry-picked success stories lead people and students — you know, business school students who are younger and don’t have 20 years of experience — to believe that it’s a path to quick riches or it’s an easy thing to do or that what someone needs to do is find an engineer, build themselves an app, and make a lot of money. That’s not the case. Anybody who has done it — no matter how successful they were or are — will tell you that it’s really hard. It’s difficult, chaotic, taxing. There are a lot of tradeoffs and sometimes those tradeoffs are your family or health.

So what we’ve introduced are a number of different programs that expose students — while they’re still in business school — to the realities of entrepreneurship. Yes, we bring in speakers and panelists and that’s nothing new, especially focusing on some people that have failed or telling the students what they won’t read about in the newspapers. But, at the Lang Center, we look at it as a win not only if someone starts a business or raises money or goes to work at a startup, but also if the student at Columbia Business School realizes through the programs we have in place or people we bring in that entrepreneurship might not be for them. Or isn’t for them, at least at this point in time, and they can still go and take that job at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs so they can make the right choice about their career while they’re still in business school and still have that option. As opposed to us not showing them the truths of entrepreneurship and them learning that the hard way after they graduate. We try to expose them to that in a low-risk environment. More than half the people who go through those programs come out and say, wow, entrepreneurship is not for me. I’m not going to go work at a Series A company. I’m not going to go work at a Series B company. I’m going to go work at a big company.

One of the biggest value propositions of business school is the ability to go change careers, and we’re not doing our job as educators if we’re not exposing them to the truths of entrepreneurship.

The other piece — and this is through personal experience starting in financial services and then going to a startup — I think if you’re coming from a bigger-company experience where things are hierarchical, and you go to work at a startup, you’re trained to do what you’re told, not take crazy risks, and if you see something that’s not working you assume “Smarter people than me or people with more experience than me have designed this and it’s just the way it works.” We really want to teach our students that if they are going to go work at a startup, they have to drive the change. If you see the house is on fire, don’t assume that’s the plan. Take charge. Leadership is one of the most important skills you can have at a startup. Because you are going to see things that are wrong. And whether they are wrong from an operational standpoint or they’re wrong from a cultural standpoint, you can’t assume somebody else is going to fix it. You have to be the one to do it. Teaching our students that is very important because those are things that don’t pop up in the media or elsewhere.

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