Against The Advice Of Others, A Child Of Silicon Valley Goes For An MBA

A Lauder Program classroom

HE HAS COME TO SEE THE VALLEY’S MONO-CULTURE IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT

He joined a five-person student team to compete at Tesla’s first-ever case competition. After pitching a smart AI product designed to maximize driver safety, his team won first place. As part of the Lauder program, he spent two months in East and Southeast Asia where he found himself immersed in a conversation with the former Prime Minister of Australia and debating security policy with members of the new South Korean administration.

If anything, he has come to see the valley’s mono-culture in a different light. He has found a group of passionate people interested in technology and how to think about it on a global stage. “We talk about everything from patent law in the Asia Pacific to how technology will impact Chinese society.”

He has also been engaging with a group of highly impressive undergraduates who think very differently than his fellow millennials. Xu has recently been selected as a new partner at the Dorm Room Fund, a $1 million student-run venture capital fund backed by First Round Capital that invests in student-founded startups. Dorm Room Fund has invested in 150 companies in the last five years that have attracted $300 million in follow on capital.

‘VALUE IN BEING PLUGGED INTO THE UNDERGRADUATE SCENE AT PENN’

“There is so much value to being plugged into the undergraduate scene and their networks. They think and consume things in a fundamentally different way. There are phenomenal engineers going to undergrad here. We are talking future Elon Musk-level talent. I might have never gotten that in the valley.”

The experience of being a an MBA partner in the Dorm Fund also may very well help Xu transition into the venture capital field. “Business school is pretty solid for helping a career pivot,” he reasons, “and for me venture capital  is an area I always wanted to explore. If I wanted to continue to work in operations on country launches, I feel pretty confident I could return to that world. But if I want to be a venture capitalist, business school can help me make that transition. I was very intentional about coming to the east coast for school to understand the VC culture in New York.”

Xu will graduate in 2019 and will have no regrets about his decision to leave the Bay Area and get his MBA. “When I come back to Silicon Valley, I think I will be better off for having this global perspective and for scratching my intellectual curiosity.”

Shawn Xu originally wrote about his experiences for Medium.

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