The Startup MBA In The Startup Nation

ROUGHLY 40% OF THE STUDENTS GO ON TO ONE OF MORE THAN 100 PARTNER SCHOOLS

A third group of students is composed of entrepreneurs who are at another stage of development. “They may have capital or revenue, even manufacturing and distribution capability,” says Broudo-Mitts. “In those businesses, students will form teams around the entrepreneur and the team members will sometimes gain equity in the company or become partners after they graduate. We have quite a few success stories coming out of that.” She cites one entrepreneur who is working on a health care startup that has a solution for the regeneration of brain tissue for someone who has suffered a head injury or another who has raised $3.5 million for artificial intelligence, solar-powered solutions.

There’s another unusual twist to the program as well. Roughly 40% of the students don’t complete the program in August. Instead, they go on to one of more than 100 partner schools for a final semester to gain a deeper understanding of a specific field of interest. “If they are studying robotic engineering, they will study in Germany or Japan,” explains Broudo-Mitts. “If they are interested in building a fashion tech company, they will go to Italy. If they are interested in food and hospitality, they will go to the States or France. It is meant to add specific content knowledge to the core of the MBA program in Tel Aviv. The experiential part is testing knowledge in the real world.”

For 13 years until 2016, Broudo-Mitts built and led the experiential education practicum in entrepreneurship at The Wharton School. She is a Wharton MBA who has a Ph.D. in anthropology and had run an early-stage venture fund in Philadelphia when she began her involvement with Wharton in 2003. Born in New York City, her move to Tel Aviv three years ago was inspired by a desire to be where the action was. “When entrepreneurship became something that everybody wanted to do and everybody believed they had a lot of answers to, the fun was gone,” she says. “So I thought where’s the fun still alive? Where is the dare still there? Where are the possibilities that people are excited about? Where is the cutting edge? And it was either San Francisco or Tel Aviv.”

‘IT’S AN OPTIMISTIC CULTURE AND YOU REALLY FEEL THAT OPTIMISM IN THE RESILIENCE OF THE PEOPLE’

Her grandparents had made the city their home, so she decided to pack up and leave for Tel Aviv. “It’s an optimistic culture and you really feel that optimism in the resilIence of everybody here,” she says. “At Tel Aviv, I had the amazing good fortune of coming into a program that had been established eight years earlier so I could build on a foundation that had already been laid but was still young enough, agile enough and forward-looking enough to have a lot of upside. It was really the perfect time.”

Founded in 2009 by the late finance professor Simon Benninga, the global MBA had already gained a reputation as an innovation leader. It helps that it is part of Tel Aviv University, which makes Pitchbook’s top ten universities for venture-back entrepreneurs. In fact, Tel Aviv is the only non-U.S. university to make the top ten which includes Stanford, Berkeley and MIT. Broudo-Mitts arrived to head the program two years ago with plenty of new ideas. Among other things, she has made the curriculum more rigorous, transitioned the core courses to be taught through case-based learning, added a number of courses to round out the entrepreneurship focus, upped the opportunities for action-based learning, and put more focus on recruiting the best possible students. Last year, an anonymous donor contributed a gift to fund scholarships for the $41,500 program that will help attract even more talent. Next year, she intends to focus on adding a fellowship at the program’s start so students are paired with an immersive experience in the field of their choice.

The program is demanding and fast-paced, just like the life of an entrepreneur. “The modules allow us to deliver highly concentrated content very quickly,” says Broudo-Mitts. “Students will actually study all day long, from 8 a.m. to 8 or 9 at night.” Roughly have of the coursework is the required core, with the remaining half devoted to electives largely in the field of either innovation or entrepreneurship, with an emphasis on experiential learning.

‘THEY ARE THE DOG, WE ARE THE TAIL’

As someone who has taught entrepreneurship for 15 years, she strongly believes that substantive knowledge or experience in a field is crucial for MBAs to launch more sophisticated and complex businesses. Among other things, she actively recruits students with advanced degrees in neuroscience, computer science, and engineering and thrown them into MBA classes. The focus, she says, is not on an e-commerce or application startup but rather interdisciplinary, highly complex ventures that take a long time to bring about and a lot of money.”Content leads and business is a technocratic tool that is the paintbrush of the 21st Century,” she says. “I treat people who come from other fields with great respect. They are the dog, and we are the tail. I really appreciate content-based knowledge. We build teams around student ventures and help bring them to life.”

Ultimately, she believes, students leave the school having gained strong bonds with each other and the self-confidence to go out into the world and accomplish something meaningful. “There are incredible levels of cooperation and camaraderie in the program. It is a tech-savvy country, but this is not New York, Hong Kong or London. What people have here is each other and it rolls over into the ethos of the class. They talk, they study and work together, and they connect. They gain a sense of confidence that they can go out into the world and do whatever they want. We teach them that it’s a mess out there. We don’t tell them they are so special. Building new things is messy and most of the time, it doesn’t work. So we teach them to figure out how to solve that problem. It gives them a certain amount of confidence, residency, and chutzpah.”

The program itself is an entrepreneurial as its students and curriculum. She confesses to innovative tinkering with the program based on student feedback and outcomes. And her goal for Sofaer is as heady as any entrepreneur looking into the future. “When we want to make a change, we make it,” she says. We are aiming to become one of the world’s top schools in entrepreneurship,” she says flatly. “We understand the field is changing and those changes provide an opportunity for a reset of what relevance looks like. We think we are going to help set the bar, and we take that opportunity really seriously.”

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