The Most Disruptive MBA Startups Of 2022

RITES OF PASSAGE TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Where do these MBA founders come up with their ideas? Same as everyone else: daily experience – and the frustrations and hopes that come with it. For Janice Tam, it started with a new hobby born out of pandemic isolation. She picked up sewing and alterations, quickly learning that clothing isn’t designed for specific body types, including petites. Soon enough, she found a partner who shared her hobby, a former Apple sensing technologist, Together , they vowed to create custom dresses using a mobile device to conduct body scans. The result was TrueToForm.

“As we began talking to apparel designers, pattern makers, and brands, we saw that the fashion industry was undergoing a massive digital transformation in the wake of the pandemic,” explains the University of Chicago grad. “Seeing that the future of fashion was digital, we recognized that our technology could enable a much more powerful solution than the physical dress form. This inspired us with the vision of what TrueToForm is today – a 3D avatar solution that enables designers to construct and fit garments using a fully virtual representation of the body.”

Elizabeth Blankenship endured a baptism by fire – almost literally – on her way to becoming an entrepreneur. A fashion designer and brand developer, Blankenship was pulled out of a Los Angeles dye house after a chemical spill – one so toxic that it required a Hazmat suit to re-enter. For her, the event was a “wake-up call” on textile waste. The event was a catalyst to launching By Eilly at the University of Virginia’s Darden School – a venture that uses leftover fabrics from luxury brands to make clothing.

“We just surpassed 180 yards of fabric saved from landfills this year which, by our best calculations, stopped ~4,203 pounds of carbon from entering the atmosphere,” Blankenship tells P&Q. Those tangible environmental metrics are what excites me and keeps me going, way more so than any MRR {Monthly Recurring Revenue] or ARR [Annual Recurring Revenue] figures.”

BUILDING TEAMS AND MAKING MONEY

Bryan Dinner’s startup – Clarifi – is an expression of his personal struggles. Growing up, he was diagnosed with ADHD, which required personal coaching. When COVID hit and Dinner began studying from home, he fell back into his unproductive ways. At the same time, his situation sparked an idea, which the Wharton School grad describes as “a distraction-free digital workspace with automated coaching tools.”

“As a first year in the JD/MBA program, the pandemic caused my productivity to nose-dive when all of my work moved online to my distraction-filled computer, Dinner admits. “I reached out to Bradley, a friend from college, to build a solution for me that would digitize my coping strategies and make digital school work easier. When Bradley’s digital attention coach helped me through Penn’s difficult JD/MBA program, it was clear that we had software that could help more students, like my teenage self, who have had so much of their schoolwork moved online.”

Not surprisingly, this year’s class has racked up a variety of achievements in business school. Rob Miller, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School, takes pride in successfully piloting his ByMe grab-and-go rice bowls – beating sales targets on a lean budget in the process. Harvard’s Hue has set up partnerships with two of the biggest names in beauty: Credo Beauty and Lawless Beauty. And MIT Sloan’s Multitude Insights may have overcome the biggest hurdle to starting a business: hiring a talented and reliable team.

“My co-founder and I spent a lot of time finding engineers who had the right balance of engineer skills, mission orientation, and dedication to the product,” explains Matthew White, whose venture provides a data-sharing tool to law enforcement. “Once the team was in place, we worked extremely hard alongside our police partners, testing which capabilities and features needed to be in place for BLTN to “just work.” We’ve learned a lot along the way (pivots, employee movements, etc.), but I feel like our team has done an amazing job during this process.”

Still, it never hurts to hear positive feedback. Shanna Traphoner-Liu co-founded bekome to support individuals suffering from anxiety. Supplying an integrative mix of coaching, health regimens, education, and peer support, Traphoner-Liu has heard clients tell her that bekome has helped them “finally know what ‘better’ feels like.” As affirming as such statements may feel to founders, Emily Smith has enjoyed the ultimate validation in 2022.

“NUFYX® is a profitable startup that has surpassed $500,000 in gross revenue without raising any outside capital,” says the graduate of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. “It has become the #1 best-selling protein powder at Erewhon Market, the nation’s most premium grocery chain, and will be distributed nationwide in 2023 with UNFI, the largest natural foods distributor in North America owned by Amazon.”

SUPPORT FROM THEIR BUSINESS SCHOOLS

An entrepreneurial mindset may be hard-wired at birth, but honing entrepreneurial skills require intensive training. That’s exactly what Mejoy Lawson got at the University of Michigan’s Ross School. That started at the Zell Lurie Institute, which provided Lawson with deep resources, ongoing coaching, and hands-on programming that helped him launch Comme Homme, a platform catering to bald men. Lawson, along with his partner Kene Onuorah, also competed in the Michigan Business Challenge. Not only did the competition force him to take a deep dive into their proposition, it also yielded over $100,000 in prize money to nourish their venture. Lawson even took a spin on the other side of the table, serving as managing director of the Zell Lurie Commercialization Fund.

“My MBA experience at Michigan Ross and U-M provided me with the leadership and organizational skills needed to succeed through coursework and experiential learning opportunities,” Lawson says. “Also, it provided resources to help build, shape and structure the idea of Comme Homme into a fully functioning and scalable business venture.”

Janice Tam was equally bullish about her time at the University of Chicago’s Booth School. The TrueToForm founder’s entrepreneurial journey began even before classes started. She took advantage of Booth’s Startup Summer Internship program, where she mastered product design and agile development at a SaaS startup. This experience led her to accept a venture capital internship, where she worked lead diligence on two deals. On campus, Tan completed a variety of startup-themed courses, such as Entrepreneurial Selling and New Venture Strategy, to pave the way for launching for venture. And that doesn’t count the lavish resources available through Booth’s acclaimed Polsky Center.

“I worked closely with the Innovation Clinic to build out my equity incentive plan and with the Corporate Lab Clinic to refine our privacy policies and data protection strategy,” Tan reminisces. “I leveraged the Polsky I-Corps program to accelerate our customer discovery efforts and launched our beta while participating in the Polsky Build Accelerator. We used the accelerator Demo Day to kick off our first fundraising round and successfully closed $260,000 in external capital from industry veterans in fashion and entertainment.”

UCLA’s Anderson School even went above and beyond for Emily Smith. Not only did the Anderson Accelerator team sharpen her pitch deck, but help her land a spot on Rob Dyrdek‘s podcast. The school’s alumni and friends were equally happy to help Smith.

“Someone with five years of nationwide food sales was one Slack message away from an hour walk-and-coffee chat along Ocean Avenue – being in such close proximity to a diverse pool of knowledge was an invaluable asset.”

OPENNESS SAVES STARTUP

While entrepreneurs are action-oriented, they gained plenty from MBA coursework. In her Entrepreneurial Thinking course at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School, Elena Nikvashvili was exposed to what makes founders tick – and how she could develop the grit needed to bring Future Farmers to life.

“The biggest lesson I learned was that entrepreneurs are not risk-takers, but instead smart about risk-taking. Whenever anyone thinks of an entrepreneur, they think of a person who was tired at their corporate job, quit, and started their own company. This is not what most entrepreneurs are like. Most start their venture while in school or working a full-time job to maintain stability. They test and retest, they measure 100 times, and then they make the leap. This lesson gave me the courage to pursue my own entrepreneurial journey at Tuck.”

That’s just one of the unforgettable lessons absorbed by the Class of 2022. In his Financial Accounting course at Ross, Mejoy Lawson learned how every decision must factor in its impact on a financial statement. For Stanford’s Nicole Rojas, the big takeaway was the concept of a minimum lovable product – “understanding what your customer will need and pay for before developing a fully-functioning product.” For Sanoma Jean, the Entrepreneurship Project (EP) at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School came with a dose of humility. A few months before starting her MBA, Jean was busy conceptualizing her startup, Aya. Before it became a patient management platform for mental health providers, Aya’s model favored the business-to-consumer niche. After discussions with her EP team, Jean chose to backpedal and take advantage of their expertise.

“We ended up pivoting from B2C to B2B, targeting providers rather than patients,” she admits. “This was a huge lesson, as I felt ownership and responsibility for my original idea as I had been ruminating about it for so long. But when we began to map the landscape and really plan our strategy, the pivot made complete sense. This was my first dose of not letting my pride or ego stand in the way of what was a smart business decision. Just because I had the original idea doesn’t mean that this whole venture is owned solely by me, or that I deserve any more say than my co-founder, who has been there since the beginning. The best strategy is one that can be executed.”

GETTING AN EDGE IN THE LOCAL STARTUP ECOSYSTEM

Along with classmates, faculty also made a difference for MBA entrepreneurs. At the Darden School, Elizabeth Blankenship says Damon DeVito tracked her down before she’d even taken his Venture Velocity course. And it wasn’t by accident. In DeVito’s case, he wanted to know if Blankenship possessed the toughness to be an entrepreneur.

“In our first meeting, he challenged me to do the hardest thing first: call up the luxury brands and ask them to give me their fabrics,” she recalls. “He does this often for two reasons: he wanted to weed out the ‘wannabes’ from the real deal entrepreneurs, and to get people to find out at the beginning whether their idea will work. If the brands said no, my venture idea was toast and I would need another one. If they said yes, then the hardest part was behind me.”

Alas, business school is only part of education. For many disruptive startups, growth is predicated on the surrounding business ecosystem. INSEAD is an hour-long ride to Paris and Station F – Europe’s largest incubator and home to INSEAD’s Launchpad for student entrepreneurs. Spaciously’s Hanna Kanabiajeuskaja loves how she can be surrounded by people wired like herself there – along with having access to potential investors. In Chicago, Janice Tam was able to partner with a local fashion college, whose students produced a window exhibit that appeared along the city’s famed Miracle Mile. True to form, an immersion into Silicon Valley culture hammered home a bedrock fundamental to Gander’s Kimiloluwa Fafowora: Your network is your net worth.

“Stanford GSB introduced me to a series of networks that have consistently fast-tracked our company,” she tells P&Q. For example, through the GSB, I became a partner at Dorm Room Fund – the first student-run venture fund. After working with that team for about a year, their CEO, Molly Fowler introduced me to a VC who ended up co-leading our seed round. Our other co-lead was introduced to me by a fellow classmate, Sydney Sykes (partner at Lightspeed VC & co-founder of BlackVC). Had it not been for Molly, Sydney, DRF, and the GSB, it’s unclear whether we’d have the same success we have today.”

Page 3: In-depth profiles of 43 MBA founders.

 

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