The End of a Very Long Road Trip

When I drove my California-plated car onto the ferry to Martha's Vineyard for a short vacation before re-entering the workforce, the attendant looked at it and said, "This must be the end of a very long road trip." I paused for a second because it hadn't been a long day of driving, but then replied, "Sure is." In fact, the trip started in San Francisco during the summer of 2008 and two years later, it's finally ending. Those two years were more than I expected or probably even yet fully realize. So, I thought I'd sign off on my Johnson School blog with a round-up of my top five aspects of the Program:

• The Park Fellowship: I've mentioned the Park Fellowship before in this blog, and I'm highlighting it again because it was the heart and soul of my MBA experience. Blended with all the other exceptional aspects of the Johnson School program, the Park puts the Cornell MBA in a league of its own.
• Big Red Ventures (a.k.a. my job): Coursework, TA responsibilities, entrepreneurial endeavors and social time aside, BRV kept me profoundly busy and provided what was the deepest real-world experience that any MBA program could boast. We made two investments this year!
• The Private Equity Practicum: the PE Practicum was something new this year that was spearheaded by Steve Gal and Ahmad Ali from the Investment Office, and facilitated by yours truly and Ryan Cole as our Park project. For the first time ever, leaders in private equity from the likes of KKR, Hellman & Friedman and General Atlantic (among others) traveled to Ithaca to meet with Johnson School students in an intimate setting.
• Professor BenDaniel and Steve Gal: one of the best and most cherished aspects of the relatively small class is the meaningful relationships that students develop with professors. Such relationships have become rare in university settings as programs have expanded and professors' time has been stretched thin. If you happen to read this, thank you Prof BenDaniel and Steve for your teaching and support, and I look forward to staying in touch as my career unfolds.
• Psych class: This is the oddball on the list because it wasn't part of the Johnson School. My psych seminar on automaticity was a digression from the business school and more importantly from the (sometimes) narrow mindset of the MBA. Psychology is so fundamental to business and yet the science of it rarely impacts the MBA. Sure, we had a consumer behavior course and we touched on organizational psychology in the core, but MBAs aren't so much concerned with psychology itself as much as the anecdotal learnings they can borrow from it to use in corporate life. Stepping out of the business school to take a class in the psych department was a revelation and a respite. There's more to life than making a profit.

So those are my top five, and there are many many more, including this very blog. My goal in writing this throughout my two years was threefold: to promote the Johnson School through one, passionate point of view, to help prospective students learn about unique aspects of the School that don't translate into formal marketing collateral, and to fulfill my own intellectual curiosity and desire to write. I know I've at least accomplished the last of those.

I'm moving back to California to join a small, entrepreneurial company and my plan is to start a new blog that picks up where this one is leaving off. Check it out at corporateexistentialism.com.

Thanks for reading!

A Thought from Far Above Cayuga's Waters

Having experienced five graduation ceremonies in person (my brother's undergrad and grad, my cousin's undergrad and my undergrad and now grad), I feel as though I'm something of an expert on graduation speeches...or at least an adequate critic. In the end, they all fundamentally say three things: thank your family for the support that enabled this moment (thanks Mom, Dad, and Billy!), follow your dreams, and don't forget to stop and smell the roses from time to time. These things are all, of course, true, but the notion of following my dreams has always nagged at me.

I wouldn't be doing my semester long psych class justice if I didn't first try to understand the meaning of a dream. In the end, a dream probably breaks down into a collection of conscious and nonconscious goals that are far less concrete than we'd care to admit (creativity, prestige, affirmation, social acceptance, etc.). But what the dreams are is perhaps not as important as what it means to pursue them, and in the context of graduation speeches, this matter of process is always lost in the limelight. The speaker is invariably someone who has achieved great success either through true capability or some random twist of fate, and that success overshadows the gritty (or lucky) moments of how it was achieved.

Ultimately, we (MBAs) are not leaving this place far above Cayuga's waters to follow our dreams, but rather to roll up our sleeves. In the words of Bob Dylan "You do what you must do, and ya do it well." Hopefully, in the process, we will make our dreams. Then, we'll all look back and say to the bright-eyed, aspiring young grads of the day: "see how I followed my dreams--you should too."

I Heart Ketchup

If you've read my previous blogs, you already know that I grew up in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is many things for many different blogs, but for this particular blog, it's the home of Heinz ketchup. Heinz is one of those companies that helps define a city. Pittsburgh's (relatively) new football stadium is called Heinz Field, and the drive out of the city on Route 28 gives every commuter a glimpse of the Heinz plant, an unchanging, even reassuring aspect of the landscape. But perhaps more to the point, you won't find a restaurant in Pittsburgh that serves Hunts or any other brand aside from Heinz. Of course, that's true for most other places too.

Malcolm Gladwell has already done the unique stature and market leadership of Heinz ketchup justice in his New Yorker article "The Ketchup Conundrum," so there's no need to rehash it again here. But I will mention a couple of things that Heinz (and its impenetrable ketchup empire) has taught me as an MBA and an aspirating entrepreneur. First, most businesses cannot rely on intellectual property to protect their market positions, particularly in today's global economy, but Heinz has still managed to build a fortress around its product because no one can replicate it. Brand aside, the ketchup itself is difficult to copy because it requires incredibly precise controls on the key input: tomatoes. Gladwell points out: "tomatoes vary, in acidity and sweetness and the ratio of solids to liquid, according to the seed variety used, the time of year they are harvested, the soil in which they are grown, and the weather during the growing season." Couple that with protecting the recipe by trade secret, and the result is defensibility more insurmountable than any patent. Secondly, Gladwell points to a unique quality of ketchup. Ketchup is unique in its universality, unlike mustard and pasta sauce, which have many different types that appeal to many different people. In a world where mass customization is king--where you can design your own personal boots on Timberland.com, or create your iGoogle home page to suit your personality and tastes--the idea of one, universal product that is the optimal product for everyone is a powerful one.

Ketchup may be an extreme case, but surely there are other examples of products that transcend market segments and standalone without begging for line extensions. Make one and you'll be the envy of entrepreneurs and major corporations alike!

Peeps

Here I am--polishing off the last of the Easter basket my mom sent me in the mail and I can't help feeling nostalgic. Holidays are, of course, bastions of nostalgia, but there is one, small company that gets it better than others: Peeps--those all-American, bright yellow, sugary chicks. When I was a kid, I loved Peeps. They were cute and composed almost entirely of sugar. What's not to like? They were right up there with Pixy Sticks and those little wax bottles filled with syrup.

Actually, I don't really like Peeps anymore. My taste buds have evolved towards more sophisticated foods. And yet I can't imagine Easter without them, and I hope my mom never stops putting them in my basket. Someday, I hope to put them in my kids' baskets. What a great business! Consumers don't even have to like eating Peeps to love Peeps. To be sure, entire brands and even industries are built around nostalgia (even Coca Cola to a certain extent), so Peeps isn't exactly working a novel angle.

Still, Peeps is a unique brand and worth looking into. From the packaging I was directed to the Peeps website: www.marshmallowpeeps.com. There I learned about the history of the brand and the company behind it. (Peeps are brought to us by Just Born, "a family-owned candy manufacturer that has been in business for more than eight decades and three generations.") Headquartered in Bethlehem, PA, Just Born makes a handful of other well-loved candies like Mike and Ike's too.

In a world of consolidation and bloated public companies with ineffective boards, a successful small town, family-owned company like Just Born stands out. The company has connected with its customers and, even more to the point, its brands and products make them happy. I for one, had a very happy Easter. Thanks, Mom.

A Sentimental Victory

Just over a week ago, I joined four peers (three MBAs and a law student) to represent Cornell and compete in VCIC, the most prominent venture capital competition in the world. The competition is different from the myriad case competitions that target MBAs, because it focuses on real deals. We posed as VCs and analyzed real seed stage businesses, run by real entrepreneurs. We then chose one to invest in and negotiated a term sheet (OK, so the term sheet wasn't real). The event was a meaningful learning (and bonding) experience, and I don't even regret staying up two nights straight to complete the work.

In the end, our team took home the Entrepreneurs' Choice Award, meaning that the entrepreneurs chose us as the team that they would most like to work with, not only as an investor, but also a partner. There's an obvious tension herein in that VCs and entrepreneurs sit on opposite sides of the table and what's good for the entrepreneur isn't always good for the VC. But while VCs may choose to impose draconian terms in later stage investments to increase their upside and decrease their risk, in my opinion, that simply doesn't make sense at the seed stage. For one thing, at seed stage, no one has any earthly idea of what the value of the company actually is. Every investment is an act of faith and above all else that faith is in the entrepreneur. So disincentivizing the entrepreneur to do a good job is practically the worst thing a VC could do when making an investment.

Of course, I like taking Entrepreneurs' Choice just because, well, I aspire to be an entrepreneur.

A Brave New MBA

Venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and other innovation-minded folks are always knocking the MBA. Some (ala Guy Kawasaki) say that an MBA is actually a mark against you. I disagree.

These naysayers seem to have forgotten that science and technology aren't the only products of innovation--education has changed too. Their illusion about MBAs is that we are a bunch of type-A, PowerPoint savvy, conformists, who all want jobs at McKinsey or Goldman, but would consider a startup only if no other offers come to pass. They hold fast to the archaic idea that all we do is sit around reading Harvard cases and "solving" business problems with Porter's Five Forces (well maybe that's what they do at Harvard).

Those notions just aren't true anymore. They may have been at one time and they may still be for some MBAs, but not as a matter of course. My MBA hasn't just been about learning how to innovate--even better, it's been about actually doing it. I've had the opportunity to manage a small venture capital fund, and in so doing I've assessed hundreds of business ideas, plans, and models. I've been able to share my writing again, through this blog, the Cornell Business Journal, and VentureViews (BRV's newsletter). I'm now working on my second business plan (the first one didn't pan out but the learnings were invaluable). I've studied the psychology of consumer behavior, which I will take to the next level this semester with a graduate psych course on automatic decision making. I've examined disruptive technologies under Don Greenberg. I've spent my summer at Novell working on a multi-million dollar strategic alliance. I could go on.

The point isn't that we don't read cases or learn the MBA staples (finance, accounting, economics, strategy...). We do that. But we do so much more, and I for one feel armed to innovate in ways that I couldn't have dreamed up before stepping within the walls of Sage Hall.

Hellos and Goodbyes

It's a fresh start, the beginning of a new semester, and yet in some ways I feel like I'm already saying goodbye. We're transitioning club leadership to the first years, picking what for most of us will be the last classes in our academic lives, and looking beyond business school to our future careers. I'm choosing my last semester's classes in an attempt to make sure I'm fully armed with the knowledge I need, while also satisfying my purest intellectual curiosity in a way that only academia can do.

While finalizing my class schedule online, I imagined the details of a course that I might design and teach at the Johnson School in some parallel universe where I was the professor and not the student. The course would be titled "The Business Novel" and it would survey works of fiction that reveal truths about corporations, markets, the economy, ethics, and generally all the human issues that affect business from Wall Street to Main Street. It seems to me that fiction has the ability to teach us those moral lessons that financial statements, press releases and even history cannot. Authors--good ones--somehow channel the sublime through their characters, and by studying them, we can find inspiration, a sense of fairness, even wisdom.

So what would be on the reading list? Atlas Shrugged would no doubt be the central work (I just read it for the first time over break and I was moved in a way that no excel spreadsheet could ever conjure). There'd be current works too. The Economist just profiled a new book called The Privileges, which is apparently the "morally ambiguous" tale of a fabulously wealthy private equity mogul. I haven't read it, but the subject matter certainly seems pertinent for MBAs who are about to be unleashed on the world to make bundles of money.

Parallel universes aside, I'm glad to be back and looking forward to my final semester at this very special place!