Does Oxford University have any claim to MBA startup ideas?

Copyright PharmaVentures Ltd 2010

Another question that was asked by the incoming MBA class to the entrepreneurship panel I was sitting on the other day.

“Does Oxford University have any claim to startups that originate from the MBA class?”

The short answer is “no”.

Normally, when some Intellectual Property (IP) is developed as a part of research at a university, the university has a significant claim to the IP – afterall it has been developed whilst working there. The split can be very fair though – the scientist who originated the IP can get 1/3 to 1/2 share of IP rights with the university.

This can be very lucrative for the university and the scientists involved if the IP ends up becoming part of a successful company or product. For example Remicade, an arthritis antibody treatment, was developed at New York University School of Medicine. In 2007, Royalty Pharma paid $650 Million to buy the royalty stream from NYU. Can you imagine your university suddenly getting a $650 Million cash injection? Nice!

Of course Oxford University tries to commercialise as much technology as possible, mostly through its technology transfer arm, Isis Innovation.

I’m told that one of the biggest royalty streams to Oxford University is thanks to Ed Southern’s “Southern Blot“, a molecular biology technique. However, I’m not actually sure if the patents are still valid.

The Said Business School has an arrangement with the University that any business ideas developed by MBA students are exempt from any claim by the University. Afterall, what right-minded entrepreneur would come to a business school that would lay claim to his ideas just because he was there for a year learning about Porter’s Five Forces and the Laffer Curve?

The exception would be if your business was based on IP developed elsewhere in the University. We do some projects with Isis Innovation so that is quite possible. One of the recent Oxford MBA startups, Lab Minds, is based on technology developed by two people from one of the science departments, so I presume the University has some licensing arrangement there.

So don’t worry about coming here with your amazing startup idea. I think the University is hoping that you’ll make it big and give some money back of your own free accord.

Next post, also a question at the same panel, – should you keep your startup idea secret?

Who says MBAs can’t start companies?

We don't just have jargon. We have frameworks baby. Yeah!

In the startup community there is this “MBAs can’t do startups” opinion, which is often quite strongly expressed. People do seem to love bashing MBAs! In fact, I was on the entrepreneurship panel for the incoming MBA class at Oxford the other day and one of the new class made a similar comment, asking for the panel’s opinion. I won’t speculate here on why this opinion is so popular, but I do suggest you read this post by the Humbled MBA.

In response to the never-ending “MBAs can’t do entrepreneurship” quips I thought I’d do a couple of blog posts about MBA entrepreneurs – one highlighting companies that had been started by MBAs and gone on to some success, and later a post about up-and-coming MBA startups, maybe with an Oxford focus. Luckily, I found that most of the work looking for successful MBA companies had been done by another blogger(*1) and in this Quora post, so I’m going to use them and highlight a few of the companies.

So here, in no particular order, are some successful companies started by MBAs(*2):

Zynga – founded by Mark Pincus (Harvard MBA 1993). Zynga was recently valued at $11.15 Billion. Zoiks!

Geocities – founded by David Bohnett (University of Michigan Ross School of Business 1980). Sorry, GeoCities has closed.

Sun Microsystems – founded by Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy (Stanford MBA 1980). That worked out quite well.

Nike – founded by Philip Knight (Stanford MBA 1962). Nike make shoes and seem to have been fairly successful. According to Forbes, he’s worth $12.7 Billion now. Not bad. He does sound like a bit of a git though.

Victoria’s Secret was started by Roy Raymond (Stanford MBA 1977?), but there’s quite a sad story to him. In his honour I interrupt this flow of MBA startups for a picture of a Victoria’s Secret model.

Adriana Lima wearing Victoria's Secret bikini. Nice finishing.

If that last company has made you feel amorous but you have no-one to be amorous with, then check out Match.com founded by Gary Kremen (Stanford MBA 1989).

If you visited the previous company, but decided that hot girls probably prefer guys with loads of money, why not make lots of money on the stockmarket with E-Trade*(3)? The company was founded by William A. Porter, who got his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1967.

Both ProFounder and Kiva.org  were founded by  Jessica Jackley (Stanford MBA 2007). They’re both relatively young companies, but Kiva in particular seems to have got quite wide adoption in the US with its microfinance model for entrepreneurs in developing regions. I visited their offices earlier this year and was very impressed by the company. Since being founded in 2005, the company has apparently raised $249 Million in loans for the entrepreneurs it helps.

US biotech giant Genentech (now part of Roche) was founded by Robert Swanson, a VC with a MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management (1970). But it wasn’t MBAs that made Genentech big – it was the mAbs. Geddit?! If you get that I want you to know my Twitter handle is Major_Grooves and you should get that too.

Tony Hawkins is a voice artist with over 15 years of experience. He sounds a bit like a robot*(4). He does not, however, have an MBA. Trip Hawkins does though! He got his MBA in 1978 from Stanford and founded computer games company Electronic Arts.

All these companies have been US companies founded by US MBA graduates. Mostly from Stanford. So here’s a token Brit! Lonely Planet was founded by Tony Wheeler (London Business School MBA 1972) but he doesn’t mention his MBA on his profile page*(5). He probably doesn’t think it’s very cool.

I was going to start this post with Fedex as I’d heard that the Fedex “hub and spoke” model was based on the founder’s poorly rated MBA project. However founder Frederick Smith doesn’t appear to have done an MBA. Quite how he managed to start a company without an MBA is really beyond me. Despite their company founder not having an MBA, Fedex does value its MBA employees:

So next time someone tells you that “MBAs can’t do startups”, quote a few of the above companies or send them this blog post.

*(1) I think this list maybe has some mistakes, and some MBA founders that I don’t quite consider “pure” founders – i.e. they they bought in to a company or similar (like Mitt Romney and Staples). Also I’ve not mentioned any of the finance firms here because they are boring.

*(2)Note I’m only highlighting the MBA founders here. Many(most?) of these companies had non-MBA co-founders who were instrumental in the companies’ success. The point here is just to show that MBAs can be involved in successful entrepreneurship as company founders.

*(3) This WannabeVC does not give investment advice. Don’t do shares kids. If you want to try trading, you should see that startup I write about in the follow-up to this post.

*(4) Seriously, he really sounds like a robot. Is it his voice used for those instant animation movies with voice over that people have been posting on YouTube recently? What I mean is… maybe it’s the robots that sounds like him!

*(5) Back then, in the olden days, it wasn’t called an MBA – it was actually a MSc in Management that Tony received. Still doesn’t sound cool.

A Solution to the MBA/Entrepreneurship Paradox

As cunning as a fox that's Professor of Cunning at Oxford University

There’s a paradox that comes with doing an MBA and then trying to be an entrepreneur.

I’m not talking about whether or not MBAs make good entrepreneurs, or whether anything you learn on an MBA is useful for a startup. Sure, most MBAs go off to become management consultants or work in finance, but from my school I think there’s at least 10% that go off and start companies after their degrees.

No, I’m talking about the paradox of leaving a degree with a shed-load of debt and trying to “bootstrap” a startup. You can reduce many costs to try and extend the metaphorical runway, but the massive £500-600 a month loan repayments that kicks in 3 months after you finish the course makes for quite an elephant in the room.

The problem is that when you explain to investors what your personal bootstrapping cash burn-rate is you have to inflate it from a fairly reasonable £21k to around £30k (gross salary equivalents before tax), which doesn’t sound much like bootstrapping to an investor.

Put bluntly, the MBA loan repayments make it damn difficult to live cheaply after your course finishes. Of course not everyone has to take such a big loan to do the MBA, but I think I’m far from the minority (Note: my running out of runway problem doesn’t even include my loan repayments as I’ll have run out of money before they even start. Ha!).

Fear not though, I have a cunning plan that might cure this paradox!

Problem: Business schools want to encourage entrepreneurship. MBAs are expensive and most students have to take chuffing huge loans to pay for them, which impedes entrepreneurship.

Solution: business schools refund the MBA loan to the bank and converts it to convertible debt based on the startup the student has started during the course. The loan would convert to equity in the startup at the first qualifying financing round. If they don’t raise any finance within a certain time-period, then the loan reverts to a normal personal debt, with interest accrued.

There would of course have to be some safe-guards to prevent wide-scale abuse and people setting up fake companies after the degree, but I’m sure with some more thought it could be possible.

Of course it will never happen. The amount of money the school would “lose” in the short-term would be massive. Perhaps a benefactor could finance the scheme?

I know it sounds like a fairly hare-brained scheme, but put it this way – if a business school really believes its MBA programme is compatible with entrepreneurship and it really believes in the students it recruits, then it should have confidence in the businesses they start. If they got one or two home runs, then they could make a good return.

Potentially true

I was considering titling this post, “would anybody like to pay off my student loan for me?”, but that seemed a bit too blunt.

Running out of runway

This is what happens if your runway is too short

It’s the start of September and I have approximately 1 week of my MBA left with our Capstone Course next week. Technically I think I remain an Oxford University student till the end of September.

I also, by my calculations, have enough cash left in the bank to last me until the end of November (based on my current burn rate, which is pretty low). Oh, and come January, repayments for my rather massive MBA loan kick in. None of this would be a problem if I was being sensible and trying to look for a regular job like most of my class (quite successfully it seems recently), but oh no, I’m trying to become an entrepreneur.

So over the Summer I’ve been working on a Strategic Consulting Project (SCP) with a couple of classmates, looking at my original startup idea in more detail and as a result you might say the original concept has evolved, or “pivoted”, to something a bit different, but still with the original idea at its core.

The question now is – how do I pursue the idea? I want to, but in many ways the SCP has left me with more questions than answers. Still, I’m convinced there is a real opportunity there, but the rather practical problem of paying my rent and bills is getting in the way.

So there the advice falls in to two distinct camps – the “you need to just go for it and commit 100%” camp, and the “get some part-time consulting gigs to support you while you develop the business” camp. Which is right?

I know I prefer the “100%” camp, but it doesn’t really answer the “pay my rent” question. I unfortunately don’t have any rich benefactors to support me for those extra 3 months I need to give this a decent shot beyond November, and when you factor the loan repayments in the amount of “salary” I need is a bit above what you might call “bootstrapping”. Such is the MBA/entrepreneurship paradox.

I know what the recently published Startup Genome Report says – people who do a startup part-time raise 24x less funding that those that commit full-time.

“Temporary moonlighting is permissible but significantly curbs performance and potential.”

Another entrepreneur did say to me the other day that if I can’t convince someone to give me money to live for a few months then maybe the idea is not good enough. I’m not sure about that. Rich people tend to be rich because they don’t part easily with their money. I think maybe my problem is that, despite a year of study, I am still at the idea stage – and people don’t tend to get investment at the idea stage. Ideas are easy.

In the meantime, what do you think I should do – is part-time entrepreneurship possible? Is the “100%” camp biased by the Silicon Valley echo-chamber? Leave a comment below!

This startup malarkey is a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, and I’ve barely even got started! I have to admit it is beginning to stress me out a bit.

A MBA’s experiment in social media campaigning via reddit.com

You

A classmate, Stephanie Getson, has been trying to raise £8000 on the crowd-sourcing website Buzzbnk.org to start her social venture, Sahara Botanicals, in Chad, Africa. She has 3 days left to hit her target otherwise the money gets returned to contributors. To date (AFAIK) the money raised has been from people that Stephanie knows personally. Buzzbnk.org is quite new and what it lacks (imho) is the name, and therefore traffic, that the poster-children of the crowd-sourced social venture funding websites Kiva and Kickstarter have, meaning projects have very little chance of “strangers” contributing money to a project just because they like the sound of it.

Stephanie has had great support from her class, but I wondered if I could help her get some broader support with a social media campaign. We had all been posting about her on our Facebook walls and re-tweeting the link to her Buzzbnk page, but none of it was really generating outside support as far as I could tell, so I wondered if I might be able to generate some more buzz via reddit.com.

So, what is this reddit place?

reddit, if you don’t know it, is a kind of social media website where users submit web links and other users upvote the content they like, or down-vote the content they dislike as well as leaving comments (which can also be up/downvoted) on the links*. Content ranges from political news stories, to amusing or interesting images. I’ve been on reddit for a few years – it’s a procrastinator’s paradise – I’m quite a fan of the “F7U11” comics (note any links on reddit that say “NSFW” = Not Safe for Work (also applies to business school libraries!)).

reddit is a hugely popular website – its servers regularly struggle under the visitor load – and content that gets enough upvotes to get on to the main front page can receive tens of thousands of visitors via the website. Whether or not a link gets on to the front page is algorithmically determined with a bias towards fresh content, and with early upvotes having more weight than subsequent ones. Most stories on the front page have net +1000 votes, but some can get there with as few as net +60 votes.

I figured that all you need is a good core of early fans to upvote you then you have a chance of getting widespread support. So I thought I’d submit Stephanie’s Buzzbnk page to reddit then try to mobilise my class to give it a quick upvote.

End result

It wasn’t a massive success, but we did get about another 6 or so donations, raising around £300. We certainly didn’t get on to the front page! I presume most of the donations came from the class (thanks!). Below I’ll outline the “strategy” and what I think I could have done better.

Strategy 101

I set up a Facebook Event to try and time the submission and upvoting for about 10pm GMT, hoping that lots of classmates would be online but also catching good online time in the US. I invited all classmates I have on Facebook – about 200 people – and allowed others to invite friends, but did not make the event public. In the end about 30 people accepted the invite.

At 10pm I submitted the link to reddit and posted the reddit link to Facebook. I also immediately posted a comment to the link which explained what the project was all about. My hope was that this comment would get upvoted to the top to explain to redditors why I had posted the link.

I also emailed the entire class mailing list – about 240 students – asking them, if they were online now, to give the story a quick vote.

Upboats?

The first comment quickly came in – “No“. Hmmm…

Then the first votes started coming in. It was quite level pegging for a while – equal upvotes and downvotes.

Then, amazingly, Stephanie messages me on Skype to say a £5o donation had come in… then another, then £30, then £30 again.

In the meantime we were getting lots of positive comments – all from classmates – but the votes were hovering around net 0. At one point I think we had net +10, but by the time I checked this morning we were back to net 0, with approximately +60/-60. Not bad – at least we got 60 people to upvote!

So what could have gone better?

Click on the red arrow to upboat.

I probably needed to explain reddit a bit better. I’ve been on it for years, but most people had never seen it before so I wasn’t sure if people understood that they had to click the upvote button, rather than just comment.

I submitted the link at 10pm to try and get US users’ attention, but with hindsight I probably should have aimed more for the UK users and submitted earlier.

I should have encouraged people to exercise restraint with posting comments. Whilst everyone’s enthusiasm was appreciated, it looked a bit like astro-turfing to have lots of 0 days old reddit accounts leaving wildly supportive comments. Just to be clear – everyone I asked to support is a genuine Sahara Botanicals fan – no-one was paid to vote!

Something went wrong with my explanatory comment – it didn’t seem to get any upboats and when I sent a bit.ly link directly to it people told me they couldn’t see my comment at all. Subsequently, nobody clicked on my link to Stephanie’s blog explaining how she’d actually spend the money.

I wouldn’t be surprised if reddit down-weights votes from newly registered accounts. Virtually everyone in the class was using a new account.

Nobody other than a couple of classmates retweeted my tweet about the reddit page. I have about 500 followers but the bit.ly statistics suggest that virtually no-one from Twitter clicked the link, which is a shame.

I was disappointed that Buzzbnk didn’t get behind this. Stephanie had told them I was planning this, and I thought they were going to give us a retweet last night, but they didn’t retweet till the morning, which is virtually worthless. I did actually voice my annoyance, and found Buzzbnk’s reply frustratingly weak. This was their chance to get big traffic – a retweet would have taken 2 seconds. Shame.

Why the downvotes?

Downvotes make me sad.

Quite a few of my friends who are new to reddit were asking me why anyone would ever downvote the link. As I explained to them, you could post the cure to cancer on reddit and it would still get hundreds of downvotes. reddit is a naturally quite cynical audience and I knew that basically going on there and asking for money had the potential to generate a backlash. That said, if you hang around reddit long enough there are loads of examples of spontaneous acts of kindness and generosity from reddit users. I personally think they are a great community, but in this case “if you ask, you don’t get”.

/edit – now that I think about it, a lot of the downvotes almost certainly came from reddit itself. I believe it has a vote to automatically downvote stories that suddenly get a lot of upvotes. No idea how that works in practice, but it is there to stop people gaming the system.

* If this sounds familiar, you might have heard of Digg.com. Once a social media favourite and reddit’s much bigger competitor, it is now a sad shadow of its former self after a botched update to its model.

Tags: Buzzbnk, reddit, Sahara Botanicals, social media

MBA Business Plan Theatre

A business plan from some LBS students

Today I submitted my team’s Entrepreneurship Project (EP), which counts as one elective towards our MBA. The EP is basically a term-long project where you develop a business plan – it doesn’t have to be a startup, but inevitably that’s what most of them are. I came in to the course really looking forward to doing the EP, as I knew I wanted to base it on my start-up so I could test the idea with four clever classmates.

I’ve been very fortunate to recruit a great team – Khalida, Alex, Amita and Jonathan – that really believe in my startup. I’m very grateful to them for the hard work that they’ve put in to developing what is, essentially, “my baby”. In effect, I’ve received the equivalent of quite a few thousand pounds worth of free consultancy and research!

We also had to do a presentation of our business to a panel consisting of local entrepreneurs and business angels. Whilst our presentation was a bit… light, it did pique the interest of one of the judges, who is now helping me as an advisor (and maybe as an investor in the future), which is a great result.

Although the EP has been a useful experience for me, it’s probably fair to question the value of “MBA business plans”. Silicon Valley legend, Steve Blank*, is not a fan of business plan competitions, which are fairly analogous to the EP. I can see his point – with many startups, you’d be better off just developing your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as soon as possible, and getting your product in to peoples’ hands to test your ideas.

For the vast majority of people on our course, the EP is just an academic exercise. The real point of the EP, from an academic point of view, is just to apply some of the things you have learnt over the previous two terms. For that reason we are pretty much obliged to shoehorn in references to various frameworks such as Porter’s Five Forces at every opportunity.

I think most of the students are in agreement that if we were to pass our EPs on to real investors for investment, the first thing we would do is strip them of most of the “MBA talk”. It would certainly shorten them substantially!

I think the real reason business plan competitions are so popular is that it’s something tangible that a group of students can do together in a relatively short period of time. For many ideas, it’s simply not feasible to build something beyond the reasoning behind the idea, as is mentioned in this blog post about someone who has started a couple of biotech companies after business plan competition.

So what am I doing now the EP is over? Well, I’m stripping out all the MBA talk from my EP as I am in the semi-final of my school’s business plan competition! Huzzah!

*the same Steve Blank we had hoped to meet in Silicon Valley but did not. I would have loved to have discussed this with him in person.

MEST day 4 – Just do it!

The first result in a Google Image search for "Just Do It". Image by Sharad Haskar. Click for more info.

Day 4, Friday 8^th April – last half day.

During the last half day the EITs presented the progress they’d made over the week and how they would be progressing with their business ideas. My overall advice for my team was JDI: Just Do It. They need to build their prototype ASAP and get it out there in the wild for people to test and give feedback. All the teams had made considerable progress during the week and had lots of ideas for how to improve their businesses.

I also suggested that we do a bit of 360 feedback on the MBA Consultants so we could see how we’d performed from their point of view. We made sure we explicitly asked for a good point and something that we could improve on. The EITs were all so nice, I could see them not wanting to criticise anyone.

The feedback was written on one bit of paper and to be seen only by each MBA, but I don’t mind sharing some of my feedback here:

Positive: “Enjoyed your [startup metrics for pirates] funnel lecture, gave me a different perspective into how Internet consumers behave”

Area for improvement: “More straight to the point”

Just before my MEST time was over, I popped over the famed MEST bridge to their other building where the previous years’ companies are incubated. I am really glad I did this. It was great to see where these companies had got to in a year as I could see the sort of progress my team could make once they get in there. The companies there were fantastic – none of them would have been out-of-place at a startup incubator in Silicon Valley (where I’m headed as I speak, typing this post at 36,000ft). In fact, one of the companies, Nandimobile, I already knew a bit about as it had gone to the Launch conference run by Jason Calacanis and won the best business award, beating all the Silicon Valley competition. Amazing! Go Ghana!

Overall, I have to say that this trip to Ghana has been an amazing experience. It was my first visit to Africa and quite an eye-opener. I didn’t sign-up to MEST because I’m particularly in to “social entrepreneurship” – I just like start-ups and seeing and talking about cool ideas and I was not disappointed. I am so glad I signed up for this at the start of the year.

At this point I’d just like to say a personal thank you to a couple of folk: Jorn Lyseggen for starting the Meltwater foundation that makes MEST possible, and Peter van Dijk for organising our visit and being a great host at MEST. Also a big thank you to Robert and Badu for being such a great team. They are a pleasure to work with!

It doesn’t end there for me though – I will still be working with my team as we prepare them for their pitch to Jorn to get in to the incubator.

P.S. If you’ve managed to read though all these posts then well done to you! I wrote all 5 of my MEST posts in one day. Probably the most writing I’ve ever done in one day (yes, that includes when I was writing my PhD thesis!), four of them at 36,000ft on my flight to San Francisco (jet-setting baby!)  so I hope that shows you how much this programme meant to me. If you found the posts interesting, please do take a second to leave a comment or rate the posts. It’s what we bloggers live for! I’m also happy to answer any questions about MEST if you’re reading this and thinking about applying.

MEST Day 3 – MBA carousel

I've always seen myself as a bit like Zebedee

Day 3, Thursday 7^th April – MBA carousel

The day started out with presentations by all of the teams to all of the EITs and MBAs. This would be the first time we got to see the other teams’ projects in detail.

After the presentations we did 30min consulting sessions with each of the teams so we could give feedback to the teams and make suggestions as to how they could improve their ideas. We were advised not to hold back with the feedback – there was no point in going easy on them otherwise they would just get a shock when they have to present to Jorn in a couple of months to try and get in to the incubator.

These sessions were great fun. In fact I would say it was a privilege that we got this opportunity. It was a bit like reading a few posts on Techcrunch then being able to grill the founders. I think I managed to give good feedback and decent suggestions to all the teams. I maybe gave most value to the team that was working on a healthcare related product as it is closest to my own product background. There were some flaws in some of the plans that needed deeper thought, but overall all of the businesses seem quite viable to me. Maybe some of them don’t feel quite so enthusiastic after we’ve dissected their ideas but I really do think that each of these ideas, if executed well, could be quite successful.

That evening we went out with the teaching fellows from MEST. We went to the ex-pat/obroni bars. First we went for Thai food, which was not too bad. Then an Irish pub (there’s always one!) called Ryans where the Star was nice and cold and there was also some free Clubs being given away in a promotion. It was some kind of Accra ex-pat society evening so the place was quite busy. I even got the chance to practice my Norwegian, which was fun. Then we went on to somewhere called the Container. Maybe it’s called that because it looks like it’s housed in a shipping container. Anyway, the beer was something like GH₵2, so no complaints from me. After there we went on to a place called Duplex. Then we somehow got home. Probably in a taxi. Not sure. All I can remember is the slight despair that there was not much chance of me running in to a kebab van offering chips and cheese.

MEST Day 2 – Workshops

Why are pirates always so grumpy?

Day 2, Wednesday 6^th April – Workshops

The MBAs were to give workshops to the EITs about several business areas: Tayo and I would cover budgeting and sales forecasting; Mike and Jaro covered business plans; and Louis was taking on implementation strategy on his own.

I was slightly apprehensive about the workshops. Despite having completed a PhD, I never got the opportunity to do any teaching (I emptied bins instead, but that’s a different story…), whereas Tayo has been a university lecturer in the states. Nevertheless I obsessively read startup and VC blogs so I figured I could take something useful from there. Maybe I should be concerned that I based my workshop on a few blogs rather than the very expensive learnings of my MBA!

I took my main inspiration from a couple of my favourite presentations: Dave McClure’s “Startup Metrics for Pirates” and Andrew Chen’s “How to Start a Profitable Freemium Startup”. Fortunately the EITs hadn’t seen these before, so my first suggestion was to look up McClure and read everything he’s ever written (whilst warning them that he uses “colourful” language and his slides look like they’re made by an eight year-old!).

I actually started out by saying that I think that revenue forecasting for start-ups that don’t yet exist is mostly a folly*. Top VCs will want to know that you are aiming at a big market, and that you have a product that people want so that you can take a significant chunk of that market. The actual forecast you come up with isn’t that interesting, because you have to make so many assumptions that the margin of error is massive. Nevertheless, showing that you’ve thought of each of the variables that contribute to the forecast shows that you’re thinking about the important factors that determine whether or not you’ll get any revenue at all.

So then we discussed each of these factors using McClure’s AARRR (like a pirate, geddit?) framework**, which stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referrals and Revenue. We took each factor in turn and discussed all the potential ways we could maximise our percentages at each stage. Tayo and I had quite a neat tag-team effort going on, with him talking about how to build a strong brand and use marketing to generate revenue rather than sales. He even treated them to a branding framework he had developed during his PhD.

Finally, I would take them through Andrew Chen’s freemium spreadsheet and show them how the things we had just discussed during the AARRR session were applied to each of the stages on the sales funnel in Chen’s model.

The EITs said they got a lot from our session – all of the sessions in fact. Even though I was paired up with a university lecturer who has a PhD in what he was teaching I think I did ok. Tayo’s a good lecturer – maybe he could have a word with a couple of the lecturers at Saïd***…

That evening everyone from MEST went out in Accra for some dinner, where we ate fine Ghanaian cuisine, and we redeemed our bonus beers for getting pics of the lighthouse (all the teams managed to get a pic!). There was some entertainment mostly in the form of singing both English and Ghanaian songs. There was also a humorous… ummm, spectacle… which I can only describe as “the duck”.****

*Note I haven’t been a VC, or raised money for a startup, so you can take my opinion with a pinch of salt!

**Obligatory pirate joke – Q: Why are pirates always so grumpy? A: Because they AARRR!!

***If by any chance you’re a Saïd lecturer and you’re reading this then of course I don’t mean you!

****Can’t tell you what this is. What goes in Accra, stays in Accra. Well, at least until I put the video on YouTube!

MEST Day 1 – Exploring Accra

Colourful fishing boats

I actually flew out to Ghana a few days early so that I could try and explore Ghana beyond Accra for a few days. If you’re at all interested in reading about that, it’s here on my other blog.*

Day 1, Tuesday 5^th April– Meet the EITs and explore Accra

After a round of introductions between the MBA consultants and the EITs (entrepreneurs-in-training), Peter, the class’s senior faculty, set us a challenge. This would be my chance to get to know Robert and Badu, with whom I had already had many chats over Skype. Armed with a small number of Cedis (GH₵) we were to use whatever means of transportation we could afford to travel around the city and get three photos taken of each MBA with his team at an Accra landmark (and get lunch at the same time). A special bonus beer was on offer for any teams that managed to get a photo of the Jamestown lighthouse, as Peter had previously tried to get a snap there but had been unsuccessful (no photos allowed!). A second mission was for each MBA consultant to buy a “trophy” for his team which would represent a learning for them.

So of course we went out, flagged down a cab and headed straight to the Jamestown lighthouse. Once there we were instantly approached by a guy that wanted to give us a “tour” of the lighthouse. Unfortunately being an “obroni” (Caucasian) made you quite the target for the local entrepreneurs (the ones that didn’t quite make the MEST grade) as I’d discovered in Elmina. We went past the lighthouse and headed down to the fisherman’s village. We were approached by a number of people wanting to “help” us, including one guy that was quite insistent that he give us a tour. Robert got rid of him, but we still gave him GH₵1 as we left anyway (for not abducting us and turning us in to fishfood?^§)

Robert explained that because it was a Tuesday the fishing village was quiet as it is the day of rest for fishermen (God created the sea on Tuesday?). Although it was quiet, it was not really the sort of place I would have felt comfortable going on my own. However, with team at my side I really wasn’t that bothered. It felt so much better exploring Ghana with Ghanaians. Down there on the (rather dirty) beach I got some photos of the fishing boats (so much colour) and a kid with a bowl on his head at a jaunty angle.

Jaunty

We went back up towards the lighthouse and took the opportunity to snap a few pics. Result! Then we decided to walk towards a mausoleum, taking some pics at the Jamestown Fort Prison along the way. With hindsight that might have been a mistake – it was absolutely sweltering and I was boiling and worried about getting sunburn and/or sunstroke. It got to the point where I was sidling along the side of buildings to try and take advantage of the shadows. Still we made it there, with some singing entertainment from a bus full of school kids along the way.

Jamestown Lighthouse

Open for business?

At the  Kwame Nkrumah mausoleum we headed straight for the air-conditioned museum. Oh yeah! I needed that. We got a few pics around the park and monument then we went on our way. On the way our of the park, I found my trophy for the team**. I was only allowed to spend GH₵5 on it, so I was very happy to haggle the street-seller down from GH₵8 to GH₵5 straight away. Now I had my opportunity to experience tro-tros – private minivans that cram as many people in them as possible then run on set routes. It has to be experienced! Having lunch in town we discovered that the ladies appreciated our trophy. Can’t say I blame them – they clearly know quality when they see it.

Another taxi trip saw us at Independence Square where we got a photo of the Freedom Arch. Mission achieved!

We headed back to MEST, where we had dinner and gave the group a debrief and explained what our trophies were meant to represent to our teams. The day had certainly been good for getting to know Robert and Badu – they were great guides – and we had a pretty good time talking about their business over lunch, where we threw about a few new ideas that could be explored with their core idea. A great first day!

*what’s nerdier than having a blog? Having two blogs of course! I have about four so go figure…

**can’t tell you what it means – that’s between me and the team (and everyone else at MEST).

^§I jest.