Francesco Baldisserri, MBA ’11

On start-ups and MBAs

During past week I attended to a speech of Aaron Patzer, founder and CEO of Mint. Mint is a personal finance web application started by Aaron 3 years ago and recently sold to Intuit for $170M (!!!). The presentation however wasn't a self-celebratory speech rather than a frank peek on what means starting a company from scratch. For Aaron meant:

1. Failures - Before Mint he started 3 companies without success;
2. Experience - He worked in a tech startup to get the necessary experience;
3. Risks - He left the job to work full time on his idea, isolating for months to code the prototype;
4. Persistence - He had to pitch tens of VCs before being funded.

You know the rest of the story but what really surprised me was Aaron insight on how VCs value start-up companies in the early stage (garage level).

• +$500K for an engineer, which can produce a prototype
• -$250K for a business guy, not really needed at this stage (the founder can cover this role part time)

That's annoying. After getting into a BSchool you're tempted to think it's just a matter of choosing what job you like next. It's not really the case. In particular startups need people that can get "their hands dirty" by working concretely on the product. Conversely VCs (very hyped in this period) look for people with in depth industry knowledge, that can concretely add value beyond the finance, marketing and operations concepts, now almost commodities. On my side I'm very interested in startups and this fall I will consult one (guess what, marketing plan) as part of club activity at Sloan. Hopefully this experience will help me in developing that kind of applied knowledge necessary to bring value into a company!

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Social IT Outsourcing

In spite of the core classes, draining most of day (and night) time, I'd like continue sharing the most interesting events going on here at Sloan. On the last day of orientation, September 11th, I assisted to the speech of Jeremy Hockenstein, Sloan alumni, former consultant but, most important, founder of Digital Divide Data.

DDD is a company based in Cambodia and Laos that provides IT outsourcing services as, for instance, data entry and digitalization. To provide these services DDD relies on Cambodian and Laotian people, especially on disadvantaged youth. Selected candidates are given IT and English lessons and after 3-8 months they start effectively working in DDD. Also during work, employees continue to attend school and after 3-4 years they graduate, now able to get a qualified job in the market, and they leave their spot to another candidate.

DDD now is a company of more than 500 people and has trained more than one thousand since its foundation in 2001. Its 2008 revenues surpassed 2 mm$ and now the company is standardizing the operations among the 3 offices to improve its profitability. At this regard, Jeremy talked about how the company is now focusing more on sales and less on donations in order to build a business sustainable in the long run. On top of this is worth noticing that DDD has ambitious expansion plans for existing offices (up to 1500 people in next years) and for going outside Laos and Cambodia through a social franchising model.

I consider this balance between social and business goals very interesting and critical for many companies with similar missions and I'm curious to see how DDD will evolve in the coming years.  

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Getting to the core

First 3 weeks here at Sloan have been intense; I was expecting an easy schedule until core classes started (September 8th) but I was quite wrong. Since my first day I had to run here and there to settle in, attend orientations and (mostly) keep up with the pace of Sloan's happy hours/dinners/clubbing nights.

1st week (August 17-21)
My 1st week was basically a furious signing up: bank account, loan, international/computing/medical orientation sessions, t-pass... plus some of the (many!) social events organized by other Sloanies.

1st weekend (August 22-23)
The 1st weekend wasn't less engaging; in fact I participated to the Rafting trek, 2 days spent in the wild in Maine, rafting and kayaking with other 80 (!!!) classmates. Camping conditions were somewhat basic and the rainy weather made me sleep twice in a row in a tent with a nice pond. Nonetheless it was fun, great chance to get to know classmates, and the cook was very good: the lobster dinner in the island in the middle of Kennebec river was worth of the travel.

2nd week (August 24-28)
2nd week was the pre-term one, we had review sessions of math, finance, accounting and microeconomics. The admit portal says that these sessions are not meant to replace individual summer study. Don't trust it. These classes start really from the basics and I've been told also that there's is a significant overlap with core topics. Classes were useful for me but not all of them were worth of the money (...) even if were surely helpful in getting in touch again with the student's lifestyle.

2nd weekend (August 29-30)
Sailing! Thanks to the organization of my classmate Jeff plus all the sailing club, a lot of sloanies and SOs got their 1st sailing class at the MIT Sailing Pavillion. Staff was very clear in its briefing, producing also a memorable quote about how to not lose control during sailing in difficult situations: "You have to be the change you wish to see in the boat!"  

3rd week (August 31 - September 3)
You could think that medical/computing/internationals orientations were more than enough before starting with classes; actually there is a whole orientation week dedicated to dive deep into Sloan spirit. Firstly, this week I've found out my ocean (Mediterranean) and core team (Gannets), which are your class for the 1st semester (60-70 people) and your study group (6-7 people). Then we went to the Warren center, a location outside Boston used for team-building activities as group climbing, raft building, ... I have to say that I'm not into this fluffy reflection/feeling sharing stuff, nonetheless activities were fun and some of them useful for bounding with teammates.

 

The week closed really well, with a talk of Jeremy Hockenstein, CEO of Digital Divide Data, and the Beer Game (despite the name no beer involved though), directed by John Sterman, insightful professor of System Dinamics at Sloan. Hopefully I'll talk more about these last 2 activities in future ad-posts!

3rd weekend (September 4 - 7)
I've spent this long weekend before the beginning of the madness in NYC, enjoying my little free time left, trying not to think about readings due for next week!

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