Meeting the start-ups

It has been an intense day. We all came dressed up in business attire today as we were to meet the entrepreneurs that we will be working with on the start-up projects for the next four months. It was fun to see the whole classed dressed up like that. It reminded me in a different way of where we are: In business school!

Economicst professor Ralf Boscheck entertained us all morning with an interesting case on the US retail market in general and Walmart in particular. I had lunch together with the rest of the start-up team and Professor Stuart Read, who will be our coach through the start-up project. We just wanted to get aligned before meeting the entrepreneurs in the afternoon.

After lunch Leadership Professor Jack Wood gave a relatively brief introduction to Transactional Analysis, which is a theory of personality and a systematic psychotherapy for personal growth. It was developed by Eric Berne in the 1960's and is probably best known for its parent-adult-child ego-state model, which basically says that a person at any point in time is in a behavioral state of either a Parent, an Adult or a child. It is my feeling that many of us in our normal day-to-day business environment would discard such theories as 'too soft' or 'too far out', but because we are where we are and because it is delivered the way it is, it all makes sense.

After a short break Entrepreneurship Professor Benoit Leleux gave presented what was expected of the start-up projects and what had been delivered in the past. The people that have been holding our seats in the past have definitely made some remarkable projects, so the bar is set very high. The tension rose in the class as the time approached 17.30 where we would be sent into the dungeons where the 15 entrepreneur teams waited for us. I think we were a bit nervous.

I will together with Brad Moldin [American], Slava Raykov [Russian], Gerald Lo [Malaysian/Chinese] and Ajay Lakhwani [Indian] be working with a software company on building their business model. We discussed with them for three hours straight and could easily have continued. Although we initially had some difficulty understanding what they actually wanted to sell we left quite excited about the project. There is still a lot we need to learn about it as the software industry is new to all of us except Gerald, but we will visit them on Saturday which will be an excellent opportunity to get another load of questions answered.