Start-up shut-down

'So you are giving the software away for free and you want to build a business doing that?'. We were somewhat sceptical when we meet the people from Bacula Systems for the first time on 21 January. There we were, six guys from all over the world who had been working with chemicals, automobiles, fashion clothing, banking and shipping. And now we were asked to help a company doing open source backup software build a business! We barely knew what software was about, not to mention open source. Only Gerald Lo [Malaysia] is from the IT industry, so we had to rely heavily on his technical expertise in the beginning.

Today we gave our final presentation to Bacula wrapping up the past four months of work by summarising the findings and recommendations we have made along the way. There were no surprises for them today, as we have been working with them all the way. Bacula was represented by CEO Jack Griffin and by Kern Sibbald, who has programmed the Bacula software. Both gentlemen have a long career in the IT industry. They were very satisfied with the cooperation we have had and said that they will be making signficant changes to their business model and target customers on the basis of our findings. That is the kind of feedback that is great to receive. Then it has all been worth it!

Along the way we have had to learn the basic jargon of the industry and understand a very complex and advanced product well enough to be able to define how it is different from its main competitors. We have learned the basic drivers of the open source community and the dilemmas that a company operating in this sphere faces. We have spoken to potential customers and partners and have analyzed the ins and outs of the competitors. The process has taken us through countless iterations and involved hours and hours of discussions, but eventually we were able to come to an agreement both among ourselves and with Bacula on how the business should move forward.

Tomorrow at 9:50 we start the grand finale. We will be presenting to a panel of Venture Capitalists, who all have seen thousands of business plans and who are renowned for their ability to spot weaknesses a mile away. We have practised the presentation over and over again. I am certain that Ajay and Cedric - who will be presenting - are rehearsing the lines in their sleep right now. Fifteen minutes to explain four months of work is not a lot. We need to be sharp! Really, really sharp!



4 February 2009. Backup for dummies. This is where it all began. Bacula CEO Jack Griffin was very patient and took the time to teach us the basic technicalities.



7 February - Information overload! Trying to make sense of it all. It just seemed insurmountable at the time.



4 March - Bacula boys at work in the Maersk building, where we spent a lot of time together. From left it is Gerald Lo [Malaysia], Ajay Lakhwani [India], Brad Moldin [USA], Slava Raykov [Russia] and Cedric Jusseaume [France].



Mid March - Finally some kind of framework starts taking shape.



Late May - Sharpening the final presentation!

Any given Sunday

9 hours of sleep at night, football in Parc De Milan at 9am, three rounds of laundry and another two hour nap in the afternoon. Sundays are about recuperation, about repairing the damages of the past week and preparing yourself for those of the coming week. It is not just about your body, but also your apartment, your dirty laundry, your emails and your list of assignments. It is your one chance per week to bring things down from completely chaotic to just overwhelming.

You never get to the bottom of things, but you can get it to a level where you have an overview of what you need to do. That is very good for stress levels in general. This weekend I didn't get quite as far as I wanted, though. Partly because we had a full day of Career Services yesterday and partly becuase of a meeting today with the company from our Startup Project.

The startup project has reached its very final phase. We have delivered several recommendations to our startup company over the past months, which they generally have accepted and implemented. We delivered another two recommendations today that also were very well accepted. We agreed with them that it now is time to stop collecting and analyzing data and start preparing the final handover to them.

We will be delivering our handover to the company on 29 May and we will be doing our final exam presentation on 30 May. The 'jury' in that exam will be a panel of experienced Venture Capitalists that will measure us on how much Real Value we have added to company. The exam will be held in the form of a 15 minute presentation.

15 minutes to present 4 month of work is not a lot, so we better be sharp. Razor sharp! We have tons of information, findings and recommendations. The trick is to destill it into a heavy, but clear, substance that is easily digestible. We have 12 days to do that and to write the 20 page report that goes with it. It has been made very clear that consultancy-like presentations with high-level strategic recommendations will not be accepted. It needs to be down-to-earth, concrete and real value added to the company. Real World, Real Learning!


Daniel Porot held yesterdays Career Services workshop on job hunting. Daniels is a bit of a guru in his field and you clearly felt the many years of experience that were behind his recommendations. I very much liked his fast paced course with a lot very concrete and actionable advice. There were no 'it depends' answers here.
Daniel presented by making drawings on his laptop, which then were projected on the screen. I have never seen this method used before, but it was very effective. He made more than 100 drawings during the 8 hour course. Here you see he his 'Bermuda Triangle of job hunting'.


MBA student at work! I do not have the view of the lake and the Alps that some of my fellow students do, but whenever I can I move out on my balcony. That gives me some fresh air while getting some work done. A good combination. It is warm enough in Lausanne now to sit outdoor all evening and I really enjoy to just sit there and listen to the sound of the rain hitting the trees.

A night in Bollywood

Today was one of those days that just disappeared too fast. Class all day and a three hour start-up meeting afterwards. Two things were different, though.

First of all my old friend, Stefan, was visiting from Denmark. Stefan is half Swiss, half Danish and found time to stop by Lausanne while visiting his family close to Zürich. I think he got a good first hand impression of the frantic speed at which things pass by at IMD.

Secondly, tonight was the night of the Bollywood party that our Indian friends have been working on for the past couple of weeks. And what a party it was! There were shows prepared by those who really knows how to dance the Indian way and there was dance tuition by Suchir Swarup for those of us who have absolutely no clue how to do it.

The evening ended on the peak with Kanika Lakhwani showing a video of a somewhat younger version her husband Ajay in a real Indian TV soap opera! All this time we have had a real Bollywood star walking among us without knowing. Ajay is in my startup group. The group will never be the same again now that this fantastic secret has been revealed. It can only make you wonder what other talents or secrets that are kept hidden in the class.

Thanks to all our Indian friends for a fascinating and fun evening!


Left-to-right: Gerrit Sinderman [German], Marco Simons [Dutch] and Ruslana Zbagerska [Ukrainian/Canadian] looking great at the Bollywood party. Not surprisingly Gerrit went on to win the price as the best dressed.


Ajay Lakhwani and his wife Kanika showing how real Indian dancing is done. It was fascinating to watch. Shortly after this picture was taken Kanika revealed Ajay's Bollywood stardom to the class!

Friday in the spring

The day started with a two-hour Entrepreneurship session with Professor Benoit Leleux. In that period of time we managed to finish the session on valuing entrepreneurial companies AND to debrief an entire book. That is just the pace that things are moving at and you just have to hang on as much as you can.

Accounting has now moved from 'financial accounting', i.e. Profit & Loss, Balance Sheets and Cash Flow Statements, into management accounting, which basically means management reporting. This is, at least to me, much more intuitive and logic, but let's wait and see. We are only a few sessions into it, so it might be too early to say.

In Operations Nikos Tsikriktsis, in his usual turbo-charged style, debriefed yesterdays visit at La Poste and reviewed the material we had been through in order to get us prepared for exam.
Then followed a quick update from Career Services on the status of on-campus recruiting and job fairs.

On wednesday our Startup project group had our so-called 'pitstop'. We met with Pascal Dutheil, an experienced Venture Capitalist, who gave us feedback on the work we had done so far on our Startup projects and some pointers on how to proceed. The meeting was held in a polite atmosphere, but it was easy to sense that Pascal is used to communicate in the no-nonense terms that the Venture Capitalists are known and feared for. Today our group then met with our coach, Professor Stuart Read, to discuss the latest development on the project and to prepare ourselves for a meeting with the startup company tomorrow.


I took this picture from the harbor when we were getting on the bus to go to La Poste yesterday. Coming from a land with no mountains this view is just priceless.


Two Russians at the Swiss Postal service, Yury Vasilkov (left) and Slava Raykov.


The sun is coming out and the temperature is creeping up, so we move the coffee breaks outside whenever we can. Here it is (left-to-right) Bruno Portnoi [Brazilian], Oren Yehudai [Isreli], Satoshi Konagai [Japanese] and Tony Jamous [French/Lebanese].

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.