Babson College this week announced the results of its first “rocket pitch” competition for students entering the Babson Fast Track MBA program at the college’s SoMa campus in San Francisco. Contestants had three minutes and three slides to explain how they meet Babson’s definition of entrepreneurship as “thinking or acting in a manner that is opportunity obsessed, holistic in approach, and leadership balanced.” The three winners, each of whom will receive a $25,000 merit scholarship, were San Francisco-based Tara Kurland, currently employed by the Air Traffic Control Education Fund; Sammamish, WA-based Rajan Venkitachalam, currently employed by Microsoft; and Oakland, CA-based Delali Attiogbe, currently employed by Genentech.

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Cementing the expansion of its entrepreneurship-focused Fast Track MBA program to the Bay Area, Babson College announced today that it has signed a seven-year lease on 7,000 square feet of space at 135 Main Street in San Francisco’s startup-saturated South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood.

As we wrote in a September profile, the Massachusetts-based school is challenging Bay Area b-schools such as the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley by offering a 27-month program aimed at experienced professionals who want or need to keep working while they earn an MBA. The program admitted its first class of students last spring, and has been using rented classroom space at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus. The second class of 80 Babson students (up from 34 in the first cohort) will gather at the new Main Street location starting in March 2011.

135 Main Street, San Francisco

“This announcement is a strong signal of our commitment to the Bay Area and clearly identifies San Francisco as the hub of our Fast Track operations to serve the western United States,” Raghu Tadepalli, dean of the Babson’s Olin Graduate School of Business, said in a statement. Babson also runs a Fast Track MBA program in Portland, OR, but plans to wind down that operation and shift the resources to the San Francisco program.

The college said that the new facility is equipped with telepresence capabilities that will make it easier for Babson to stay in touch with its students. Fast Track MBA students spend most of their time on Internet-mediated distance-learning activities, gathering once every six weeks for two days of face-to-face classroom work with full Babson faculty.

Tadepalli said the new space will also give Babson the ability to host academic, professional, and networking events for the local business community, and to offer “access to content generated by faculty and students who are deeply committed to advancing Babson’s unique approach to entrepreneurial management education.”

With its choice of location, Babson isn’t shying away from the competition: the new Main Street location is just a block away from the San Francisco campus of the University of Pennsylvania’s famous Wharton School of Business.

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If you’ve spent much time around Boston, you know that the name Babson College is pretty much synonymous with “entrepreneurship.” Centered in Babson Park, MA, adjacent to suburban Wellesley, Babson’s MBA programs seem to churn out startup founders at a rate that’s far out of proportion to the school’s size (1,600 graduate students) or its endowment (just $171 million). The entrepreneurs I met during my three years with Xconomy Boston hailed from Babson just as often as they did from Harvard Business School or MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Now Bay Area businesspeople who’d like to earn Babson MBAs don’t have to move to Massachusetts to do it—and they don’t even have to take (much) time away from their jobs. In a move that directly challenges local B-schools such as the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, Babson has set up the second off-campus version of its Fast Track MBA program in San Francisco. The first cohort of 34 San Francisco students began their studies this spring, and the school is already interviewing students for its next class, which will come together starting in March 2011.

It’s a daring and entrepreneurial move, but perhaps not a surprising one for a school that tends to practice what it preaches. After Babson president Leonard Schlesinger joined the school in 2008 from Victoria’s Secret parent company Limited Brands—where he was chief operating officer—he said his goals for Babson were to broaden the definition of entrepreneurship and extend the school’s reach around the globe. “This is our time…and the world can benefit enormously from a much more expansive diffusion of what it is that we do,” he told Xconomy CEO Bob Buderi in an interview last year.

Schlesinger says the principles of entrepreneurship are “documentable, codifiable, and consequently teachable to anybody.” And the Fast Track program is a case in point, representing the school’s attempt to repackage its two-year MBA program into a form that works for busy Bay Area workers who don’t want, or can’t afford, to leave their full-time jobs.

The program involves a combination of face-to-face classes, taught by full-time Babson faculty members, and Internet-mediated distance learning. First-year students start out by traveling to Babson’s Massachusetts campus for a five-day bootcamp. Then they use wikis, blogs, and Web conferencing tools such as Adobe Connect and the Blackboard learning management system to pursue remote projects. Every six weeks, the students gather at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus in San Francisco for an intense two-day session of classes and discussions (8:00 a.m. to 5:00 pm on Friday and Saturday).

“Unlike a typical evening MBA program that requires students to go to campus once or twice a week for the duration, here the students need to come to campus just once every six weeks,” says Raghu Tadepalli, the Massachusetts-based dean of Babson’s Olin Graduate School of Business and one of the architects of the San Francisco program. “We find that allows students, for the remainder of that period, to work or travel, and the only thing they need to access the material is a broadband connection.”

The Fast Track program is competitively priced—the program costs $70,000 for two years, compared to roughly $160,000 at Wharton and $140,000 at Columbia. And it’s tailored for the West Coast’s entrepreneurial culture, with high-decibel give and take between students, according to Tadepalli. “If the Boston program was going at 60 miles per hour, San Francisco is going at 90,” he says. “The students’ expectations are just that different.”

Tadepalli is careful to spell out what the Babson Fast Track program is not. It’s not an online-only degree program like those offered by the University of Phoenix, because … Next Page »

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During his first week at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in 2008, David Lieb found himself meeting dozens of new classmates and typing their names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses into his phone’s address book, one by one.

“There is this little loop running in my mind that’s always going, ‘Why are things crappy?’” Lieb says now. “That thing went off. We’ve got these $700 devices with all these sensors, connected to the Internet, but here I am using the most archaic technology to transfer information into the device or between devices. I thought that was dumb, and somebody should fix it.”

Lieb’s obsession with the mobile-device data transfer problem would eventually cause him to interrupt his business-school career. But not before he and Booth classmate Jake Mintz had won $25,000 in the school’s New Venture Challenge entrepreneurship competition for Bump—the software they created to instantly send data between any two iPhones.

Bump, which now also works on iPads, iPod Touch devices, and Android phones, is a free app that transmits contact information, photographs, calendar appointments, and social-networking IDs from one device to another wirelessly. Users initiate the transfer by literally bumping two devices together—a trick that relies on one of the aforementioned sensors, the accelerometer.

The free app has been downloaded more than 19 million times since its release in March 2009, putting it securely within the top 100 most popular iPhone apps of all time and bringing the young, Mountain View, CA-based startup considerable press coverage—along with $3 million in venture cash from Sequoia Capital and a group of celebrity angel and micro-VC investors, including Ron Conway of SV Angel, Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, and Joshua Schachter.

After winning the New Venture Challenge and getting accepted to the summer 2009 term of the prestigious Y Combinator venture incubator program in Mountain View, Lieb and Mintz both took an indefinite leave of absence from Booth. Lieb says he has doubts about whether either of them will go back, now that they and their third co-founder, Andy Huibers, have such a big real-world business opportunity on their hands. “Obviously the school wants to produce graduates, but producing dropouts who go do exciting things is valuable, too,” says Lieb, who is now Bump’s CEO. [See a video interview with Lieb on Page 4.]

Perhaps the most exciting thing about Bump is that it fixes a longstanding problem with most Internet-enabled mobile devices. Wi-Fi and 3G Internet access is now nearly ubiquitous, so smartphones can easily connect to Web or e-mail servers that may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Oddly, however, there’s no good way to send data directly from one device to another that may be just inches away. To send contact information, photographs, or other personal data to a friend’s phone, you typically have to compose an e-mail with an attachment, or perhaps an MMS message.

One exception to this sorry state of affairs was Palm’s line of PDAs and smartphones, which—starting with the Palm III in 1998—had built-in infrared ports that allowed two Palm users to … Next Page »

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[Updated 3:30pm 1/9/10 with clarification (see below)] If you want to know which companies are looking to hire top young business talent around town, just ask the group of 20 or so first-year MBA students from MIT Sloan School of Management. The students from Cambridge, MA, are in Seattle this week looking to make contacts for jobs and summer internships.

It’s all part of the annual “tech trek” program in which some 150 Sloan MBA students split up to visit companies in Seattle, Silicon Valley, and the Boston area. The students on the Seattle leg visited Adobe, Microsoft, and RealNetworks yesterday, and they are at Amazon, Starbucks, and T-Mobile today.

I met up with a group of them over drinks last night. They had a refreshingly candid perspective on job prospects at Seattle tech companies, and some valuable insights into the local tech-business scene. (Almost worth the $43 parking ticket I got from the BluWater Bistro lot—it’s been one of those weeks.)

“The job market is better than last year. Companies are very receptive, and positions are open,” says Sloan student Hilda Tang, a former management consultant in New York City and a native of Vancouver, BC. Tang helped organize this year’s trip to Seattle, together with fellow first-year Ryan Thurston, a former design engineer and product manager at Seattle-based Impinj. “Everyone’s hiring, but they’re hedging their bets,” Thurston says.

Kathryn Wepfer, another Sloan student, previously worked for four years at General Electric in Massachusetts managing a technology development program (defense work). Wepfer went on the Silicon Valley leg of the trip earlier this week, where Sloan students visited VMware, Cisco, Google, Apple, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Zynga. Last year, Google and Yahoo didn’t participate, as their hiring was on hold. This year, the students say Google is hiring selectively for positions in finance, operations, marketing, and business development; Yahoo didn’t impress, with one student commenting, “What are [they], really?”

It sounds like some companies were much better at marketing themselves to students than others. The strongest reaction I got was when I asked about their visit to Apple (in Silicon Valley). “Everyone came away totally creeped out,” one student said, adding that the company came off as “secretive” and “sterile,” and that during their visit, at least one Apple employee admitted it wasn’t a great place to work while Steve Jobs was on leave.

[This paragraph added on 1/9/10 for more context on Apple---Eds.] This student followed up with me later to say, “We heard from people in finance, marketing, and product management—everyone hands down was very excited about their job and being part of the Apple community. It’s a very attractive company to me, but it is somewhat difficult to see the reality of the secretive culture that may be necessary to maintain Apple’s ability to create products that change the world. I, and I think the rest of the group, appreciated their openness and honesty.”

On the Seattle front, I had to wonder about Microsoft, which is coming off a year of … Next Page »

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Business school applications require many thousands of words’ worth of essay questions, usually dealing with those universal but ephemeral corporate themes of Teamwork, Impact, and Dealing With Difficult Situations. Somewhere within this morass the applicant is generally expected to answer the question, “What are you going to do with an MBA?” To this there are three types of answers:

1. The Exceedingly Grandiose (“Harness the power of sustainable development to change the fate of the Third World”).

2. The Believable But Contrived (“Leverage my current skill set and augment it with a top-notch experiential education”).

3. The True But Obviously Unacceptable (“Get a job that doesn’t make me want to kill myself”).

Needless to say, upon matriculation these claims are immediately forgotten, as the practical matters of schoolwork and socializing take over. But right around the time that everyone starts giving serious thought to their summer internship, the question, unbidden, comes roaring back. What am I going to do with my MBA?

The summer internship, as the mid-point of the two-year MBA, carries far more import than regular people usually ascribe to the word “internship”. It is often assumed that upon graduation the student will give serious consideration to a full-time position at the summer employer or, at the very least, remain in the same general industry. This past January, at the MIT Sloan School of Management, anxieties around internships began to escalate. As a first-year, I found the whole process to be like a pop quiz, blindsiding me into making a life-changing decision before I was ready. I mean, I came to business school to escape the real world.

Eventually, however, an attractive opportunity presented itself. Through an old colleague I was introduced to a startup in Boston called WordStream, which got its funding a year ago and launched its product in January. WordStream is run by Rob Adler, a serial entrepreneur who was brought in a month after the company’s funding to be CEO. Rob, a Harvard Business School grad, exudes enthusiasm, and is one of those mysterious people whose number of connections on LinkedIn is listed as “500+”, which always make you wonder exactly how much larger than 500 people their network is.

WordStream is still at the stage where the company’s strategy is constantly being reexamined and openly discussed amongst everyone in the company (there are currently only 18 full-time employees). Who is our target customer? What exactly is our value? How should the product change?

The entrepreneurship professors at Sloan, veteran entrepreneurs themselves, often speak in quasi-romantic tones about working for a startup as a capitalistic ideal, the intersection of high-minded business strategy and dirty, sweaty reality. They could not be more correct. About a week after starting at WordStream, Rob came over to me, looking grave. “I’d like to speak with you for a minute,” he said. He brought me into … Next Page »

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When the Dow is sitting at half its 52-week high, the U.S. economy is shedding about a half million jobs a month, and the financial institutions of entire countries are collapsing, it’s as good a time as any to do some hard thinking about your professional future. At business schools these days, more and more students are trying to figure out whether this is the best time to start a business. With entrepreneurship as the flagship program at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the chatter here on this topic is loud.

Since we started in the fall, every professor, keynote speaker, and panelist has said that this is a great time to be an entrepreneur. The reasoning goes that The Party is over, most of the money is gone, and the only people left are the Serious People. And if these Serious People can create products that others need, then there will be suppliers who want their business, and plenty of cheap office furniture. This is what we’ve been told.

“Go for it”
The best way to figure out if this is a good time to be an entrepreneur would be to start a company. Instead, we decided to examine entrepreneurship and its relationship to business school. Can entrepreneurship be taught at a business school? What are the tools that students can use to start new ventures? What kind of environment facilitates budding entrepreneurs? What needs to be changed to encourage entrepreneurship at business schools? Armed with these types of questions we talked to several first-year, second-year, and alumni MIT Sloan students who either have entrepreneurial aspirations or have already started new ventures.

So what did we find out? In our conversations with a select pool of people, there was a near unanimous agreement that MIT Sloan is indeed a fertile ground for aspiring entrepreneurs. Environment, competitions, classes, and access to resources are some of the many factors people cited that help MIT Sloan students build new ventures.

We also found that not everything is perfect. A few small changes would ensure that an even higher proportion of students gets excited and succeeds in starting new ventures.

It’s the Environment, Stupid
The entrepreneurial environment at MIT Sloan was the advantage cited most often among all the people that we interviewed. On paper, MIT Sloan has essentially the same diverse mix of students as other business schools. But here, students hear directly from successful entrepreneurs every day, many of whom were sitting in their seats only a few years before. These entrepreneurs are at once river guides, role models, and catalysts for our own startup ambitions, inspiring us to action.

The ClickDiagnostics founding team is a perfect example of a group of individuals with diverse skill sets, from an MIT neuroscientist to a consultant, who came together as a result of the entrepreneurial ecosystem at MIT and the Cambridge/Boston area.“The idea was so big and we needed passionate people with so many different skill sets—where could we have gotten them all, nowhere else but MIT,” said Tania Aidrus (Sloan 2008). Tania and Ting Shih (Sloan 2009) helped co-found ClickDiagnostics while they were students at MIT Sloan. ClickDiagnostics and their non-profit arm ClickHealth connect rural patients with remote medical specialists through community health-workers equipped with mobile phones.

“Coming to Sloan exposed me to a real network of entrepreneurs,” said Jeff Vyduna. Vyduna is a co-founder of PollEverywhere, which claims to be the most affordable way to make events interactive by displaying and counting real-time text messages and votes from your audience directly in your PowerPoint presentation.

Vyduna is an interesting case study in that he started at MIT Sloan in 2007 but took a leave from the program after the spring 2008 semester to concentrate on PollEverywhere full time. Vyduna said that being around like-minded people at MIT Sloan that he could bounce ideas off of gave him enough confidence that he was right about his idea to go all-in.

Shuba Swaminathan (Sloan 2010), with one venture already under her belt, felt that her Silicon Valley network was inadequate. “My network in the Valley consisted of mostly engineers. Business school was a quick way to diversify and grow the network with top notch people,” said Swaminathan, who is now working on another new venture in the high-tech space.

Although she has only been at MIT Sloan for only seven months, Swaminathan has already felt the power of association with MIT. She believes that the main reason she got an audience with a Fortune 500 CEO was because she was at MIT. “My email to the CEO would have been ignored if it had not originated from the @mit.edu address, I am sure,” said Swaminathan.

Getting an audience with investors, usually not an easy task for many entrepreneurs, gets easier at business schools. Josh Miller (Sloan 2009) says, “As a student, reaching out to other entrepreneurs and VCs for advice, or to invite them to speak, is so much easier. There’s less pressure because … Next Page »

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If you are a student enrolled in a MBA program these days, phrases like “Boy, your timing in going back to school has been perfect!” and/or “This is the best time to be a <fill in your standard business school career choices>” are serenaded quite often in your direction. Typical reactions to this would range from a self-congratulatory smile to a deadly stare. Ah, the wonders of summer internship recruiting season for first year MBA students!

Across most business school campuses, the months of December and January bring with them a flurry of activities: case discussions like your life depended on it, mock interviews on getting your “story” right for a career in finance, and trying to find reasons why your background in Romance languages is a great fit for a career in energy. We first-year MBA students at the MIT Sloan School of Management are no different. If you happened to stumble into Sloan’s main building any day in January you would not have missed the organized chaos of summer recruitment preparations.

With the economy in its current state, students’ anxiety levels are naturally all over the charts. I don’t yet have a quantitative picture of this spring’s recruiting season, but I have come across a range of interesting opinions and statements from students on campus. I have also looked briefly at a few trends in recruiting from past years.

The top recruiting industries at most business schools are consulting and finance. General management, operations, and marketing/sales round out the industry pools that recruit at MBA-granting schools. At MIT Sloan, there’s historically a large group of students interested in entrepreneurship as well. Students have had interesting recruiting experiences in all these industries this spring.

“In most years we would have given you an offer” was one of most common responses students got after their final round interviews at consulting firms. There is no question that internship offers in this industry are down. I went back and looked at the recruiting numbers for consulting the last time we had a recession and noticed an interesting trend. Officially the last recession started in 2001 and ended in 2003. At Sloan, consulting offers dropped from 35-40 percent of of the class in 1999 to 15-17 percent in 2003 at MIT Sloan. It took almost two years for those numbers to climb back up to earlier levels.

Recruiting for finance internships has been equally interesting. It’s a safe assumption that with the financial sector at the center of the economy’s malaise, internships would be hard to come by. Students who poured their hearts out at MIT Sloan (and other schools I presume) preparing for finance interviews found out first hand. The consensus opinion was that the internship pools at most banks have shrunk significantly. One could sense the frustration in a classmate when he saw a posting for “Career in Finances” lecture in mid-January. He said, “Let me guess: they aregoing to tell us how this is the best time to start a financial career. Same **** different day.”

Notwithstanding the lull in traditional hiring, industries recruiting for general management, operations, marketing, strategy and sales functions has been active. Some students who had their minds set on traditional MBA internships are re-evaluating their interests and strengths and are finding other avenues to learn during summer.

There has been an increasing focus at MIT Sloan on entrepreneurship in the past few years. While debates rage as to whether entrepreneurship can be taught in a classroom, students seem to believe so. Enrollment in the entrepreneurship and innovation program at MIT Sloan has been steadily increasing. Some of the students in this program are making plans to either work on their own startup in the summer or spend time at a startup to learn what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

Times may be less than optimal for us MBA students now, but there is still an abundance of optimism on campus. There is a strong belief that most industries will recover to a certain extent by the time our class graduates, in 2010. Until then most of us plan to hunker down, use our time to build a strong foundation, and smile and nod whenever someone says, “Isn’t this the best time to be in business school?”

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