10 years for the Chicago NVC

I spoke Thursday at the Chicago GSB’s 10th Anniversary Celebration for the New Venture Challenge (its business plan competition). I have the odd distinction of having been in the finals three times, even though business school is only two years. When it takes you 8 years to finish a 4 year dual program, you get a lot of bites at the apple.

Besides tracing my history through the program and how it catalyzed my development as an entrepreneur, I offered a few general observations for entrepreneurs. Since I’m not a great speaker, I hope they come out better in the blog.

1. If you focus on building a company, you’ll raise money and do well in a business plan competition. If you focus on raising money or succeeding in a competition, you’ll never build a company.

Business plan competitions are often focused on the VC pitch and raising money. While that’s a useful way to organize your thinking as you build a business plan, it sometimes leads people to put the cart before the horse. Raising money is interesting, but most of being an entrepreneur comes later. I spent about 10 days raising money for Clickshift. I’ve spent 345 days running the company since then, and I’ll probably spend many more before I even consider raising money again.

2. Entrepreneurs have to be open minded to criticism, but they also need their own critical judgment. If you put 10 VCs in a room and ask them about a business, you might get 20 opinions – and 19 of those might be wrong. But entrepreneurs, especially MBAs, routinely tailor their plans to make the latest pitch go well. It’s better to evaluate every input on its merits and not by its source – you’ll find the best ideas can come from anywhere, and if you build a great company, the VCs will tailor their pitches to you, not the other way around.

3. CEOs should understand that their product is not the same thing as their company. What Clickshift sells is an important piece of the company, but it’s only one piece. Our people, our culture, our sales process – those are what will let us scale to be a huge business.

4. You have to love it. Most entrepreneurs fail several times in their careers. (Leo Chang doesn’t :) Even when you succeed, there are a lot of dark days along the way. If you don’t love it, you’ll never fight through those dark days and come out on the other side.

Related Tags: startups, venture capital, business school