Late nights, early starts, a lot of coffee and even more learning, was what the process was about – for those with prior venture capital experience as well as those without. All team members brought their unique knowledge and skill-sets in order to drill down into the investment opportunities, present the choices to judges and persuade the companies that this was a deal they couldn’t pass up on. Everyone was challenged, everyone made mistakes, and everyone was corrected and improved as a result. I may still not know, for example, all the intricacies of term sheet preparation, but VCIC pushed me to figure it out, and I now certainly know much, much more than I did. These new learnings are important and satisfying, of course, but the experience of working on them under pressure as part of a team was what made the VCIC ride fun.
An understanding of the venture capital process from the inside will be invaluable to the numerous MBA students who choose to follow a start-up route in coming years. For those that don’t, the issues that were addressed are still extremely relevant for a general business education, and the pressure of working to tight deadlines is something we will all have to deal with again.
These kinds of intense learning experiences are a large part of what an MBA is about, for me – you push the boundaries of your own capacity, and the boundaries expand. That’s what we all chose the Copenhagen MBA for, and VCIC is a great bitesize example of the process, the pressure, and the payoff.
Alistair, fourth from the left in the accompanying blog image, was part of the winning VCIC team.
