A 'Soft Summer with Gates & Co.

"My 10 weeks in Seattle gave me a deep appreciation for the extraordinary level of talent at Microsoft and in tech generally"

by Grant Allen

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Grant Allen
U Penn
Class of 2007

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It's been a while since my last journal entry, and there's far too much to write about so I'll opt for the cocktail conversation highlights. When I first noodled through what it was I wanted to do for my B-school summer, I knew certainly I wanted to do something different. In other words, no banking, no consulting. (It's harder than it sounds to break ranks.)

After emerging only marginally discouraged and drained from Wharton's Designated Interview Period (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/06, "Grant Allen: Trial by Interview") and deciding on Microsoft (MSFT)—O.K, so maybe I wasn't really pushing the envelope here—I was offered the opportunity to work with a local venture fund, Liberty Associated Partners, based on my work with Wharton's Small Business Development Center (SBDC).

I was at Liberty, a Philadelphia-based evergreen fund with a "few hundred million" in deployed capital, for less than a month. In those four short weeks, though, I had the good fortune to work closely with one of their portfolio companies, Jingle Networks, whose main (actually, currently only) business is 1-800-FREE-411, a free directory assistance service (http://www.free411.com).

As opposed to dialing 411 and paying $1.50-plus to Verizon (VZ) or whomever your landline or cell-phone carrier is, you call 1-800-373-3411 and get your number for free in exchange for listening to a short, usually 10-second, advertisement. It's a slick little Google (GOOG) model and a ridiculous value proposition for end users. As one of the VCs investing in Jingle often remarked, the business model was great because it shrank a large market.

Jingle had just received $26 million in Series B funding from Liberty and three other VCs, including Josh Kopelman's First Round Capital (Josh is a Wharton grad who started Half.com and sold it to eBay (EBAY), one of three companies he's taken public. I'd say he's doing O.K. He's also a wonderful guy I've had the pleasure of meeting a few times around school.)

Since this summer, Jingle has received a $30 million Series C round; I'll defer commenting on whether this was due to my insightful analysis. Since I can't say much more about my work with Liberty and Jingle, I'll just say that you should test the service out for yourself and let us know what you think of it.

Seattle Can Be Sunny

A few short days after passing off my recommendations to the Jingle CEO, I loaded up my iPod with a slew of Nirvana, Death Cab for Cutie, and similar grunge/alt ilk, and hopped a long flight to the Pac Northwest. From the outset, Microsoft made my 10 weeks in Seattle more than comfortable. All that rainy day, doom-and-gloom stuff you hear about Seattle was half-baked from what I could see, or maybe Microsoft had just paid off the weather to stay nice for the two months we were in residence!

Seattle-ans/Seattleites (I still don't know which it is) are uniformly nice, if not surprisingly independent, and every weekend and evening moment was spent engaged in some sort of outdoor activity like biking, hiking, kayaking, etc. It was this last point that led me to believe it really was going to get crappy come October; residents were simply, and smartly, making the most of the nice weather. Regardless, the month of July was heaven: clean, clear blue skies, 60-degree evenings, fresh seafood, good music, and active, interesting company nearly every night.

Face Time with Top Managers

The software goliath provided a superlative summer experience, exposing its 67 MBA interns to leadership from all corners of the organization, including the corner office. We really were lucky to meet with most org heads, including Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Jeff Raikes, Robbie Bach, Kevin Johnson, and J Allard, the brains and passion behind the Xbox initiative (no comment on Zune), among many others.