The Great Race

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Danvers Fleury
UNC - Chapel Hill
MBA Class of 2008

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I entered the class as an MBA volunteer to work on a friend's project, which quickly turned into our potential post-graduation jobs.

The company involves some very cool green technology that is applied to sports gear and ultimately packaged as a fashionable new brand. We brought in three classmates who were perfect fits for the project and began the business plan writing process, as well as the business plan competition process. Because Launch the Venture is absolutely outstanding, we were able to rapidly accelerate our development and enter three business plan competitions right at their deadlines, despite our nascent state.

There is a business plan competition circuit and culture (BusinessWeek.com, 11/13/07), and for better or worse, I was the proverbial Yankee at the Nascar race. By the time we got to our first competition most people were on their fifth. By the time we made it to Rice University for the biggest prize money in the world ($675,000 distributed, with 32 qualifying teams drawn from 234 applicants), other teams had full-blown table displays while we didn't even have business cards. We showed up to the practice round wrinkled and casual; apparently students are supposed to wear suits.

This didn't stop our ragtag outfit from going all out in the first round by developing a new kind of presentation that specifically distinguishes our business from the crowd—that is, a company with an extraordinary management team that requires relatively little capital to play in a fun space with high exit multiples.

Top Contender

After the first day at Rice, the 36 teams were divided into three flights: 24 teams that did not move forward, six wild-card teams competing for one finalist spot, and six guaranteed finalists. After the first day, despite being about six months behind schedule, we qualified as a wild-card team.

Staying up late into the night making several rounds of changes to our presentation to address judges' input, we came in the second day and put on our best performance ever. At lunch, we were announced as the winner of the wild-card round! We were in the top seven with a chance to win the $125K grand prize. In college basketball terms, we were this year's Davidson or George Washington, a team on barely anyone's bracket that now had a chance to cut down the nets in Houston. We charged up to our practice room to prepare for our big performance, and interview with Fortune magazine.

Forty-five minutes later, one of our teammates was in the parking garage and given a clap on the shoulder by a sad-looking competitor who we'd befriended. "I can't believe they did that, I'm real sorry for you guys." My teammate assumed this person was joking around about our finals placement, and accepted the "mock" condolences, but as the next half-hour unfolded we discovered the shocking truth—the judges had miscounted a ballot and the recount moved us out of the winning spot. I was later told some judges called for another recount while others proposed two wild-card teams in the finals, but the organizers made a quick decision to drop us from the finals and then, making an honest mistake, failed to inform us of the decision.

We finished in eighth place, and despite getting a People's Choice award and a Top 3 Elevator Pitch award, we were miles away from generating significant seed capital. The good news is that we had a blast. The Rice competition was top-notch, and since then we've been approached by several generous and intelligent investors, so now it's time to discuss the future of our business as a team.

A Different Kind of Startup

There is a second-year MBA phenomenon that takes place which you are now about to become a part of—people start announcing pregnancies. My wife is due in August, with a baby boy!

Starting a company from scratch and starting a family are two exciting, rewarding, and daunting enterprises generally done separately—doing so concurrently will be a big challenge.

So it's back to the drawing board, which will get moved into another room because we're making space for the crib. It's time to either kick this business into overdrive or find a job, preferably one with health insurance.

Fleury is a member of UNC - Chapel Hill's MBA class of 2008.

Interested in UNC? Feel free to e-mail Danvers Fleury any thoughts or questions you may have.