For entrepreneurs, business school presents a unique set of choices and opportunities that can drastically alter a founder’s chance of success — for better or worse.
I founded Troop ID while I was an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School in February of 2010. And while today we employ 17 people and sign up nearly 1,000 new members daily, our path to success would have been much swifter had I leveraged the resources at my fingertips while in business school.
Here are 5 of my top lessons — many of them learned the hard way — for other MBAs considering entrepreneurship:
1. Research vesting carefully.
If you have a co-founder, then you will inevitably face a choice about how to split ownership of the company. Initially, this will seem simple: 50/50. But what happens when your co-founder – comparing his ramen noodle diet to the average starting salary of your MBA graduating class — decides to take a high-paying corporate job several months later and wants to remain an equal owner? (more…)