TEACHING & LEARNING
Consulting
to Growth Businesses
Opening the Doors to Private Equity
OUTREACH
Wharton
West: Back to School
Q&A with The Newly Appointed Director of The Wharton Small Business Development Center
Faces of Wharton Entrepreneurship
RESEARCH
Inside The "War Room"
Tracking Digital Transformation
Outreach
Wharton West: Back to School
Why do successful entrepreneurs return to the classroom? In the words of one West Coast business founder: "I still don't know everything."
Why would a successful entrepreneur want to go back to the classroom?
Wharton MBA student Ron Murayama founded a variety of successful businesses that led to his earning the "Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year" award this year. At 13, he started a glassblowing business as a supplier for Disneyland that paid for his undergraduate education at USC. A licensed dentist, he left a thriving dental practice in 1989 and now manages the growth of his current business , the Cybersonic oral care system. Though Murayama suffered through seven profitless years that forced him to sell his home and tap out his savings and children's college tuition funds, the product, touted through infomercials featuring celebrities such as Vanna White, has begun to soar. Sales will exceed $60 million this year.
But instead of sitting back and enjoying his success, Murayama enrolled in the demanding Wharton Executive MBA (WEMBA) program at the School's new San Francisco campus called Wharton West. When he took a required statistics class, fellow students actually used his San Juan Capistrano-based Amden Corp. as the case study for a "multiple regression analysis" of a business.
"I Still Don't Know Everything"
After earning so many accolades and rewards in the "School of Hard Knocks," Murayama has one explanation for returning to the classroom for a formal education: "I still don't know everything."
Professor Raffi Amit, who is teaching an entrepreneurship course in San Francisco, isn't surprised to find successful entrepreneurs such as Murayama in the classroom. "We have students who have done several ventures and don't need to work for a living anymore. Now they sit in our classes," said Amit, academic director of Goergen Entrepreneurial Programs, who taught some of the first Wharton courses on the West Coast. "I think the class gives them a way of thinking about their experiences. It gives them a deeper exposure to the processes and allows them to take their experiences, whether good or bad, and learn from them. The class helps to anchor what they have done and to develop principles they can use in whatever they do next in their careers."
Entrepreneurial Aspirations
Other students return to the classroom to gain knowledge to fuel their entrepreneurial aspirations. Wharton West student Sivaram Krishnan is one example. After working for Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics, Krishnan founded a small technology consulting firm in 1995, Atlantis Technology. When he enrolled at Wharton last year, he wanted to create something on a broader scale. "It was my aim, and I believe it was that of several other people in the class, to form one or two substantial companies by the time we graduate," he said.
Since entering Wharton last year, he helped put together plans for two technology-based businesses, related to data storage and radio frequency identification (RFI). He entered these in the Wharton Business Plan Competition, as part of the first group of West Coast students to participate in the annual competition. He and his teammates gained insights from the process. "One consistent story I heard was the need for a stronger marketing plan," he said. "But we also heard from two people who said they would be interested in taking a second look. That was encouraging."
Now he is working with classmates on a new business concept based on wireless local area network technology. It was brought to them by members of a local venture capital firm visiting the Wharton entrepreneurship course. The revolutionary technology can significantly increase performance of wireless networks. But good technology still doesn't guarantee it will be a viable business. "It is a good idea," he said. "Where the rubber meets the road is whether we can get customer applications and customer acceptance, to create a business plan to give meat to the idea."
Classmate Aron Bohlig
started his career at an entrepreneurial start-up and ended working for
a large corporation without switching companies. "I started out working
for a 15-person company that grew to a 50-person company, bought by a
200-person company that grew to an 800-person company that was then bought
by a 70,000-person company," he said.
He and his classmates developed a plan in Wharton's "Entrepreneurial Marketing" course for a hand-held medical device that would help anesthesiologists track their time and procedures on a PDA. "One of my classmates who is a physician had the idea, and I had a software background, so off we went," said Bohlig.
Bohlig said there is a very strong entrepreneurial spirit among students in the San Francisco based MBA program. "Probably at least 40 percent of the people have an entrepreneurial background in one way or another," he said.
Eliminating Geography
This entrepreneurial energy, with a particular emphasis on technology, is part of the motivation for Wharton's presence on the West Coast. "A lot of innovation in business is happening out on the West Coast," said Amit, who, in the late 1990's, helped develop the strategy for launching Wharton West . "Unless we as faculty have exposure to what is happening, we will be left behind. It gives us access to a wide range of companies that were not in business 20 years ago."
Bohlig agrees. He says the Silicon Valley environment also has an entrepreneurial energy that is hard to explain. "Imagine you've discovered you have a sixth sense that no one else has," said Bohlig, who recently moved to the East Coast and will finish the program in Philadelphia. "There are more activities so you have more access to breaking innovations."
To support entrepreneurial students in San Francisco and forge closer connections with the Philadelphia campus, Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs has come up with some innovations of its own. This year the Wharton Business Plan Competition is going paperless. Now students from anywhere in the country can file their business plans online and judges around the world can evaluate them and post responses. Competition organizers also have made arrangements to offer educational sessions to West Coast students via videoconferencing and to increase mentoring opportunities in the area.
There already is strong interest in the competition from the West Coast,
with more than a half dozen entries last year. "Given a class of
about 60, that was a good turnout," said Anne Stamer, associate director
for Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs. "And there seems to be strong
interest out there again this year."
While electronic systems will make it easier to track the hundreds of submissions and judges involved in the process, Stamer said one side effect of the electronic system is that it may make it harder to find out how many West Coast students are participating. Geography becomes invisible. "We won't even know who is West Coast because it all goes by e-mail — which is, I guess, the way it should be," she said.
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