TEACHING & LEARNING
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Working Out Without
Breaking a Sweat
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The Wharton Private Equity Boot Camp brings together Wharton students, alums and professors for two tough days.
Boot camp: noun, circa 1942; a navy or marine corps camp for basic training.
About its boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., the U.S. Marine Corps says, "We believe that Marines are forged in a furnace of shared hardship and tough training." Parris Island is famed as a trial of grit and will. It culminates with a two-day test of teamwork and endurance simply called the Crucible.
While nothing at the Wharton School quite compares to that, the Private Equity Boot Camp held on May 12 and 13 was rigorous intellectually, if not physically. The more than 300 students who participated crammed nearly a third of a semester's worth of lectures and seminars into two 12-hour days. A number of students enrolled in the MBA for Executives program at Wharton West even flew in from San Francisco.
"What was amazing was that these were MBAs who'd just finished their exams," says David Feldman, a New York securities lawyer and Wharton alum who was one of the instructors. "They had to get up early and spent 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. two days in a row doing this. It really was grueling and intense."
The curriculum, organized by Steve Sammut, a Wharton lecturer on private equity, and Raffi Amit, professor of entrepreneurship and management, stressed practice over theory. Sammut and Amit encouraged the instructors to provide "a realistic assessment of what is happening in the industry today, and what the outlook for the future is," said Amit, who is also academic director of the Goergen Entrepreneurial Management Program. The boot camp offered a wealth of tips and stories from the field, with participants bandying about terms like "workout," "term sheet" and "due diligence."
Sammut and Amit recruited more than two dozen Wharton alums who work in private equity — venture capital, emerging markets and leveraged-buyout funds — to serve as instructors in many of the 22 sessions.
Rob Newbold, managing principal at Graham Partners, a buyout-firm in Wayne, Pa., taught as part of a panel that he described as "the anatomy of a deal" (officially called "Fundamentals of Deal Structure").
"We used real-life examples of here's how we found the deal, here's how we executed the deal, here were the problems, here's how we solved them," he said. Newbold, for example, drew on his firm's dealings with Eldorado Stone, a maker of stone veneer.
The instructors also offered a raft of checklists and "good anecdotes about what not to do," said Dean Miller, a principal in PA Early Stage Partners in Wayne, Pa., and president of the Wharton Private Equity Alumni Network.
"The venture industry has evolved like an apprenticeship business," Miller explained, with most of the training coming on the job. With the boot camp, Wharton students who land jobs in the industry will begin with "knowledge about mistakes you should avoid, about businesses that might have pitfalls and about things in due diligence that you shouldn't take for granted."
One of those students,
Denis Kalenja, who's between
his first and second years in the MBA program, agreed with Miller's
assessment.
"Steve Sammut is an excellent professor — his classes are packed with
information," Kalenja said. "But this gave you
a much more real-world view of what's going on in the
industry."
Another benefit is the networking, which helped Kalenja find his summer job with the Fossicker Fund, a new buyout fund in Philadelphia. "One of the panelists and I, we talked about what I wanted to do, and he helped me find the job with a friend of his."
The boot camp also helped demystify an industry that doesn't advertise or recruit on campus the way the big investment banks and consulting firms do, Kalenja said. "A lot of people have an interest in how to get into the industry, but they're not quite sure what it's like or how to get into it."
At least not until they've begun to build their VC muscles at boot camp.
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