We have taken the famous BAEN 506/507 Technology Entrepreneurship class since the beginning of January. The faculty is flawless and entails such big guns as

• Paul Cubbon, marketing and entrepreneurship guru as well as guest speaker of TEDtalks,
• Thomas Hellmann, who worked on his phd at Stanford under the famous prof. Stiglitz and taught entrepreneurship there for 10 years,
• Deven Dave, a venture capitalist from Vancouver,
• Mike Lyons from the Silicon Valley, who has thought the famous Entrepreneurship Class at Stanford for the last 20 years giving birth to many well-known ventures and who flies up from San Francisco just for our class,
• and TAs such as Kevin Reilly, who made through this course previously and who offers invaluable help and advice on how to deal with the different questions that arise on the path of entrepreneurship.

A more detailed description of the course and the faculty:

http://evc.sauder.ubc.ca/techventure/instructor.html

Our first idea has been killed after two weeks. Customer validation is a quite useful technique to evaluate the viability of any business idea, and still it is not applied widely enough. When we hit the wall, Thomas sent around an e-mail for the faculty to inform them about our failure. Surprisingly, we got congratulating e-mails basically saying “Test your product and if you fail, fail fast! You did it!” The support we get from the faculty is indescribable. We got introduced to potential partners in a blink of an eye and sat in a meeting talking about business opportunities in digital media just two hours after our original idea got killed.

At the beginning of January, 36 determined mbas left Vancouver to compete with 21 other business schools at the MBA Games near Toronto.

Every team had to submit a video on the theme of leadership. Our class’ masterpiece is based on scenes from several movies: UBC MBAs take on the 2013 MBA Games

After the closing ceremony a short promotional film was released by the organizers to summarize the events of the weekend: The MBA Games Official

Our class won second place for the video and also for the live performance at the opening ceremony.

1-2.) The opening ceremony of the games. Indescribable experience.

3-4.) We excelled in volleyball and basketball (to some extent..).

We had the chance to volunteer at an elderly home. There isn’t more rewarding than people in their eighties offering cookies made by themselves to express their appreciation!

At the Movember Closing Event at the end of November many people got rid of their mustaches while some others grew new ones in just a blink of an eye.

As we are close to the North Pole, Santa is a returning visitor to Vancouver. If you are lucky enough, you can even take a picture with him.

The first breakfast of the new year. Hopefully this year will be at least as rich in experiences as the breakfast was in calories!

On the ferry back from Victoria where we spent the New Year’s Eve with friends from the class. The ferry takes you among so many beautiful islands that it is worth to stay on the deck even if it’s cold and windy.

 Exploring Victoria’s secret…

A typical week during the Integrated Foundations. That week we had only four assignments to handle in. Sometimes we had six. The timetable doesn’t include the team meetings, the time for reading for each class and the time for actually writing the assignments. The reason: there is just no time for that.

We had a fun business simulation for several weeks with which we managed a manufacturing company in groups of five.

Whiteboards became part of our lives. This is a simple process map to brainstorm for our second project during period two. The objective was to develop a business plan for a new opportunity in just five weeks.

In mid-October, between period one and two, I took a Greyhound night bus to visit Calgary. I flew through the city many times before but I never had the chance to actually explore it. I was curious about Calgary as I heard many interesting stories about the city from my classmates coming from Alberta. As Calgary is full of opportunities for mbas I definitely wanted to walk around to get a feeling whether I could see myself living there.

I arrived early on a Friday morning and although it was mid-October the city was covered with snow and the temperature was -6 C. Nevertheless, I wandered around downtown by foot as that is a great opportunity to explore any new city. Later, I took both CTrains in all the directions to see the surroundings. I then checked out the campus of the University of Calgary and the building of the Haskayne School of Business, just to see how those other mba folks look like.

During my time in Calgary, I found locals to be very kind and even though the city has one million residents it felt like I was in a nice town with nice people. The following day, I took another bus up to Edmonton to visit my friend and drive back together to Vancouver through Jasper. Edmontonians seemed to be kind as well and the city had some nice green spots too. From there the drive through the Rockies was amazing. We have seen many kind of animals along the way. It was also nice to discover eastern BC while we drove back toward Vancouver.

A nice bench in downtown Calgary indicating that the area isn’t just about oil and gas.

Edmonton.

Driving through Alberta.

The Jasper National Park

The school’s very own regatta was organized on a sunny weekend in August. The race was won by Snowball, a Martin 244, on which I had a chance to race among others.

The first days were flawless. We attended many programs, participated in Sauder’s very own sailing regatta and went on hiking to lay our eyes on the city from above.

1-3.) English Bay and Sunset Beach, where many people enjoy the outdoors during the summer.

4-5.) The Grouse Grind

I have planned to start this blog many times, but I have waited for the perfect moment to actually begin my first post. Of course, I have never actually defined what the perfect moment was, so I have never really known whether the time has came. But today has been different. I’m overloaded again with readings, assignments, team projects and presentations to work on for next week, so when could be a better time to begin to write if not now?

You might want to ask how the program has been so far? Well, It hasn’t been easy. And it’s not because of  the complexity of the material. Everything is nicely covered and presented. The difficulty comes from the workload that takes over our weekdays and weekends. This is basically a 6 am to 10 pm commitment to business. Maybe a little bit less on weekends.

At the same time, the mental expansion is significant. Although we entered the program as experienced professionals, now, just five months later, we can already feel remarkable change and see our surroundings from a different angle. The world opened up, there is no question about that. And we still have twelve months to go!

I glanced over the pictures we have taken so far since the beginning of the program and though the best way to summarize this time would be to share some of them here. And so the next posts will be dedicated to that.