And now, the rest of the story…
How I Ended Up as the Head of the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Center at IESE Business School
Last week I posted on LinkedIn that I’d started in a new role at IESE Business School as the Head of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center, and the likes and congratulatory messages flowed in.
But a quick post isn’t THE story, so here are the details…
As crazy as it sounds, it started 3 YEARS, 3 MONTHS, and 23 DAYS ago — so announcing my new position last week was a long, LONG, L-O-N-G time in coming.
In fact, I started talking with IESE about coming on board in October 2014, when Itziar de Ros, then the Director of MBA Admissions, asked me during my admissions interview if I would consider working at IESE after graduation.
I answered the only way you should ever answer a question like this in an MBA admissions interview, “Yes. Absolutely!”
I continued, “Over the past months of preparing my application and researching the school, I’ve found that the mission and values of the school really resonate with me. If the right opportunity was presented I’d be crazy not to consider it.” Classic, right?
Here’s the thing though. I had worked in education management, and I wasn’t really interested in making a further career of it.
In fact, part of the reason I elected to do a full-time MBA instead of an executive MBA is because I wanted to do a career change. I was eligible for an executive MBA in part because of my 10 years in education management — which is why Itziar asked the question about working at IESE in the first place. She saw in my application that I was serving as the VP of Advancement overseeing PR, marketing, communication, fundraising, alumni relations, and admissions for a large private school in the U.S. and knew that those skills could be useful to IESE.
Ultimately, IESE accepted my application, and I decided IESE was the best business school for me. Nine or tenth months later, I quit my job, sold my house, two cars, and everything else that I could, packed up what was left of my life in the U.S., and moved with my wife and two young children to Spain for two of the most incredible years of my life.
When I started my classes I wasn’t exactly sure what was going to be next for me professionally. Some students arrive with a clear idea that they want to be management consultants or investment bankers or go into a specific industry.
For me, it was the opposite. I knew several fields I did NOT want to go into, but not where I did want to go. Very quickly after arriving though, I got bit, and bit hard, by the area of startup investing.
You see, in addition to my experience in education, I had also co-founded a small business into an ongoing minor success. But, because I had bootstrapped the business, my previous exposure to VC and angel investing was pretty limited.
Thanks to a global MBA competition called the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC), I drank from a fire hose for almost six months, progressing through six stages of competition from an initial pool of about 140 students at IESE, to being selected to the school’s five person team, to winning the European Championship, and participating in the Global Finals.
This validated my interest and transformed into an incredible summer working with Samuel Gil at JME Venture Capital where I identified a startup they ultimately participated in providing funding to.
I wanted to stay active in the startup ecosystem during my second year of courses, so Jesus Monleon and Marc Badosa let me spend a few months as an entrepreneur in residence at SeedRocket one of Spain’s leading accelerators, focused primarily on helping them get 4Founders Venture Capital ready to make its first investments.
By March or April of last year, the clock started ticking louder and louder — and as the school year wound down I started focusing more and more on securing a “real job”. VC was still calling my name, and I received a few offers from VC firms, but nothing was quite right. Working in VC wasn’t about getting rich, it was about investing in people, ideas, and the future. It was about identifying talented, motivated entrepreneurs and connecting them with resources that would make them more successful and make the world a better place.
Then came a conversation with Julia Prats, head of the Entrepreneurship Department at IESE.
Over the two years of the program, the school had knocked on my door once or twice about joining in a traditional post-MBA role like admissions, custom program sales, etc., but those were the sort of roles I was trying to move away from. When Julia and I spoke, it was about a very different sort of role, and it immediately became clear that we both shared a vision of how IESE could serve entrepreneurs.
IESE is a school founded by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. We teach with a global scope and general management perspective and strive to instill an entrepreneurial way of thinking in every student regardless of their career path.
It was a natural fit to my background and passion.
We have a great platform of entrepreneurial resources (I think I’ll write about this next), and we’re adding more, trying to serve entrepreneurs at every stage of the their journey. I joined a great team, and I’m focused on boosting the visibility of IESE’s entrepreneurial offerings and serving as a point of contact to the ecosystem.
This is why I’m excited.
This is what I’ve waited 3 years, 3 months, and 23 days to do.
If you’re working in or around the entrepreneurship space, regardless of your role — startup founder, corporate intrapreneur, search fund entrepreneur, investor, just starting to explore, or whatever — I’m here for you.
If you’re an IESE alum, let me know what you think we’re doing well and what you think we need to work on. I’m rolling up my sleeves…
