Trinity Term: Week Eight

Week 8 was officially the last week of classes, however we still have a couple left to make up for the time lost due to the MBAT’s. Things are getting a bit hectic as the assignments typically start to come due around this time, but there was still time for one last formal dinner at Exeter college. I had been to the formal hall at Exeter once before, but as this would likely be the last formal dinner that I attend at Oxford, I decided to go. Exeter is one of the most beautiful colleges in Oxford and has a great view of the Radcliffe Camera. I attended the dinner with my Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) group. The competition was held in January and lasted barely a week, but we still get together fairly frequently.

After dinner, we were invited to stay for a talk at the college that was to be given by Biz Stone, who is one of the co-founders of Twitter. I was initially hesitant to stay back as Biz was due to give a talk at the business school the following day. I finally decided to stay back and was glad that I did. The talk was sparsely attended (around 20 students), which meant that it was moved to the college garden and the tone was conversational and highly informal. Biz was officially supposed to be promoting his new book “Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind” but spent most of his time answering questions about his new startup Jelly, and sharing anecdotes about Twitter’s initial days and in particular about a memorable meeting that he had with Mark Zuckerberg. He is highly creative and is most certainly not an MBA type and it was a nice change from some of the visitors that we generally get at the school. I did not attend his talk at the business school the next day, but heard that it was quite good.