L'Chayim! Darden GBE Israel 2011

Shalom! I returned to the US on Sunday after a fantastic two weeks in Israel. With all due respect to Brazil, Argentina, Spain, and Sweden, I doubt there could be a better-organized FY GBE experience at Darden!

The purpose of the trip was to focus on entrepreneurship and innovation in Israel, which has become known as the "Startup Nation" -- it has more start-up businesses per capita than any other country in the world. We would be meeting with companies and government officials and working on projects with Israeli startups which were interested in entering the US market. We also would be visiting historical and cultural sites in Israel and learn both about the Arab-Israeli conflict as well as the religious-secular divide in Israel. 25 intrepid Darden FYs (and 2 SYs) would go along for the journey.

Venture capitalist Scott Tobin, who once turned down the chance to invest in Facebook.  Oops.

After rushing through a final week of exams and group projects at Darden, we flew to Israel just in time for its Memorial Day on May 9th. Unlike Memorial Day in the US, which is more about going to the beach than remembering soldiers, the Israelis take their Memorial Day seriously. After a morning meeting with an expat venture capitalist, we traveled to Yitzhak Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, where we watched a moment of silence at 11AM. A siren sounded and everyone left their vehicles, standing at attention. A very powerful moment!

In the afternoon we had lunch with our startup's entrepreneur and then in the evening the Independence Day celebrations began! The contrast between the somber Memorial Day and the exuberant Independence Day celebration is deliberate -- Israelis want to ensure that they remember the fallen who helped create and preserve the Israeli nation state. Independence Day fireworks and music were certainly much more fun, but I was too jet-lagged to really make a big night out of it. The actual holiday the following day was light -- we saw the Independence Museum (where the Israeli state was declared in 1948) and walked around old Tel Aviv and the port of Jaffa.

Outside the Knesset (Israeli Parliament)

On May 11th we traveled to Jerusalem, where we met with the Accountant General (the CFO of Israel) and a couple foreign affairs ministers. In the afternoon we toured the Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, and received a lecture on Israeli business culture following our evening dinner. On our second day in Jerusalem, we met officials at the Ministry of Trade, followed by a visit to the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset). The afternoon was intense -- an afternoon tour of the Jerusalem Old City, including visits to the City of David, the Church of the Holy Sepulchure, and the Wailing Wall.

On Friday, May 13th we traveled to an Israeli commune, the Kibbutz Magal, where we met with irrigation giant Netafim. We toured their facilities and learned about the distinctive lifestyle in a collectivist community. In the afternoon we heard a heated debate between a reform Jewish rabbi and a follower of Orthodox Judaism, after which we recognized the Shabbat, the beginning of the Jewish day of rest on Friday evening. In largely secular Tel Aviv, though, it was plainly visible that this was not being widely observed.

Saturday was a day to work on our group projects for our Sunday presentations. Sunday is a workday in Israel, and my internal clock was a bit off when I was told we would be waking up for an 8:30 AM presentation by the head of PR at Better Place, and Israeli electric car startup. This presentation though ended up being one of the best on our trip. Better Place is pioneering an electric car model in which you rent the battery but receive free charging and battery swaps at a network of convenient automated stations. They launch in Israel and Denmark later this year...check them out!

After listening to Better Place we packed our bags and drove north to Haifa, Israel's third city. At the Technion, Israel's equivalent of MIT, each of the student groups presented to our six startups. We had three solar energy startups (Solar Bead, TIGI, Eternegy), a pharmaceutical startup (Avixenna), a software startup (AIType), and an online Israeli art portal (Omanoot). My team had worked for several weeks with Eternegy, a company which has developed an innovative tracking device which aligns photovoltaic solar panels with the highest energy photons from the sun. Through this project we learned a lot about project development in the solar industry and the challenges faced by those introducing new technologies. Though a lot of work, I really enjoyed this experiential learning component of our GBE.

The final two days of our GBE were spent in the northern part of Israel. We traveled to an industrial park where we met the highly energized founder of luxury soapmaker Gamila's Secret, kayaked on the Jordan River, toured an army base in the Golan Heights, met with the Israeli offices of Qualcomm and Google, and toured the beautiful Baha'i Gardens. Following the end of the Darden GBE, I stayed with a few classmates for the rest of the week, taking a road trip to the Negev Desert, the Dead Sea, the ancient fortress of Masada, the resort town of Eilat, and into Jordan to visit the lost city of Petra.

Darden Professor Gal Raz, our fearless leader

The Israel GBE not only was an exciting and amazing experience, but provided a great supplement to our business school educations. Business today is highly global, and without an appreciation of this your business career is likely to be short-circuited. Israel faces many challenges, for sure, but this emerging economic phenomenon is likely to continue to disrupt existing markets with its new and innovative technologies. I came away with a view of Israel quite different from what you see on the evening news, a view of a country which lives a rather normal lifestyle, albeit with typical Israeli impatience and informality. The Darden Israel GBE provided me with a far deeper view into contemporary Israeli business culture than I could have gleaned from personal travel. My GBE mates and I are grateful to Professor Gal Raz for the effort he made to introduce us to his home country!

3...2...1...ISRAEL!!!

Life in the Darden bubble continues to defy the traditional boundaries of space and time. You wouldn't believe it unless you were here but the last four weeks have flown by in a split-second and I am 48 hours away from boarding a flight for my Darden Global Business Experience to Israel! This week I've wrapped up classes, worked on four group projects simultaneously, started building the foundation for an ambitious Energy Club agenda next year, and tried to find balance by making time for some belly-busting gym action...very important before a visit to the beaches of Tel Aviv!

The triumvirate of roommates all head to Israel next week

My first year at Darden has been ending rather anticlimactically. Unlike high school (or even college) there's no crescendo to the end of the school year symphony...rather it just...sort of ends. You say bye to a couple folks and trust you'll see the rest when you return to Charlottesville in 3.5 months. As one of my Facebook friends posted today, "This is the way first year ends: not with a bang but a whimper (or the click of an "upload" button)."

Well, no time to loiter on this blog post.  Need to grab a quick Cinco de Mayo margarita as a stress relief prior to taking my last exam of the year.  Talk to you soon from the Middle East!

Awesome Section E -- Darden Cup Champs!!

Celebrating a Section E Darden Cup three-peat!

I'm not normally one to brag, especially when said bragging may alienate 80% of the Darden student body, but another year has ended and my beloved Section E is once again the Darden Cup champion!

For those us you not familiar with the Darden Cup (probably everyone not at Darden), this yearlong competition tests a section's unity through events which challenge both intellectual and athletic talents. Points are awarded for performance (after all, this is business school) but also for participation from First Years, Second Years, and faculty. Events range from flag football to softball to soccer to trivia. Throw in a community outreach component and you have a lengthy yearlong battle to establish true section supremacy.

Getting manhandled by a Section B student in Darden Cup soccer!!

The competition's purpose is to promote cohesion amongst each First Year section and Section E was able to gel around the goal of winning the Cup quickly. As two-time defending champions we had weighty expectations to live up to, and our Second Year alumni set the tone from day one: We were going to win. Thankfully, Section E had been gifted with 68 students who wanted our group to compete and win at everything -- see Dave Miller's post for more about our competitive nature. We had strong leadership from Section Rep Evan Smith (now DSA President) supported by a strong team dedicated to supporting our exam preparation, outreach efforts, and social lives.  Nicknaming ourselves the "leprecats" (based on a sectionmate's inspirational speech), we developed a "front-runner" strategy -- pick up points early and energize our section with our successes. This worked like a charm: Section E had the best participation numbers at almost every event.

Section E final day of class in December

Along the way we discovered hidden talents and found a way for everyone to contribute. We weren't the most athletic section -- our victories were in the decidedly non-athletic dodgeball, bowling, and trivia events -- but through participation and energy we were able to maximize our points at every event, and in the end won by a resounding margin.

Darden Cup isn't the only way in which First Year sections jockey with one another. Witness the Section E Mischief Team, whose pranks on neighboring Section D you can watch on YouTube, or Section A's obsession with stealing Section B's beloved mascot (see Sara Sajadi's entry for details). There are a few injuries every year from aging former athletes with Type A personalities crashing into one another in Darden Cup athletic events, but generally speaking the pursuit of the Cup is good clean fun and a way to forever forge a Darden student's section identity.  Though Section E hasn't shared case discussions together in room 190 since December, you can still identify E'ers by our "High Five Tuesday" tradition and our impassioned section spirit.

So, prospective First Years, you all should be spending your summers hoping and dreaming that Marsh Pattie's random name generator places you in the decidedly most awesome section at Darden, Section E!

Spring Grilling with Dean Bruner

Yesterday evening the Darden Student Bloggers had a pleasant dinner with Dean Bruner (if you track several of these you'll probably see 14 posts this week).  The Dean and his wife, Bobbie, graciously hosted us at the home which he has owned for over a quarter-century.  We shared stories about our student experiences and the Dean told us about a failed idea he had a few years ago for an online patent auctioning site.  The Dean grilled burgers and displayed a meticulous attention to detail -- we could choose from two types of cheese or a veggie burger, served with a fine assortment of wine and the local Starr Hill beer.

Quite the perquisite for someone who gets free reign to ramble about life in business school. Something to consider if you're an incoming Darden First Year -- join the Student Bloggers!

Bloggers hanging out pre-dinner in the Dean's backyard

At the risk of reprimand from Darden Media, I present a less-than-flattering photo of Dean Bruner about to grill some burgers  :-)

Darden Blogger group shot (some of us, at least)

Sustainable Venture Capital Investment Competition

Late post on this, but better late than never. A couple weeks ago I journeyed down to Chapel Hill, NC with a Darden team to compete in the Sustainable Venture Capital Investment Competition (SVCIC). Our task was to analyze the business plans from three real-life entrepreneurs and make the case to a panel of venture capitalists for which startup we would invest in, then justify why and how. Darden was competing against eight other business schools: Kenan-Flagler (UNC), Saïd (Oxford), Columbia, Stern (NYU), Wharton, Fuqua (Duke), Georgetown, and Ross (Michigan).

I had no experience in the world of startup funding or venture capital (VC), so I was very much looking forward to learning about these in preparation for and by participating in the competition. The Darden core curriculum doesn't make a place for these topics, and I quickly discovered that startup "term sheets" have a different language than what you learn in finance class. Before the competition, my team spent a few weeks learning this new language and the implications of VC terms on how a startup business operates. Soon, phrases such as "liquidity preference", "option pool", and "post-money valuation" became second nature to us.

The first day of the competition started with pitches by each of the entrepreneurs. One business created an online platform for searching through OpenCourseWare materials, one had a product for more efficient power management in laptop computers and servers, and the third created fixtures with superior lighting characteristics for warehouses. After the pitches, teams split up into "due diligence" sessions with the entrepreneurs. We had 15 minutes to grill each entrepreneur with questions we had about his business model. In the evening, our team retreated to our hotel to choose a business to invest in and propose investment terms which would be agreeable to the entrepreneur but also mitigate the downside risk of the investment for our fictional VC fund. On the second day, our team presented our investment proposal to the panel of venture capitalist judges. We were judged on how well we identified and mitigated risk, assessed social and environmental impact, and understood the VC process.

The Darden team didn't win the competition, but the judges told us in our feedback session that our performance fell into the top half of teams participating. Not bad for a group which had no prior VC experience! One thing which really left an impression on me was the importance of the entrepreneur in the success of a new business. Every judge we talked with stressed how the people running the business are more important than the business concept. Our team saw this first-hand -- after reading the three business plans our team was heavily leaning towards one of the businesses, but our judgment quickly shifted when we met the entrepreneurs and saw that a different one had a far better strategic vision for where his startup was headed.

More importantly, I now know something about the wild world of startup financing which may prove valuable if I decide to start my own business after school.

Darden United!

We're on spring break now at Darden, a great opportunity for everyone to catch their breaths after a frenetic winter.  Many students have jetted away on a Global Business Experience, to faraway lands such as Argentina, Spain, and Brazil. Some are working with a Chinese company for a "kaizen" week in Shanghai, and others are in Central America just enjoying the beach. For me and my roommates it has been a very relaxing time in Charlottesville. We've enjoyed the mild and sunny weather that has returned to Central Virginia and having Outlook calendars devoid of any appointments, finally!

With the end of winter means the end of my first UVA intramural indoor soccer season. Darden United is my coed team of first-year students, a group of old fogies who still have the magic to dominate some undergrads, on a good day! Our collective wisdom and knowledge makes us competitive against younger legs, plus we have a former US Olympic gold-medal winning goalkeeper on our squad! (my MIT varsity soccer experience pales in comparison)

Soccer players at Darden have a good support network. We play pickup games every weekend at "The Park" and also are starting a Darden soccer club to travel to MBA soccer tournaments around the country. If you're applying and wondering if you'll have people to play with here, you're in good hands!

Here's some photos of Darden United (courtesy of Filipp Gorelik):

Getting ready for kickoff at Memorial Gym

Starting in the goal...not my natural position!

Packed in defensively

The ball looks like it's on fire!

Summer Internship Set!

Yes! I finally ended my summer internship saga this week by accepting an offer to work for Waste Management at its corporate headquarters in Houston. I will be working with the Organic Growth Group, a team which creates partnerships and makes venture capital investments in companies which have promising emerging waste conversion technologies. Over the past couple of years, WM has invested in companies which can convert biomass to electricity, specialty chemicals, and fuels such as natural gas. Over the long run, WM's corporate strategy is to integrate these technologies into their massive materials collection operation -- WM is the largest waste handler in the United States -- and generate additional income from the waste stream. They literally want to turn one man's trash into another's treasure!

The group recently got a nice little writeup in Fortune magazine and also some press in the green media regarding an investment in a biomass conversion company called Genomatica. Given my interests in sustainability and renewable energy, I think this position will be a great fit!

Like all those at Darden who have accepted offers I'm much relieved to be through the job search -- for now. The culture of first year at Darden, for better or worse, creates a feeling of anxiety around the whole internship thing. My colleague Yumi wrote a terrific post in the fall describing the process of running to company briefings "like a scared mouse", which captures it perfectly.

It needn't be this way -- just about every second year I've met had a worthwhile summer internship -- but at least the career services folks don't breed a feeling of complacency around here. You start by probing your inner self to conjure up what you really want to do, maybe discovering nothing. You run between briefings, collecting the occasional Chick-fil-A along the way. You draft and redraft and nitpick every single little word and phrase on your resume, culminating in Resumania!, an event whose name makes me think that we had sunk into a collective madness. You then network...network...NETWORK!, calling every Darden alum you can find who will speak for 20 minutes (thankfully they have all been through this too and are very gracious). Then you nitpick every little word in your cover letters, culminating in CoverLetterMania!, respond to as many job postings as you can tolerate while managing your Term 3 exams, fly away to a job trek, take a day off for Christmas to catch your breath, interview...interview...INTERVIEW! in January and February (missing several of your classes for final rounds), and finally if you've played the game right you end up with a couple offers.

The feeling is often frantic, but if you put in a full effort and "trust the process" you might end up with a killer job, which is probably why you came to business school in the first place!