In a way, it's like marriage. Why should some people live a more carefree life than others anyway?
New Enterprise Financing
The prof enters in class, and you can hear the imaginary drumrolls and inspirational war music behind, when he says 'I promised to do these many cases with you, and I shall complete them!'. And the class settles in for a wordy battle, even though they're weary from completing the day's assignment from the night before. The first case was about how a newly started VC was approaching the concept of due diligence, and how they wanted to do lesser deals, so that they could concentrate on helping with the growth of those ventures. While studying this, the prof mentions that it's important to watch out for subtleties... he says that if we read this case carefully, we'd see that the company was trying to bring a new approach because of all the recent failures of VCs post the dotcom boom. Seeing how people were madly rushing in and throwing money, sometimes just after a week of not-as-due diligence, investment funds were getting very wary of VCs. Therefore, approaching the problem from a different angle, this VC was looking to take things slow so as not to make the same mistakes. Plus, they were coming up with this idea of using a framework, which could be refined over time. Such a concept, was for some reason, not already a reality with VCs, and so the prof describes how approaching issues from the concept of market need, ability to execute and capture, was an important aspect of new ventures and we looked a little deeper into the issues plaguing the venture that had approached this VC for funding.
We had a few other cases as well, but I couldn't begin to describe the subtleties, such was the nature of these cases. The prof did rush through them, we didn't get enough time to enjoy proper discussions as we'd done in some of the previous classes, but as long as the point gets through and the perspective of various players in different settings comes through, that's what we were there for, and I like to think that we had a fair bit of learning there. The prof managed to complete every single case, after all. Whether we should have finished them off so fast, is a matter for another day.
Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning
Same ol' story as last week. Quite a few presentations, and some of the ideas stayed back... how people like Ken Kutaragi at Sony helped start off a whole new line of businesses there, even when it looked like he had no support, or when how a single leader in Surat transformed the city after a horrible plague, by just asking for accountability and setting rules in place to enforce it. Quite a few such inspirational stories, it's too bad that we didn't have the prof discuss this with us in his own way... I'm sure we'd have gotten a fair bit out of it.
It's a bittersweet way to end the last official day of learning at IIMB... on the one hand, we just saw how peering enough at the numbers and having some judgement and luck can go a long way, and how looking for the subtleties in the case will tell you more than what's explicitly written. And on the other hand, a bunch of awesome cases, just there for the reading, can be delivered in a not-so-optimal way, because a bunch of students didn't take the trouble to read cases and play their part in an active teacher-student interaction. Every action has its consequence, and nothing hits harder than that when your very last class is not as powerful as you know it could have been.
All that stands between me and a vast expanse of time, is one exam and one project. We've done this many times before, 10 times to be precise. It doesn't seem that hard at all...
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