Naah, that's not gonna happen.
New Enterprise Financing
We had this hugely detailed case this week, about a venture(RBS) that's looking for a second round of financing. The actual case was done in 6-7 pages, the exhibits were the gigantic part spanning almost 20-odd pages. The class begins with the prof asking us about how we would go about making the decision to invest in this company, and what are the questions that we'd like to ask about the details in this case. He reminds us that 'Asking questions is a costly process. Choose your questions well'. After a pindrop silence of a couple of minutes, the questions slowly start appearing and the prof puts them down on the board. He then moves on to describe to us the way he typically would structure questions, and breaks them down into four overarching sections. He goes on to do some number crunching, and projects some numbers for the next few years. He suggests that it's always good to start with constructing the P&L, then the cash flows, and finally come down to the balance sheet. He ends by saying that considering the type of sales projections, the financing would need to be well-defined and that probably whatever the company's trying to raise in this round might not be enough. And that given the experience of the CEO, while he's done an admirable job thus far, one would need to consider if this company requires a change in management. A very strong flashback appears in my mind, from all the way back in Managing Organizations from Q2 - 'What got you here, might not get you there'. Nice to be reminded about that again.
The second session was taken by a guest speaker from a venture capital firm, one of our prof's battle-hardened colleagues. He spoke to us about the investments made by him and others in the Indian VC space, and how the returns are reasonably through the roof (though one of our classmates pointed out that only the successes were mentioned here, and not the failures). He also took some time to describe the type of companies here, and how many of them were solving problems specific to India, and how that made these ventures special. He also described how certain sectors in India actually helped boost the local venture ecosystem (For e.g. the telecom sector helped build the image of some of their Indian suppliers, which then let them play at a global scale). Had this been our first encounter with a VC, it would have been an eye-opening experience. But maybe there's just nothing different that VCs do from one another. They're all playing to a standard set of rules, but where the individual scenarios unfold slightly differently from one another. The fun must be coming from each individual experience of financing a company, because it sure as hell doesn't seem that fun from the description of the process.
Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning
The less said, the better. Students came by, one team after another, to present their topic for the week. A couple of them had the audacity to not even bother to prepare for their material, or to check if their slides appeared properly on the machine it was supposed to be presented on. The prof's typical fire was missing from the stage, as he sat as part of the class, interjecting with a few key points now and then. Urging us to read specific sections again, he mentioned how thrilling those cases feel when you read them for the first time, and that it can be quite inspirational to us. I'll just take his word for it, because our presenters definitely don't seem to feel that way.
I can't believe that we have to submit ourselves to one more week of cold, dissected case presentations next week. It's a horrible way to end such an amazing course, and an amazing three years at college. But I guess, as a class, we did fail the prof. One lesson for life -> You don't need to be the one who actually screwed up, you just have to be in the same place at the same time... you'll get screwed anyway.
One week left. Life beckons... where am I... who am I?
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment