Emily Currin ’12
My Experience
I performed a variety of roles for mGood, including preparing the investment pitch deck, meeting with investors, recruiting clients, refining the financial model, and reaching out to strategic partners. It was truly a new experience every day with all the highs and lows of working for a startup.
I’d say the two biggest skill-sets I used in this particular experience were Entrepreneurial Finance, and also the Launching Social Ventures class I took with Ron Gonen. The former was key in terms of understanding the variety of ways that deals can be structured, as well as the things to watch out for in terms of structuring a term sheet. The latter was super helpful because Ron really walked us through what makes an effective pitch deck, how to present a business idea and not lose your audience, as well as a more personal take on a lot of the lessons introduced in Entrepreneurial Finance. More generally, I think the MBA program prepared me for life at a startup in that it is frenetic, varied and always changing, and you can’t predict what’s going to come up in a day. Managing clubs, academics, social activities, job search, etc. is very similar to the balance needed to manage client servicing, fundraising, team dynamics, etc.
There were, of course, a few challenges involved in the experience. One that stands out is that we were/are kind of a “teenager” startup, in that while we were raising money, we already had a number of clients and so we had the client relationship angle to manage as well as the raising money angle, which are two very different activities. When you’re preparing a deck, reaching out to potential investors, etc, that is all to a great extent driven by the internal team. On the other hand, when it comes to working with clients, this is not always a flow that can be predicted, and this can complicate time management. Additionally, we were at the stage where we were kind of in between Seed funding and Series A, which made articulating our growth stage somewhat fluid in terms of approaching the investment community. Another challenge was realizing just how many times a message can change. Just when we’d think, ok, “this” is who we are, and we’d integrate that into the deck, and into our pitch…. we’d realize based on our own revelations and also on feedback we’d receive, that we were slightly different than what we’d articulated. The way it was posed to us on one occasion was “What do you [meaning the company] want to be when you grow up?” When you’re coming into your own as a company this is a question you must constantly ask yourself and it can be exciting at times, and exhausting at times (not unlike raising a child, I imagine!)
I have a lot of takeaways from this experience, but a major one is managing time, energy, and the variety of activities that any startup experience entails. To not burn out, you really have to set aside chunks of time for certain kinds of activities, and other chunks for other kinds of activities. So, if you have to do something that’s tedious, like refining a financial model, you want to be able to devote your full attention to this in a context where you’re not also trying to brainstorm for a new slide or something like that. Reason being, these two mental activities just aren’t compatible and will sabotage each other. Another take away that is super important, is that in any business but perhaps more so in the social enterprise space, you’re going to be dealing with a broad spectrum of individuals with their own backgrounds, strengths, and communication styles. It’s not going to be like business school where there’s this lingo that everyone kind of knows “ROI! Sunk cost!” You have to meet people where they are, change gears, slow down, speed up, and really just learn to communicate effectively with the person you’re speaking to. You aren’t going to use the same style with an investor, a nonprofit, etc. The message is going to be the same, but put in different terms. This was a big takeaway, with the central learning that if you can’t explain something to a variety of people you either don’t understand it or, worse yet, you aren’t really saying anything.
