Trip to Europe, Berlin

The elective courses that I want to take are scheduled so that I was frontloaded with two courses in January and early February and backloaded with three courses in March and April. In between, I had 6 weeks of free time...well mostly free time. I got a job as a teacher's assistant for a 4th year commerce course on management of new enterprises and the Tricolour Fund is an ongoing project course.

3 of my classmates were on exchange in Mannheim, Germany, for a couple of months. They had some travel plans laid out and talked me into going over there and travelling with them for 10 days. It doesn't take much to convince me to go on a trip anywhere...I just checked my finances and made sure I didn't have any outstanding deliverables for the fund or my TA work.

I met up with them in Mannheim on a Friday and that night we took a train to Berlin. Berlin was an interesting place. Apart from the old buildings like Reichstag, it felt a lot like Toronto...except with Germans. We spent a couple of days there...had an awesome dinner at a rustic Italian restaurant and went to a club. We checked out the historical sites...the holocaust memorial put a somber tone on the second day...kind of depressing combined with the cold snowy weather.

Here are some pics in any case:

A square in Mannheim


From the Reichstag




Sometimes the people around you make a picture...it's worth putting them in your shots. Here are a couple from around the Brandenburg Arch. You get some surprises like this one...


...or you can people watch and take some interesting ones.


Had to stop and check out this Bugatti


There are some really nice spots around the area...like this pano shot of the museum and cathedral (forget the names) near the arch


(I forgot to set the camera to manual so the exposures were all different. Had to photoshop it quite a bit to even things out...)

Of course, had to check out the wall...


Next was a brief stop in Rotterdam to have some lunch with some other classmates on exchange and on to Amsterdam...

MBA: Strategic Leadership

This course was designed to help explore personal leadership styles and to give students tools to develop their own leadership styles. There were more personal style surveys such as the FIRO-B instrument, another try at the MBTI to see if it changed since the beginning of the program, a survey about one's degree of self-monitoring, and some other stuff all designed to help you know yourself better.

I had high hopes for this course as real opportunity for personal growth, but the learning side wasn't as valuable as I thought it would be. There was a lot of writing involved and it seemed frivolous at times.

One interesting exercise was a project on networking where we had to interview a couple of executives and ask them questions about how they built and manage their professional networks to help them be successful. D and I partnered up and interviewed Joe Pal, the founder of Pal Insurance, and Paul Vallee of Pythian (see earlier post on Financing New Ventures). Both are interesting men with some solid life experience. In terms of networking, both men agreed that networks are built slowly over time in an organic manner. Neither had a deliberate and structured approach to managing their professional relationships. Also, you have to be genuine and be ready to help people with no benefit to yourself. Over time, this strategy will payoff because of the reputation you build for yourself.

Meeting these two gentlemen was the real benefit of this course...not sure I really learnt anything from the class work.

This leads me to a bit of a rant about business school in general. Coming from an engineering background, sometimes it seems that business people apply buzzwords and frameworks to things that should really be in the realm of mundane common sense. Not sure why it's done...maybe some business profs need something to do sometimes and come up with some intelligent sounding framework or theory. "Networking" is a buzzword that drives me nuts sometimes. They host 'networking' sessions and give talks on how to build your 'network'. Basically, they talk about how you make friends...something you've been doing your whole life since you started kindergarten. But now, in the academic business realm, it's a field of study and there are theories on the benefits of networking. End of rant. Won't even touch "synergy".

MBA: Financing New Ventures

After the Christmas break, everyone starts taking elective courses so the class breaks up and we're no longer all together all the time. My focus is on entrepreneurship and new ventures so my elective choices are geared toward that.

Financing New Ventures was co-lectured by Elspeth Murray and Andrew Waitman. The course is about how venture capital companies work, pool money together, and set up their deal flow.

The course is a prerequisite for the Tricolour Venture Fund which is also offered as a project course as part of the MBA curriculum. It's like a real life Dragon's Den where we get to evaluate start up companies and decide if the fund is going to invest in them in return for an equity stake in the company.

Andrew Waitman taught most of the course. He was a key part of Celtic House, a VC company in the Ottawa area that financed some successful technology companies over the past 10 years. He's got some great knowledge of the industry and some great insights in what it takes to make a new venture successful. He's not an academic type, speaks frankly, and tells it like it is. He had a column for a while in which he wrote about different topics with the VC and entrepreneurship realm. You can read some of it here.

As part of the course, three entrepreneurs were brought in to talk to us and we were given the opportunity to ask some detailed questions about their business and what it took for them to be successful. Really interesting.

Damian Lamb started Genesys Capital with a partner because they saw an opportunity to tap into the life sciences research in Canada and turn some of the ideas into viable businesses. He was another very frank speaker and gave us some real insights into how VC companies get started, function, and make money for themselves and their funders.

Wael Mohamed started a network security company called 3rd Brigade and gave us some good knowledge about what it really takes to get a new venture off the ground. One key learning I took was about how to simplify your idea and show your due diligence to make it easy for investors to understand what your talking about. He showed us his initial pitch presentation and it was very simple, clear, and concise. Really neat.

Paul Vallee was an entrepreneur at an early age and actually started a business when he was still an undergrad. After 3 or 4 new ventures, he became successful with the Pythian Group, a database monitoring and management company. Andrew Waitman is now CEO of Pythian. They just revamped their website and there's a video with both of them on the home page.


Rob Ford also came to talk to us about term sheets, the legal documents that accompany VC financing deals. Nice guy...he had some interesting stuff to say about the legal side of things and how deals are structured to protect the VC companies.