Wharton School MBA Students Host Entrepreneurship Conference Panels and Speakers Explore Six Paths to Entrepreneurial Success
There’s more than one way to be an entrepreneur.
That’s the message of the highly successful Entrepreneurship Conference, organized and run by Wharton School MBA students, held on December 3, 2004 at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Philadelphia and attended by more than 500 paying registrants from the Philadelphia area.
Six Paths to Entrepreneurship
Some people think of an entrepreneur as a creature of the 1980s or 1990s — perhaps a young Californian visionary who innovates a technology, finds funding for it, and then becomes a millionaire in a Google-style IPO.
This is certainly one kind of entrepreneur. But the conference emphasized the range of different ways to do it — not all of them involving high risks.
“What is missing for most people between the desire to be an entrepreneur and actually doing it?” asks co-chair Amit Kapur WG’05 about the motivation behind the conference’s theme. “It’s thinking it’s high risk.”
“We believe there is no one right way to pursue your entrepreneurial instincts,” agrees Emily Cieri, Managing Director of Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs. “We look at entrepreneurship in the broad sense.”
Kapur and Vijay Mayadas WG’05, Wharton MBA students who co-chaired this year’s conference, focused on what they called “6 paths to entrepreneurship.” These include not just “High Stakes Entrepreneurship” but also “Social Entrepreneurship,” “Real Estate Entrepreneurship,” and “Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition or Franchising.”
The variety of topics offered attendees a broad vision of how they could become entrepreneurs. Each panelist and speaker, reports Mayadas, “had a very different and at times contradictory philosophy. That’s a good thing. We thought, if we present many different concepts, the attendees can find one they relate to the most and go with that.”
Diverse Speakers and Panels
The all-day conference included panel discussions, keynote speakers, and workshops that gave attendees the opportunity to interact with experts.
Highlights included legendary New York City real estate entrepreneur Barbara Corcoran, who inspired the audience with her life story of “straight D’s in high school and college, and 20 jobs by the time she turned 23.”
Attendees also benefited from the popular workshop on “Negotiations for Entrepreneurs” led by Wharton School professor (and Wharton MBA) Stuart Diamond WG’92. One of Wharton’s most renowned instructors, Diamond offered training in negotiation strategy that attendees could, in Kapur’s words, “go right out and apply to the real world.”
The three keynote speakers affirmed the breadth of entrepreneurial career paths. Josh Kopelman W’93 — founder of Infonautics, an Internet information company; Half.com, an internet retailer; and TurnTide, an anti-spam company — began his first entrepreneurial venture while still a Wharton student in 1992.
David Morgan, on the other hand, founded Real Media only after earlier jobs as a lawyer and general counsel for the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association. And Jeffrey Citron, currently Chairman and CEO of Vonage, is a longtime innovator and visionary in both financial services and telecommunications entrepreneurship.
Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs sponsors numerous other activities in support of these diverse paths to entrepreneurship.
For example, a December 13 panel on corporate venturing focused on entrepreneurship in a corporate setting, including Wharton alumni from Yahoo, Dupont, and Johnson & Johnson, moderated by Wharton professor Ian MacMillan, co-author of The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty.
In the spring, Wharton will offer both its entrepreneur-in-residence program, which invites the founder of a company to sit down with students one day each week, and its first-ever MBA course on social entrepreneurship, taught by Prof. MacMillan.
