close window 
The right mix of experience, diverse business backgrounds, and communication skillscame together for a group of Chicago Booth students to yield the school’s first-ever win at the international level in the annual Venture Capital Investment Competition.
“Winning the VCIC required a combination of deep analysis, thoughtful communication, and interpersonal connections with the entrepreneurs,” said Ryan Gembala, a second-year student in the Full-Time MBA Program. “One of the judges jokingly described Chicago’s team as ‘having both the steak and the sizzle.’”
In the annual competition, held April 8 – 10 at UNC-Chapel Hill, students acted as mock venture firms, heard pitches from actual CEOs, and evaluated real business plans. Students performed due diligence, prepared investment memos, and presented their proposed investment to a panel of judges who work as venture capitalists.
With Gembala on the winning team were first-year student Nikhil Abraham and second-year students Gil Haberman, Matt Hankins, Josh Marehbian, and Erin O’Neill. They who moved on to the regional competition February 12 at the University of Colorado-Boulder after having bested 26 Chicago Booth teams in January at local competition hosted by the Michael P. Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship.
At the regional event, the Chicago Booth team beat out teams from Notre Dame, Michigan, Kellogg, Purdue, Wisconsin, and other schools. The team’s win at regionals brought a Chicago Booth team to the international competition for the fourth time in six years. At the international event, the Chicago Booth team placed before teams from Oxford and UNC, who received second and third place, respectively. The win represents Chicago Booth’s first international title in VCIC, a time of increased competition since 2010 was the first year of an expanded competition that included a new Asia region.
“In assembling a team for an event like this you always want to draw on a diverse set of experiences to insure that you are covered for all types of businesses,” Hankins said. “However, a diverse group can create obvious challenges in a time-constrained setting. This team really excelled in drawing on its diversity to advance the solutions and ideas beyond what any individual would have developed on his own while continuing to make progress in the process. The team’s ability to work together was the key to our success.”
Four of the team members had previous entrepreneurship experience, while three had experience working for venture capital firms, including Hyde Park Angels, an angel investor group founded by Booth alumni that focuses on opportunities in the Midwest. And each student contributed experience from a different business sector, ensuring that the team would be able to respond appropriately no matter what type of business the entrepreneurs they were questioning came from, Gembala said.
“At VCIC, Chicago’s approach to critical thinking made a difference,” Haberman said. “Internally, we kept challenging one another based on a diverse set of expertise and accessible data, resulting in a deeper, more thoughtful, analysis.”
Gembala said the competition afforded him real-world experience. “It showed me that once the analysis is finished and a decision to invest is made, VC becomes all about personally connecting with the entrepreneur and demonstrating that your firm can add value in differentiated ways from other VC firms,” he said. “That's the only way you're going to win a competitive deal. The VCIC puts you in the driver's seat to have these types of conversations with entrepreneurs, and this provided an incredible hands-on learning opportunity.”
Scott Meadow, clinical professor of entrepreneurship, has been the faculty advisor for the VCIC contest for 9 years. Meadow said, "The VCIC is a wonderful addition to the curriculum since it allows the students to utilize the hard-core lessons derived form our entrepreneurial courses in a realistic exercise in the ‘real world.’ We have been working over the years to create an arena where our students can apply the tools they learn in the classroom to the actual situations they will face in the work place, and the VCIC has been very useful in this regard.”
Over the years Chicago Booth has won the regional competition six times, and finished in the top-three internationally four times.
—Patrick Ferrell