New Venture Challenge: Rising to the Challenge

CBM: What are some of your fondest memories about the NVC? What insights did you gain as part of your individual journey through the process that helped position you for continuing success?

Doucet: Participating in the New Venture Challenge puts you in a situation where you are pitching to actual investors, who are right there in the room with you. It may be a simulation of sorts, but it’s about as close to the real thing as you can get. The NVC helps founders and startup teams understand how to talk to potential partners and present ideas in compelling ways, and gives you chances to get real-world feedback from real-world business leaders—something that’s often hard to come by otherwise outside of business school. When you’re pitching venture capitalists and trying to raise money for a company, you typically don’t get a practice round like this.

Jaffee: I remember the moment they announced we’d won, and my cofounder, Mitch Kirby, ’16, and I looked at each other like: How did we do this? We used to spend late nights in basement conference rooms debating product strategy. He took a class at Booth that taught him how to code applications, and we went from launching a product with no users to getting thousands of people to sign up for it. Booth and the NVC really transformed our careers in so many ways, and really gave us a chance to shine and show off our talents. Faculty members and mentors challenged us to exercise our strategic thinking skills in the best way possible and opened doors to future opportunities. I’m still friends with many of them today.

Rafiq: The skills necessary to be a successful intrapreneur versus entrepreneur are interrelated but different. To be a great intrapreneur, you need to go beyond individual creativity and innovation—you also need to have what I call corporate biohacking skills. Biohackers are constantly experimenting with different methods to see how an organization can become more agile. Large organizations are prone to legacy thinking. Unless you consciously hack the system, it’s going to be frustrating for everyone from intrapreneurs to C-suite executives responsible for growth. Biohacking everything from decision-making to how meetings are conducted to how input is collected can overcome that legacy culture. I think it is essential to create shared understanding in an organization, bring other company leaders along on your journey, and secure the resources and support needed to get ideas off the ground.

CBM: What’s the best piece of advice or feedback you picked up from your time in the NVC, and what can others learn from it?

Jaffee: Every entrepreneur thinks that they’ve found a problem to solve, but at the same time, it’s also important to ask yourself: Is this really a true market pain point—and one that the entire business ecosystem feels? This is the mantra of the New Venture Challenge. A lot of entrepreneurs are focused on building a business from their own perspective. But unless you are an actual member of your target audience living its challenges on a day-to-day basis, it can be hard to know if you’ve truly landed on a problem that makes sense for a business to solve. Judges really challenge you to consider: Is this a big enough problem that it impacts an entire industry—and will addressing it make a really big impact in the world?

Rafiq: The best piece of advice for any entrepreneur is to build. Build something simple, get it to users, and listen to their feedback. If a team does this continuously, it will be on the right track. If the idea has promise, the users will guide them to what aspects are useful and what needs to be rethought. The business idea may turn out to be a dead end, but the team will know much quicker, and waste less time. It can move to the next interesting idea. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, said that if you’re not embarrassed by your first release of a given product, you’re moving too slowly. So we should never overbuild. There’s so many no-code/low-code technologies available today for an entrepreneur to test and learn. I suggest all companies start with a wireframe of a UX, as that is inexpensive and makes the idea clear.

Doucet: The NVC also gives you a framework through which to consider how you build your business and prompts you to ask more pointed questions as you go about doing so. For example, it teaches you how to consider your ideas from someone else’s perspective and think about how realistic your plan for going to market is, and where you can strategically apply your efforts today to get results faster. Judges push you to think about traction and show business progress on a week-to-week basis, which forces you to become more objective and goal-driven as well. The lessons it teaches in terms of structured thinking and accountability can help fuel a lifelong drive to progress.

Rafiq: The least important thing an entrepreneur should focus on is a PowerPoint presentation. Eventually, a team will need one to pitch investors. But if that’s all a team brings to the table, I would shy away as an investor or potential backer. The space between the product and the user is the most valuable to make progress on.

Doucet: Some of the NVC coaches are also investors, and they advised us that it would be a concern to potential partners that we didn’t have any relevant experience in the beverage space. One of the things that they drove into our heads was that if we couldn’t demonstrate that experience, we needed to be able to show very compelling data that would speak to the product’s demand and traction in the market. Our coaches encouraged us to find ways to demonstrate that Open Water was performing really well in the accounts that had started to carry it. We still apply these lessons as we go about raising money today: to not only tell, but show as well. 

CBM: What makes Booth’s approach to teaching entrepreneurship so unique— and capable of making such a lasting impression?

Doucet: Life and everyday responsibilities often make it hard to get opportunities to try your hand at entrepreneurship. The NVC gives you a chance to turn your ideas into action, and potentially discover something that you love doing that also works as a real-world business. Not every company will win the challenge. But company founders and team members will walk away having grown and learned, and will become more capable and successful from having participated in the experience.

Jaffee: Booth’s approach to teaching entrepreneurship isn’t theoretical—it’s experiential. You’re actually there building a real business, challenging yourself to use your wits and resources, and testing your ideas as you go. As a result, I started a real company, and learned how to constantly experiment and learn as you go.

You are also given a great amount of autonomy. Unlike at other business schools, which are incredibly regimented, at Booth, professors trust your decision-making and judgment. Booth gives you the skills you need to chart your own career path as well as the confidence to do so. While many companies that participated in past NVCs may have gone quietly into the night, their founders and CEOs didn’t, because they gained the talents and insights they needed for future success.

Doucet: Technically, we weren’t an NVC winner. But just going through the program helped us find new markets for Open Water, and it helped me get a feel of what it was like to manage people for the first time. Some of our classmates and people who were on our NVC team have also gone on to become some of my closest friends. Several contacts that we were introduced to by our NVC coaches have also become mentors to us. They’ve helped us land new accounts and think about our business in different ways, and they’ve offered helpful advice. The NVC provides a level of realism that allows you to test your skills in lifelike scenarios and connect with, pitch to, and learn from people who’ve actually been successful in the business world. Booth offers more than book examples and historical case studies in its approach to teaching students how to get ahead in their career. What makes the school—and the New Venture Challenge—special is that it pushes you to discover what it takes to succeed.

Rafiq: Booth also offers tremendous flexibility. I took evening classes at Gleacher Center so I could keep days free, because I was attending school during the first internet boom and didn’t want to be disconnected from all the business activity that was happening. Even though I was a full-time student, I was able to be a director of a startup at the time. The university is also great about bringing in top-notch speakers, including from the fields of business and technology. I was inspired by people with similar interests and energy, which helped fuel my passion and enthusiasm for innovation, and take my drive for innovation to the next level.

CBM: What are some of the skills that you gained through Booth and the NVC that you still use today?

Doucet: I’ve never been much of a public speaker. The NVC pushed me to learn, though, and to consistently put myself in uncomfortable situations until I got more comfortable presenting to different groups of people. It made me a lot more confident as an individual, and a lot more capable when it comes to being put on the spot. I also learned the importance of working hard on an idea and believing in it, even when others do not. There will always be people who challenge your ideas or think that these ideas are crazy, but if you keep persevering and proving that there’s a real need for what you are doing, you can still come out ahead in the end.

Jaffee: My time with Booth and the NVC was incredible—it feels like a significant part of my life, and I still draw upon the lessons today. As a venture capitalist who’s also been an entrepreneur, I have a greater understanding of what it takes to build a successful company, and more empathy for founders and the challenges they face as a result. In fact, I was on a call last week with a founder, and I actually used examples from my NVC days to provide guidance on where to invest the company’s time and efforts given that the current resources were limited. Some of the growth hacks we used to help build a business as part of the NVC are things that I still share with the companies that we invest in today. In addition, if you ask any of my colleagues, they’ll tell you that I’m obsessed with the power of storytelling—it’s a passion that I honed in on, in the NVC days. As part of the competition, our challenge was to find ways to share our company’s mission and purpose in such a compelling way as to make everyone believe in our team and vision. It’s still the same challenge that every new startup faces today.

Rafiq: Truthfully, my idea was not selected to pass the first round of the NVC. But as a result of going through the program, I realized it was because the idea needed to go further into what eventually became known as ride-sharing. It’s still a valuable lesson I keep in mind today—not settling with the initial inspiration or insight. At McDonald’s, I was one of the first chief digital officers to appear within the Fortune 500 and was asked to reimagine customer experience around technology—and at a company with an approach that hadn’t changed in decades. From mobile apps to digital kiosks, we were able to create new ways of engaging with audiences from scratch and create billions of dollars in incremental revenue per year. Back in 2015, we began working on drones and delivery fleet technology—though the company chose not to move forward with these efforts, we didn’t stop pushing the thought process. Being able to take a concept from the idea and early stages to a successful rollout and continue to improve upon it as we go are still talents I use day in and day out today.