Stanford Business

FEBRUARY 2007


Tales from the Trenches


Mark Leslie, left, and
Charles Holloway team
teach MBA electives.
Photo by Robert Holmgren

by Marguerite Rigoglioso

One of the founding directors of the Business School’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Professor Emeritus Charles Holloway has been bringing scholars and business practitioners together in classrooms for 10 years. “A CEO of a major company who comes in and says, ‘This is the way we did it,’ brings the kind of credibility to the classroom that an academic alone sometimes cannot,” he says. “The combination of scholarly rigor and firsthand experience Stanford offers in its courses on entrepreneurship has been a powerful one. Students and faculty alike gain from it a tremendous depth of knowledge.”

To develop courses to provide this insight, Holloway has worked with Mark Leslie, who has experienced both the agony and ecstasy of creating startups. Leslie founded a computer systems firm that eventually failed, but he achieved enormous success with Veritas Software, which became the 10th-largest independent software company with a revenue base of $1.5 billion. He has drawn on those experiences to help design two popular and important courses, Formation of New Ventures (with venture capitalist Andy Rachleff) and Building and Managing Professional Sales Organizations (with marketing Professor Jim Lattin).

Although he’s been in the trenches, Leslie says that for him, “teaching is about more than telling war stories. Stories just punctuate and embellish the larger lessons you’re imparting to students. Your instruction has to be rigorous and systematic.”

Teaching also has led him to new ways of thinking about business problems, which, in turn, have led this former CEO into the areas of writing and research. “There’s nothing quite like having an intellectual epiphany and getting it out there in the larger academic community,” he says.

Holloway adds that “Mark’s and my recent article in Harvard Business Review [“The Sales Learning Curve,” July–August 2006] could not have been written without his insight into the problems facing startups and the ways in which practitioners go about trying to solve them. In the field of entrepreneurship, the scholar-practitioner approach has really been a key to bringing new ideas into the university in a way that stimulates research.”

In their article, Holloway and Leslie argue that young companies typically go to market and ramp up a sales force before they are really ready, which means they inevitably burn through cash, fail to meet revenue expectations, and sometimes go under altogether.

Before a new company can sell its product efficiently, the entire organization needs to learn how customers will acquire and use it—and modify the product, marketing, and sales approach accordingly. They call this process “the sales learning curve.”

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