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Firsthand Experience for Budding Entreprenuers
The Center for Entrepreneurial Studies racked up nine successful years of its Entrepreneurial Summer Program (ESP) last year. The program offers financial and other forms of assistance to MBA students who forgo hefty corporate salaries to spend 8 to 10 weeks working in a company that’s just getting started or is in its early stages of growth.
About 30 students a year take advantage of the program. “I suspect that if we didn’t have the ESP, the number working for small startups would be less than half that,” said Irv Grousbeck, director of the Center.
The wannabe entrepreneurs “can see firsthand what the founders are going through. They can see what it’s like to be in a 10-person company instead of a 10,000-person company,” Grousbeck said.
“I used to picture Silicon Valley startups as all run by 22-year-olds,” said David Silver, MBA Class of ’08, who worked for Scalent Systems, a Palo Alto infrastructure software company that provides software to repurpose servers in data centers. “But enterprise software tends to be a whole different ballgame,” he said, adding, “It was awesome to be at the intersection of a great company and a really hot market segment right as the industry was taking off.”
