MBA

2015 Annual Report (Mid-Year Report)

Dear Grad Techers, Alumni, Friends, and Supporters:

A few months ago, in our 2014 Annual Report, I wrote about the Grad Tech Club’s activities throughout the fall. While that writing feels just moments ago, much has occurred in the interim, including my walking the field at Alumni Stadium alongside the Class of 2015 just three days ago. We began the year with an ambitious agenda to equip members with the knowledge and skills necessary for success in the tech industry, to raise the overall profile of the BC MBA program within Tech, and to get our members hired. With the year behind us, it’s time to reflect on how we did. (more…)

Catching Up with BC MBA and Entrepreneur Ryan Traeger

Last week I had the chance to catch up with Double Eagle Ryan Traeger, CEO and co-founder of ACHVR. Ryan received a BA from BC in 2003 and an MBA from the Carroll School in 2012. I have always believed that BC is a great place to start a business, yet our MBA program is not always viewed as such from the outside. One of the goals of the Grad Tech Club is to change that perception and create opportunities for plenty of future businesses to come out of the walls of Fulton Hall.

Even before his MBA, Ryan was no stranger to entrepreneurship, running a small web design firm out of college before taking on some marketing agency firm jobs. While he loved marketing, Ryan started to feel the entrepreneurial itch again and decided to go back to BC for an MBA. He hoped in the time to either start something or find a fledgling business to join while there. In his first year, Ryan was a member of Professor Gallaugher’s TechTrek West class which he says was the pivotal experience in his MBA program. It really invigorated him and was the true impetus to making him really dig in and start exploring ideas with new vigor.

The idea for ACHVR came to Ryan early in his second year and he ran with it. ACHVR would be an app that would gamify the experience of setting and pursuing life goals. It would also generate significant and valuable data for marketing and advertising uses. Passionate about pursuing the idea, Ryan approached the Dean of Graduate Programs and got permission for himself and a few others to approach the business as a class. He further developed the idea and then spent his second semester raising money. Ryan recruited a BC heavy management team tapping an undergrad classmate as CMO and a fellow MBA for the CFO. In October of 2013, ACHVR raised $1.3 million in seed funding!

Clearly Ryan made great use of his time and skills at BC but was there anything he wishes he would have done more of? Of course! Ryan says he did not do enough going out to the slew of entrepreneurship events happening nearly every night in the Boston area. These events can sometimes be dominated by Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern and could certainly use an infusion of Maroon and Gold. In particular Ryan suggests the Drinks on Tap meetup for Mobile entrepreneurs and the Greenhorn Connect calendar for discovering other events.

Thanks to Ryan for taking the time to talk and for his willingness to help out BC entrepreneurs! I look forward to chronicling more BC MBA startups over the next few weeks and to seeing more arise over the next few years!

Interested in learning more about ACHVR? Check out this video interview conducted by BC’s own Greg Stoller.

–David LoVerme is a 2nd Year MBA at Boston College and the President of the Grad Tech Club

BC GradTech: A Week in the Life

They come less often these days, but I still occasionally receive emails to the tune of “I’m not a coder, can I still join the BC Grad Tech Club?” I respond explaining that we are devoted to preparing our members for jobs in the Tech industry but that these include all disciplines including business development, finance, HR, marketing, and more. While professional clubs such as the Finance Club, the Consulting Club, and the Marketing Club seem to be pretty intuitive, our own is less apparent. While this ambiguity has allowed us to pursue a wide and meaningful agenda of activities, it has perhaps made it difficult to understand what it means to be a member. As a result, I thought I would share what one recent week looked like for me.

Monday, Feb 16

It’s President’s day and a BC holiday. While there won’t be any classes today the Tech scene rolls on. I read my weekly email for VentureFizz, a great source of information about Boston Tech, looking carefully for any events our club members should attend or for jobs that might be a good fit. It would not be uncommon to have a speaking event on a normal Monday but today is a university holiday so I turn off my computer and head out to enjoy the day.

Tuesday, Feb 17

It’s snowing today but the BC Startup Job Fair has already been rescheduled once so we keep it as is. As I head to campus on a shuttle that promises a snail’s pace at best, I tweet a reminder to club members. In the startup world especially, it is all about networking as Bobby Gooch reminded us, and we need to mobilize our folks. I chat with early stage startups, later stage firms, and a slew of incubators and accelerators, at once looking for good fits personally and for opportunities to pass on to the club. There are a lot of good options and I exchange cards with a number of folks. I will need to follow up soon, but at present I can’t as I have to rush to Fulton Hall for a meeting.

I slip into the conference room just as my watch hits 3:30. Google student Ambassador Arev Doursonian is already sitting there and we open up our computers to Google Adwords. This month’s Digital Marketing targets the popular SEM tool and we begin hypothesizing about the best ways to drive traffic to our site. The meeting lasts close to an hour and I leave knowing a lot more about the service than I did when I walked in. Hands on, experiential opportunities to test hypotheses and learn by doing. That is what this initiative is all about and a week later, we are making some serious progress.

Wednesday, Feb 18

Nothing on the calendar today! Even with a lighter courseload this semester, days like this are rare and worth taking advantage of. I cross a number of items of the to do list, one of which is updating bcgradtechclub.net. I start with the events page but quickly move to the homepage. For such a dynamic organization it is pretty static and the image is a year out of date. I replace the image with one from our recent visit to Google Cambridge and then rename the page to “About” in our menu. I opt to replace the landing page with our blog to better represent the dynamic nature of our organization. We saw a lift from 1.7 pages per visitor to 2.4 after the change!

Like all Wednesdays, I also send out the Grad Tech Weekly Update. This week’s emphasis? Code & Coffee, BU’s Tech Conference, and an opportunity to try out some Google wearables!

Thursday, Feb 10

It’s Thursday evening which means one thing, Product Team Meeting! This one is particularly special because we have been working for months to identify needs, develop concepts, and test our hypotheses. We finally have something we are ready to start working on and we have developers joining us for the first time! We take stock of where we are at and make a plan for the future.

For me it’s off to class and then straight to Landsdowne Pub to support one of our members, Jackie Ouellet! In addition to being a full time MBA and an Uber driver, Jackie is running the Boston Marathon for charity. It’s great to see so many Eagles out to support her. Some even do so vocally…in the form of live band karaoke!

Friday, Feb 20

It’s 12:50pm which means I am currently brewing a French press full of coffee to fuel us up while myself and others work our way through CodeAcademy’s intro to Python course. I blast Pandora “Don’t Stop Believing” Radio and crush lists and libraries. Normally our weekly Code & Coffee event lasts two hours but today I have to leave early to join a mixed group of MBAs and Undergrads at Highland Capital’s Cambridge office for TechTrek Boston. It’s an awesome event and I learn a ton! As you’ve probably come to expect…I blogged about it.

Saturday, Feb 21

As a second year MBA, I am used to evening classes. Maybe that’s why I am still groggy after being up for an hour and a half. I wait for the shuttle bus that has replaced the green line, pressed against a mountain of snow where once there was a sidewalk and crossing my fingers that I don’t get hit by the passing cars. Cold and traffic notwithstanding, however, it is going to be a great day! BU’s Tech Club is hosting their annual TechConnect conference and the theme is Product. I have worked with these guys before and seen many of the presenters speak in the past. I know it’s going to be a great event! Fast forward a few hours and I am enjoying a post conference beer and chatting with some of my Terrier counterparts. The conference was awesome and I learned a ton. I congratulate them on a job well done and fail twice at getting the green line shuttle to stop for me at Blanford St, I hail a cab and head home.

Sunday, Feb 22

I do nothing Tech Club related today…at least not that I can remember. We all need a day of rest after all.

–David LoVerme is a 2nd Year MBA at Boston College and the President of the Grad Tech Club

BC Visits BU for TechConnect 2015!

Big props to our friends at BU for putting on an awesome TechConnect Conference this year! The theme was Digital Crossroads: Products and Ideas and featured an awesome array of speakers that really complemented each other and meshed with the conference theme. It is a ton of work to pull something like this off so my hat is off to Jaymie and her team for a job well done! A single post is not enough to do justice to the amazing amount I learned, but I’ll do my best to share a couple thoughts from each speaker I saw.

Bruce McCarthy-Effective Product Roadmapping

I have seen Bruce speak several times now at various Boston Product Management Association events and I am always struck by his enthusiasm and desire to help others. It’s always a pleasure and I always learn something new. In this case, Bruce emphasized the importance of your product road map telling a story about the value of the product. He went into detail and shared a lot of knowledge but I will sum it all up by listing the Dirty (Bakers) Dozen common pitfalls of Product Roadmaps:

Being Too Agile
Planning Based on Your Gut
Over or Under Estimating
Not Having Strategic Goals
Inside out Thinking
Trying too Hard to Please
Focusing on Features
Not having a Buffer
Playing Catch-Up (to competitors)
Not Getting Buy-in
Being too Secretive
One Size Fits All
Not having a Story

Want to hear more? Check out Bruce at ProductPowers.com

Meghan Keaney Anderson-Product Launches

Like Bruce, I have met Meghan a few times before. Not only is she Hubspot’s Director of Product Marketing, but she is also a BC Alum! Meghan combined her deck on product launches with real examples from Hubspot to demonstrate her points in a highly effective and meaningful way. She summarized the role of Product Marketing as coaxing the meaning out of the Product. She shared with us her Golden Rule of Product Marketing: It’s never about the product, it’s about the person using the product.

While I won’t share everything Meghan talked about, one of the biggest take home messages for me was how thorough and methodical an approach good product marketing requires. Meghan follows a step by step process, ensuring that each necessary element is taken care of, tested, and resonates with customers. She maintains a product marketing menu of all the different tasks, tactics, and channels they could use for a launch or activity and then selects which are the best for any given time. Likewise, for a launch event, Meghan and her team actually have everything planned down to the minute or even the word of a keynote. They maintain a command room at the event to facilitate a smooth launch! All this effort and preparation can seem overwhelming, but it is crucial. While there is certainly a lot there, according to Meghan, not all product marketing was created equal. “The key is good positioning. If you get that right, everything else is easy.”

C. Todd Lombardo-Ideas Lifecycle

C. Todd runs the InnoLoft at Constant Contact and had both an awesome presentation and a superbly aesthetically pleasing deck. Most people are familiar with the concept of an MVP or Minimum Viable Product from the Lean Startup approach. C. Todd suggested that before and MVP, you should pursue an MVC or Minimum Viable Concept. Unlike an MVP, this doesnt even have to work, only to do a good enough job demonstrating the concept to get a sense of what it does. He used IDEO’s Elmo Monster Maker prototype as an example. At this point you can test with 5 to 7 customers to get a sense of whether it is worth pursuing an MVP. C. Todd suggested doing design sprints, or few day deep dives into a problem using the Define, Understand, Ideate, Build, Test cycle repeatedly. He talked about the importance of being a “Designtist,” a creative designer that nonetheless approaches their design using the scientific method of testing hypotheses over and over to arrive at the right ends. It’s a messy process and certainly not too straightforward. C. Todd suggested that it is more like the design squiggle than a straight line. “If it feels too linear, you are probably not doing it right!”

The other thing I really liked about C. Todd’s presentation was the concept of Job Stories. We are all familiar with user stories and the amount of Jira tickets I have written stating “As a salesperson, I need to be able to…” could fill up more than a few Excel spreadsheets. Job stories are different in that they lend context to the request and are thus more powerful. They take the form “When (situation) happens, I want/need to (action), so I can (benefit).” This format forces you to think about whether you are really addressing the pain point and makes it hard for anyone to misinterpret intent.

C. Todd left us with a few key take-aways that I will reproduce here:

Your opinion doesn’t matter
Talk to customers. Listen.
Check your assumptions. Again.
Think like a designtist.
It’s not failure if you learn.
F*** It, Test it.

Allen Murray-Agile Methodology

Allen is an SVP at Mobile Device Management company Apperian and his session was perhaps the most fun all day, not only because he is charismatic and approachable and I learned a ton about small aircraft flight, but also because we did the marshmallow challenge. For those unfamiliar, it involves working in groups to form the tallest possible tower using spaghetti, tape, string, and a marshmallow on top. MBAs typically perform terribly at this, while kindergartners do much better because the task lends itself well to trial and error and iteration and not advanced planning giving the time limits and lack of expertise in most participants (architects as the exception do quite well when planning). Happily, we outperformed most MBAs and even kindergartners but learned that most of our assumptions were ill founded. Allen used the activity as a jumping off point to talk about effective teams and Agile product development.

Key Take-Aways from Allen’s Session:

Diversity in Teams matters, need leadership, facilitation, and specialization.
Incentives magnify outcomes. With the right team, great things are possible but incentivizing a team without the right skills will only magnify the failure
The crowning moment in your professional career is when you see your customers truly satisfied with something you have given them.
If you can manage four things you will be successful using Agile:
- Visibility
- Adaptability
- Business Value
- Risk
Declaring work done is crucial to a successful scrum cycle.
You are not working on a technology, you are working on a business problem.
Must create dynamic on teams to want to improve.

Dan Cobb-Creating a Culture of Innovation

The final keynote of the day came from EMC SVP Dan Cobb who was slated to talk about creating a culture of innovation. To be honest, to me his talk was a bit of a let down. Dan spent the majority of the time educating the audience about EMC and essentially making a pitch for the company. As a BC MBA, I am very familiar with EMC as they are a top recruiter on campus. Nonetheless, Dan did hit on some points that I found very interesting.

Key Take-Aways:

Big companies must balance innovation and disruption
Innovate through internal R&D and aquisitions
When you aquihire you must empower the talent to stay on. EMC does this by involving its acquisitions in future M&A decisions.
3 Major Keys to Innovating Successfully:
- Develop a brutally candid view of the world.
- Align innovation agenda with strategy
- Institutionalize feedback loops and then step back to listen, partner, engage, and measure.
EMC is “absolutely, positively, the most paranoid place in the world” and that is a good thing.
Innovation is a strategic means to an end.

–David LoVerme is a 2nd Year MBA at Boston College and the President of the Grad Tech Club

2014 Annual Report

Dear Grad Techers, Alumni, Friends, and Supporters:

It is with pride that I look back at the past semester for the Grad Tech Club. In less than four months, we have accomplished a ton, always toward furthering our mission of equipping our members with the knowledge and skills necessary for success in the tech industry, raising the overall profile of the BC MBA program within Tech, and getting our members hired!

Toward the first goal of building hands on skills we have had several initiatives. Each Friday, MBAs led by GradTech VP Kori Kenerson, plug away at CodeAcademy’s Python course for Code & Coffee. Likewise, on Thursday evenings, the Product Team gets together to ideate, test, and release a real tech product. We are currently in the proof of concept phase with a few very interesting ideas. You can check out our progress here and here. Finally, each month we take on a new Digital Marketing Channel to explore its options. So far we have tried Facebook and Linkedin and we are currently exploring promoted tweets on Twitter. In addition to these, GradTech members are gaining html and web development skills from using WordPress and A/B marketing skills from experimenting with Mailchimp. We will continue these initiatives as we move forward so that BC MBAs won’t just graduate having done case analyses with hypothetical solutions but will also have applied the skills we learn to real tools and real products in the Technology space.

Our biggest initiative to raise the profile of the MBA program in Tech has been our website and social programs. We do lots of cool things and then we blog, Facebook, and Tweet about them. From a previous best year of just over 200 visitors, we now get hundreds per month and we hope to break 1000 MAUs in 2015. Among our members we enjoy a sky high Net Promoter Score of 75 and we have had alumni express interest in getting involved, companies reach out to partner with us, and prospect students cite our club as one of the main reasons they are interested in BC for an MBA. All of these are indications that we are pushing forward but the biggest differences will come from placing our people in meaningful Tech jobs and helping out future Eagles.

To that goal, we continue to push forward. We have attended job fairs and industry events put on by Microsoft, the Boston Product Management Association, and even sponsored the Startup Job Fair. We have visited the Cambridge offices or Microsoft and Facebook by ourselves and many more including Spotify and Paypal in conjunction with the Undergrad IS Academy through the TechTrek Boston program. Furthermore, on campus we hosted Alum Arnie Sookram from XBox and four MBA Alumni from Google, LogMeIn, Hubspot, and Wayfair to talk about the different careers and cultures within the Tech space. Well attended and highly praised, the Careers in Tech Panel has already led to a number of connections and we hope to hold a similar event featuring even more functional areas in the spring. Finally, we continue to drive alumni to help our cause through our Alumni Central and Hire an Eagle Page. We already know of some jobs coming out of these initiatives and we hope for many more.

As we move into the spring we will continue to move forward towards the three pillars of our mission. Off campus we will visit as many industry events, offices, and career fairs as we can, and on campus we will host another Careers in Tech Panel, an event on What Every Manager Needs to Know About IT, a discussion on Women in Tech, and a Digital Marketing Dinner. We will continue to develop our product and hope to host a rousing Launch Party in April.

I thank you for all your support thus far and look forward to a fantastic 2015!

Sincerely,

David LoVerme

President, BC Grad Tech Club

–David LoVerme is a 2nd Year MBA at Boston College and the President of the Grad Tech Club

Cyberposium and Why an MBA Matters

Earlier this month, several members of the BC Grad Tech Club attended the 20th Annual Cyberposium, presented by our friends at the HBS Tech Club. As we have come to expect, the event featured solid speakers and was very well run. A huge thank you to the HBS Tech Club for a job well done.

For me, the highlight of the event came early in the day during the first keynote which was a tag team effort by Jenny Fleiss of Rent the Runway and Scott Friend of Bain Capital Ventures. Many of us visited RTR’s NYC offices last spring as part of TechTrek NYC and I was impressed by how much growth the company has seen in such a short amount of time. This particular presentation was eye opening because Scott was the VC who met with and funded Jenny and RTR and therefore we had the unique opportunity to hear the story of the company from both the Founder and Investor perspectives. Among the key take-aways were the concepts of “do it first, scale it second” and using B-School profs as advisors, after all they have to listen to us! From the VC perspective, Scott said that one of the first things that impressed him was that Jenny and her co-founder stood up when presenting and had already done the legwork to prove the concept. I note this because good presentation skills and due diligence are key attributes we develop and polish as MBAs.

The marquee keynote for the day was Y-Combinator President Sam Altman. I am one of the many folks out there following his “How to Start a Startup” course via YouTube so it was particularly neat to see him speak in person. One of the things Sam noted was that in many ways you actually have to untrain yourself. He was a particularly interesting speaker because he gives the impression, sometime quite straightforwardly, that he does not think particularly highly of business school and MBAs. When asked where MBAs can add value to a startup, he suggested once they really hit the acceleration point on the growth curve and need to scale quickly. Other key take-aways: “If you don’t have an idea, don’t start a company,” and “Startups commit suicide far more often than they are killed.”

While I really enjoyed the event on the whole there were a couple of recurring themes with which I took issue. To some degree, despite the location there was some advancement of the idea that B-School is a bad investment or toxic to starting a startup. Obviously, as an MBA myself I have a biased perspective but I firmly believe that an MBA can be an extremely powerful asset, if for no other reason than it requires you to think about a number of different businesses and to go through some serious self-examination for at least two years. If taken advantage of properly, this can give the time needed to identify an issue, a suffering population, and some hypotheses to address it. Indeed, a little digging reveals that a full third of Unicorns (Billion dollar companies founded in the last 10 years) have at least on MBA founder, and more than half have an MBA executive. (http://bostonvcblog.typepad.com/vc/2013/11/unicorns-and-mbas.html)

Another (perhaps more prevalent) theme was that an MBA is only worth it if you go to one of the top 5-10 schools. Certainly these are over-represented in executive positions, etc. but as I approach the end of my two-year B-School journey I can honestly say that the experiences, skills, and time for reflection has made me a much more effective professional and I would not trade it. I am working on two different products at the moment (read about one here) and have chatted with CEOs at the likes of Etsy, WePay, ThredUp, Rethink Robotics, and IBM, and other executives at companies like Apple and VMWare. Furthermore, I am a firm believer that education in all its forms is generally a good thing and an a strong appetite for learning is a key tenet for success. I found a kindred spirit at the conference in Jeff Engler, cofounder of Podimetrics. His positive energy and passionate defense of the value of MBAs, Accelerators, and any opportunity to work hard alongside other driven people was inspiring. (Not surprisingly he is a fellow Columbia History Undergrad-long live the liberal arts!)

All in all, I thought the event was great and very insightful. While we at BC tend to be more collaborative and less cutthroat than some other business programs, we certainly are determined and can be competitive. At the Tech Club in particular, we love bucking conventional wisdom and I am excited for the great startups that will continue to come out of Fulton and combat these notions.

Other Key Take-Aways

Customer Success is very different than customer satisfaction. Cant be successful without it.
If you’re not having fun in business school, you’re blowing it. -Mark Wallach
Keep a keepers list of the best ppl you work with then use that to hire when you start a company. -Sam Clemens

-David LoVerme is a 2nd Year MBA at Boston College and the President of the Grad Tech Club

Code and Coffee

As part of the Tech Club’s goal of creating opportunities for students to further develop their “hard skills” through practical learning experiences, we’ve recently been hosting weekly Code & Coffee sessions. We had our first meeting two weeks ago, and it was a great success as we crushed code and rocked out to “Don’t Stop Believing” Pandora radio.

These meetings are primarily designed to promote a collaborative learning experience for those trying to learn programming. Instead of individuals tackling it on their own, the idea is to create an environment where students can seek help from each other as they move through the same curriculum.

The sessions are essentially structured as a self-directed study group that meets on a weekly basis to go through a set curriculum together. The curriculum we’ve been following is the Python tutorial on Codecademy. Python is a great introductory coding language due to its heavy emphasis on readability. It also appears to be the language of choice among data scientists. The Codecademy platform is highly interactive and especially intuitive / user-friendly for beginner programmers. The entire tutorial only takes about 13 hours to complete, and we’ve already made solid progress during our last two sessions.

Grad Techers getting their code and coffee on!

Setting aside a weekly meeting time is also intended to maintain a higher level of discipline when it comes developing these hard skills. From my own personal experience of attempting to teach myself programming through an online course, I’ve struggled to keep up with it. Something more important or pressing always seems to come up—it’s so easy to push off going through that next online lecture or exercise without a set schedule. We’re hoping that working alongside others in a collaborative group setting that meets regularly should make it easier (and hopefully more enjoyable!) to keep up with the material.

Once a group of us is able to develop a decent comfort level with Python, the longer term goal of these sessions is to work on a Kaggle project together to really put our skills to the test. Kaggle is a platform for predictive modeling and analytics competitions on which companies and researchers post their data and then data miners/statisticians compete to produce the best model (essentially the data science version of TopCoder). Tackling one of these real-life projects would provide a great opportunity to practically apply the skills we develop.

We’re hoping that interested students will take advantage of the opportunity to develop their technical “hard skills” to supplement the conceptual material and softer skills of BC’s MBA program. Join us on Friday afternoons at 2:30pm—if not for the coding, then at least for the free coffee, good music and good company! What better way to spend a Friday afternoon?

Also all levels of programming experience are welcome! In fact, advanced programmers are particularly encouraged to attend. If you have any other projects you’re working on using languages other than Python, please don’t feel restricted at all – this group is truly designed to learn and collaborate as much as possible.

If you have any suggestions for our group, please don’t hesitate to let me know. These sessions are definitely a work-in-progress! Email kenersko@bc.edu for any questions, suggestions, etc.

Kori Kenerson is a 2nd Year MBA and VP of Analytics for the Grad Tech Club