This week, The Atlantic ran an article by an MBA student who was noticing how startups aren’t ‘cool’ anymore. Between the threat of an economic downturn and looming student-loan payments, the author discusses how coffee-break conversations about business ideas with his classmates rarely come to fruition. My co-founder and I both were successful entrepreneurs before we became venture capitalists (and both obtained our MBAs) — so we found the post interesting on multiple levels.
The main goal at our firm, Next Coast Ventures, is to source and support the best entrepreneurs building companies outside the coasts. While that means making a financial investment, it also means attending board meetings, fielding late night calls from panicked founders, coaching CEOs on how to deliver tough news, and a myriad of other support functions on the roller coaster of entrepreneurship. However, as entrepreneurs ourselves, we’re not going to sugar coat the long and bumpy road to being a successful founder. So when current MBA students find that startups aren’t cool anymore, or just how difficult it is to scale a company, that’s not an entirely bad realization in our eyes.