HEC MBA Entrepreneurs Launch Start-Up Day In Paris!

Entrepreneurship is an increasingly enticing MBA Job prospect. These three HEC Paris students are holding an MBA event dedicated to start-ups - with top CEO's and entrepreneurs as speakers!

An engineer, a PhD in biomechanics and a filmmaker walk into a bar. You’d have thought that they would have seen it!

Once myself, Arvin Nuckchady and Florent Bolzinger had dusted off the embarrassment of the incident, we came to learn that between the three of us, we have started three companies and have worked with numerous start-up firms. One thing led to another and we found ourselves taking over as leaders of the MBA Entrepreneurship Club at HEC Paris.

We had seen how other professional MBA Clubs had been so popular and active, and felt that our club had the same potential. After all, as MBAs from a top business school, there had to be a lot of gumption and therefore many budding entrepreneurs.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t really the case. People were creative, resourceful and had initiative, but they hadn’t considered starting their own company.

We started by organising regular pitching and brainstorming sessions for people to discuss their ideas in a safe environment. However, we knew that we had to take it step further.

MBA students are often pressed for time. As club leaders, we wanted to put together something simple that would give students a preview of what starting a business is like. So we decided on Start-up Day: a whole day of entrepreneurs and industry experts talking about the theme of the WRONG good ideas and the RIGHT bad ideas. They will talk about failures, successes, business plans as well as investing in start-ups.

Two of the speakers are serial entrepreneurs (Thibaut Mercey, Co-founder & CEO at Prestodiag and Maxime Guillaud, Founder of TheTops); one is a consultant and expert in innovation strategies and entrepreneurship (Olivier Ezratty, Selection Committee Member for Finaréa); and our fourth speaker is the manager of a prominent, French venture capitalist firm (Christophe Raynaud, Manager at ISAI).

We hope that Start-up Day will turn into a yearly event and will inspire future entrepreneurs and investors.

Start-Up Day will take place on November 8, from 10AM to 4PM CET, at the HEC Paris Campus. The event is open to all university students in the area.

You can lean more about Start-up Day at https://www.facebook.com/HECStartupDay

Or directly register for the event at http://hecstartupday2013.eventbrite.com/