The allure of Silicon Valley and the technology sector has been charming workers away from corporations for years. MBA students too are flocking to entrepreneurship and start-ups in greater numbers. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) has accelerated 28 new business ventures founded by MBAs this year alone.
“An MBA is of significant value to an entrepreneur... The MBA positions entrepreneurs to develop a business, not just an idea,” says Sergio Llorian, founder and chief executive of VoiceBoxer, a start-up that provides voice interpretation for multilingual webinars and presentations.
He founded the business in 2013, the same year he began a full-time MBA at CBS. Sergio hit on the idea while working in the language services industry, where he noticed there were small events that needed interpretation services, but were priced out of the market.
One of the 28 ventures incubated at CBS’ MBA Accelerator, VoiceBoxer has benefited from the atmosphere of cooperation and collaboration, allowing its team to test new ideas.
“[The] accelerator gave us early exposure to prominent members of the start-up community,” says Sergio, who graduated from the MBA program last year, and who opted for the Entrepreneurship Track. It has been a “substantial part of our development”, he says.
The Copenhagen location combines the benefits of a thriving tech industry with the cooperative advantages of a small but growing entrepreneurial scene. “Copenhagen is an up-and-coming start-up community,” Sergio adds.
VoiceBoxer targets international corporations, non-profits, governments and educational institutions. It recently raised funding from angel investors, although Sergio declines to provide details.
The start-up’s success is not unique. Since launching last year, the CBS MBA Accelerator has doubled the number of ventures housed on its Denmark campus.
Eythor Jonsson, its director, says the business school has been building up its entrepreneurship training for a decade.
“Many students were eager to start their own companies and many others were enthusiastic about learning the process of new venture creation to become better leaders,” he says.
He puts the growth in number of students becoming entrepreneurs down to lower barriers to entry. For example, technology has made it easier to launch a company, and the entrepreneurial ecosystems in most economies support start-ups.
“Entrepreneurship,” he says, is also the “foundations of the modern organization”, citing Google, Facebook and local Danish ventures Falcon Social and Vivino as champions of this model.
Key to its success are partnerships with organizations such as PayPal, which offers perks and assistance to develop the ventures, and Business Angels Copenhagen. The accelerator models itself on Techstars, the incubator which had in January accelerated 531 start-ups with combined enterprise value of $42 billion. 50 mentors — who are serial entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and technology experts — help budding entrepreneurs develop their companies.
“The intense feedback provided great food for thought…It makes the business model stronger,” says Heather Thomas, founder and CEO of MadMad Food, which operates a gastro pub, the MadMad Cafe, pictured above, on Copenhagen’s Vesterbrogade.
She says the contacts made through the accelerator have added to MadMad’s network of support.
Most of the largest venture capital funds in Denmark, for instance, have representatives as mentors in the accelerator program.
Heather founded the business last year while still completing her MBA at CBS. By teaching people how to eat differently and supporting farmers who are working in sustainable ways, she believes MadMad will differentiate itself from the competition.
The restaurant sources food produced in ways that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and support clean air, soil and water. The biggest challenge the start-up faces is the limitations of what is seasonably available in Copenhagen.
Heather, who has worked across the creative sectors and in international development, says her background taught her how to take an idea from concept form to an operational plan.
She greatly values her “MBA toolkit”: “I’ve learned that the resilience and the beauty of a year spent reflecting on how I use the tools, control my energy, prioritise my actions and inspire others to do the same is important,” says Heather, who previously worked at the Royal Academy of Arts and YouthNet.
This is a sentiment echoed by VoiceBoxer’s Sergio, who, as a former attorney at law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in New York, has perhaps had a difficult career transition.
“As a start-up founder, one takes on the role of the accelerator of the machine, not the brakes,” he says. “It’s a shift in perspective to quiet the more conservative voice while amping-up the volume of the more aggressive one.”