Verity Noble, Vice President of Programming at Unreasonable Institute talks to us about why she skipped the world of finance and consulting in favour of social business.
The Unreasonable Institute helps social enterprises have a bigger impact. The ambitious goal is to help these enterprises scale to reach one million people each.
Verity graduated from IE Business School Spain in 2012. She shares her remarkable story of getting onto the perfect MBA programme, and through a series of twists and turns landing the perfect job with Unreasonable Institute. We learn more about the Unreasonable institute and how it helps social entrepreneurs succeed.
What's the Unreasonable Institute all about?
The Unreasonable Institute gets world-changing ventures and entrepreneurs what they need to scale their impact.
Each year, we select 10 to 30 entrepreneurs called “Unreasonable Fellows” from every corner of the globe to live under the same roof for six weeks in Boulder, Colorado. These entrepreneurs receive customized training and support from 50 world-class mentors, ranging from a Time Magazine Hero of the Planet, to the head of user experience at Google X, to an entrepreneur who’s enabled over 20 million farmers to move out of poverty.
In the process, they form relationships with corporations and international organizations, receive legal advice and design consulting, and get in front of hundreds of potential funders.
Our goal is to bring all the resources to accelerate these ventures so they can scale to meet the needs of at least one million people each.
The 2013 Institute will run from June 12th – July 24th, 2013 and applications for the 2014 institute will open in Fall 2013.
Who set it up?
Daniel Epstein, Tyler Hartung and Teju Ravilochon were three highly idealistic young men who met at the University of Colorado in Boulder. They wanted to start a business that had a social mission but noticed that there was a total lack of support, knowledge, and networks to help entrepreneurial-minded young people start social ventures.
So they decided to create something that offered all three resulting in the birth of The Unreasonable Institute. The three of them have recently been named in Inc. Magazine's 30 under 30 Coolest young entrepreneurs of 2012.
Why the name Unreasonable Institute?!
The organization's name comes from a George Bernard Shaw quote: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
How do entrepreneurs hear about you?
We go out and hunt them down! I'm only kidding. For the last couple of years Unreasonable TV has been featured by Fast Company which showcases what happens at the Unreasonable Institute and, alongside various press coverage, is cited by many as their motivating factor for getting involved.
Others hear about it from fellow entrepreneurs who have either attended or applied to the institute before, but most are discovered through our amazing global network of pipeline partners including Ashoka, Aspen Institute and Endeavour. Without them the task of finding the right entrepreneurs to bring to the institute would be so much harder.
Can you tell us a bit about your role? What types of events do you run?
My job title is Vice President of Programming - I have no idea what that really means (!) but basically from this summer, I will be directing all the logistics of the summer institute which involves creating the container within which the magic can happen!
More specifically this includes planning out the whole summer in detail to ensure that every I is dotted and every t crossed from securing the house and chef and coordinating mentor travel, to managing a team of fabulous summer interns and running each of our summer events. I am also responsible for sponsorship, local activation and accounts.
The idea is that I free up Teju and Tyler's time to focus on scaling the Unreasonable concept to other countries.
What is your favourite Unreasonable start-up so far?
I can't answer that question! I love them all.
How did you hear about the job opportunity at Unreasonable Institute?
I was at business school and asked a particularly impressive friend of mine what his dream job was. He told me about this Unreasonable Institute in Colorado and I thought WOW, that sounds like my dream job too, but thought no more about it - it was in the US, it would clearly be impossible to get a job there and it sounded like you might need to be a finance guru to work there (I was thinking of it as a kind of VC firm at this point.)
I then won a place on the Emzingo internship to South Africa which quite literally changed my life. I was consulting for social businesses in Johannesburg and suddenly became immersed in this whole world that I totally gave a shit about and really enjoyed. However, on return to Madrid, I still had no real idea what I wanted to do so in a post-Emzingo career chat with one of the Emzingo founders, Ramon, I asked him, 'Given my interests and experience, what do YOU think I should do?'
He suggested I look at Impact Investing. It looked great - combining what I cared about with an MBA appropriate job - I'm in! As soon as I graduated I applied for an internship at Clearly So, an organization that facilitates investment into social businesses and builds that space in general.
As the most experienced (i.e. oldest!) intern I was given a great role of helping to set up the first social angel network in Europe, working closely with the amazing Suzanne Biegel, ex-head of investor circle in the US.
I then saw the Program Manager role at Unreasonable on Emzingo's Facebook page and I sent a note that looked a bit like this: "The fact that I have a British passport probably fills you with horror, but here are five reasons why you should give me a chance." Teju wrote back immediately saying if you're the right person, we'll do whatever it takes to make this work, definitely apply! The rest, as they say, is history.
Is this what you expected to be doing, post-MBA?
Hmmmm, I really don't know what I was expecting to be doing post-MBA but I did expect to discover what I was meant to be doing and this is definitely it, so yes. I guess in a roundabout way, it is what I expected to be doing although I still pinch myself that I got so lucky!
Why did you choose IE for your MBA?
This is quite an unusual story…. Both my husband and I were applying for MBAs and getting two people into business school is a lot harder than getting one person in - or at least to the same business school anyway. So we chose about 10 business schools in the US, South Africa, Australia, China and Europe and applied to all of them. IE was not on this list. We ranked the 10 schools in order of where we would like to go most and decided that whichever was the highest ranked that we both got into, we'd go there.
Offers and rejections began to come in and there were very few places that accepted both of us!
We then (very randomly) met someone who went to IE in the last month or so before we were making our decision and we decided to throw in a last minute application, ranking IE as number 2 on our list of schools. Boom, we both got in, the start dates were perfect and it was in a great city so off we went.
There's a lot of talk in the MBA world about Return On Investment, measured in terms of salary increase. Were you ever tempted to get into consulting or finance or another highly paid industry?
I HATE working in an office for long-hours. I'm also not great with checking in with six different people before I make a decision so I would have been terrible in consulting or finance. Yes, I did consider both as it would be nice to earn a fat salary, but that is really not my motivating factor.
At Unreasonable I get to work with my best friends every day, I do something that I'm really passionate about, and I feel like I'm making a difference. I also get to act like an idiot, dance in the office and laugh pretty much not stop. If it paid me a fortune, that would be a bonus but we're a non-profit so that would also go against our values a little.
The other day I read an article that suggested an MBA was a waste of money. I can definitely see that point of view. It's expensive and you could learn a lot of the stuff they teach you from books, seminars, videos etc. I expected to become highly knowledgeable about certain things but instead I learned a bit about A LOT! I learned the language of business which has proved invaluable to me since. But most importantly I made lifelong friendships with truly amazing people and built a global network that is priceless.
Read more stories about students, alumni and programs at IE Business School, Spain
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