111–120 of 196 posts
If you're not thinking of watching the video, think again. Even if you watch just the last two minutes. There's a good twist in the tail in the way the most successful team made the most money :-)
Can someone just spoil it please? I hate having to waste my time in order to glean insights. Pareto.
If you're not thinking of watching the video, think again. Even if you watch just the last two minutes. There's a good twist in the tail in the way the most successful team made the most money :-)
Can someone just spoil it please? I hate having to waste my time in order to glean insights. Pareto.
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Your argument seems to lean a bit too strongly on unsupported accusations of fraud: Did it take less than 2 hours to create the booth, the signs, and perform the services? Unlikely. What, you're saying that a team of college students, on a college campus , which presumably has a fully stocked stationery store within five minutes' walk, can't throw up some hand-scrawled signs in less than (say) 15 minutes for under fi…
"And I don't seem to recall anything in the "constraints" about not being allowed to beg or borrow anything, nor any rules about not being allowed to use stuff you already own." What if "stuff you already own" includes a bank account with 2 million bucks in it? I also thought the solution was a bit dishonest, but then the whole thing should not be taken that serious from the start. The reservations solution seems eve…
It's a valid point how the artificial constraints are the envelope and the time, because the way she listed the rules was, clock starts when you open the envelope - it's almost a a ploy, or a method of trying to distract someone. Imagine, if you were handed an envelope and were told "there's money inside there", wouldn't you immediately start to wonder "how much?" and you would immediately want to open it. She restricted this thought by applying a 2 hour time constraint, from the time you open the envelope, which almost forced the students to think twice about jumping to the money. Instead, all the groups achieved something without ever really having to open the envelope. I think it was interesting, and a job well done.
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Can someone just spoil it please? I hate having to waste my time in order to glean insights. Pareto.
She teaches a class at Stanford and offers each team $5 of 'funding' in an envelope. She tells them that once they open the envelope, they have 2 hours to make as much money as they can. She cites three teams' approaches: 1) First team opens a free stand that offers to check peoples bike tire pressure for free, then charges $1 to inflate if necessary. This team changes midstream to accepting donations instead of char…
Welcome to business school.
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The more I think about the video, the more disappointed I become. You're right: these "genius entrepreneurs" were selling the time of their classmates. The 3-minute slot had no value if their classmates didn't tolerate the fact that their time became a commercial - one which they certainly didn't opt into. On the one hand, it's probably true that the timeslot they sold was the most valuable thing they had, for the pu…
> You're right: these "genius entrepreneurs" were selling the time of their classmates. Exactly. But you miss the fact that they already had the time of their classmates to sell. No matter what happened, the classmates would have to sit through 3 minutes from this group.
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Thanks for the synopsis. I'm curious, though, what makes the solutions 'immoral' or dishonest? They seem perfectly legitimate to me.
Making and selling restaurant reservations doesn't strike you as dishonest? It's an honor system. What's to stop me from making reservations at ten different restaurants for my blind date tonight, and deciding at the last minute which one will make the best impression on my date? The system relies on honesty. It only works because few people are willing to abuse it, and those who do so only do it in a small way. This…
I'm not so sure that it does. It relies on filling the tables at the restaurants. The restaurants don't care if the people who come to fill your table aren't the same ones that originally booked the reservation. Nor do they care if a certain number of reservations are no-shows, if the number of no-shows is smaller than the number of people waiting at the door.
As I said above, you obviously can't take this all the way to the edge case or you'll have a company that buys up every single reservation, sells none of them, and then cancels them all at the last minute. Then that company will go out of business, either because the restaurant stops them or because the restaurant goes broke, taking the company with it. ;) So, don't do that! Just because your business plan fails on some edge case doesn't mean that it has to fail for you...
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Well I understand what you're saying here, but you're over-thinking the problem (like an engineer). The point of the exercise was to get the students excited about entrepreneurialism. The real world (read Wall Street) has plenty of constraints and people are always gaming the system to make a buck. So in this sense, it's a valid exercise. Edit: In terms of "gaming the system" I'd like to think of this as leveraging o…
Yes, because the lesson I really want people who are thinking of working on Wall Street to learn is that they should be trying to cheat the system.
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"And I don't seem to recall anything in the "constraints" about not being allowed to beg or borrow anything, nor any rules about not being allowed to use stuff you already own." What if "stuff you already own" includes a bank account with 2 million bucks in it? I also thought the solution was a bit dishonest, but then the whole thing should not be taken that serious from the start. The reservations solution seems eve…
If stuff you already own includes a bank account with 2 million bucks in it, and you burn through it in order to excel in one class, that's a lesson in itself. Or, more realistically, if a student had $100 in their pocket and used it as additional funding. You can easily be in a similar situation in real life. You can get a mortgage on your house, or sell your car, or pawn family heirloom, etc. You can extend your ru…
If a student weren't allowed to sacrifice their entire life and all of their resources to excel at this one stupid class exercise, it wouldn't be a very good simulation of the entrepreneurial experience, would it?
You know what would have made for a great class? If one of the students had invested $2 million out of pocket to create an additional $100k in two hours. They would have presented that to the class. Everyone would have to agree that, objectively speaking, in dollars and cents, they would have "won". The next question to ask them is: do you feel successful? Have you accomplished whatever it is that you wanted to accomplish, when you signed up for a class on entrepreneurship? And does that make you happy?
Whatever their answer was, it would probably be educational.
For me, a take-home lesson from Startup School was that a lot of extremely talented and successful entrepreneurs are still searching for their answer to this question. They've invented something great, or they've made N millions of dollars, or both, and yet the question persists.
They have time to make money from 2 hours after they open the envelope. If you make your money outside of that time, how is it supposed to count towards the money that you made for the project?
Why couldn't they just never open the envelope and work 9-5 jobs for a couple weeks? Then say 'HAH! see! we made 2,000 bucks each!'