The first HBS New Venture Competition was held in 1997, in the era of PalmPilot and RealPlayer. And while the tech landscape has changed dramatically since then, many of the core lessons of the entrepreneurial experience—scaling, funding, and staffing—remain constant. So what can we learn from a quarter-century of HBS startups? To celebrate the New Venture Competition’s 25th anniversary, we asked some past participants about the hardest lesson they’ve learned as an entrepreneur—and what it looked like to learn it.

If you aren’t intentional about culture, it can get away from you quickly. In the early days of WAVE, with a fairly small team, it was easy for me to model the expected behavior. But as we started to scale up, and our original culture ambassadors became the minority to the new hires, we learned that codifying and communicating our desired ways of working was critical. So we literally wrote down our unwritten rules and created a handbook for onboarding. I was a bit skeptical about the idea; it felt like a very old-school HR effort. But the results were tangible. It instantly gave us a common language and allowed us to hold people accountable for not playing by the rules and to recognize and celebrate those who did.

—Misan Rewane (MBA 2013)
cofounder of West Africa Vocational Education;
Social Enterprise track runner-up, 2013

As one who loves the early-stage hustle and excitement that comes along with building something, I’ve had to really think hard about what it means to balance. Not only the most common interpretations, like work-life balance, but also the short view of being first to market to make sure you capture an opportunity versus the long view of executing something to perfection with a bit more time and patience. Or, in a world where consumer expectations are so much higher, pushing your team to step up just a bit more versus taking your foot off the gas to allow for rest and recovery. Or doubling down on an idea you’re committed to seeing through versus pivoting to something new or different because the market isn’t ready or willing to accept it. These are the day-to-day questions constantly being evaluated, but sometimes it takes sitting down, forcing yourself to unplug, or sinking additional capital that is already so precious. But that’s the reality of entrepreneurship at its core.

—Gina Pak (MBA 2015)
founding member and CMO at Blueland;
Alumni track winner, 2019

Sebastian Monroy (MBA 2018) and I launched Zubale as a marketplace to connect independent contractors to consumer goods companies in need of merchandising help. And while we always knew that retailers like Walmart could eventually be a big customer, it took the pandemic and the dramatic rise in e-commerce to force us to reevaluate our model and focus on supporting the fulfillment needs of retailers in addition to our brand business. It meant a very quick pivot and a complete realignment, but it quickly put us on an incredible growth path that has allowed Zubale to expand to four new countries in the last year (soon to be six) and complete more than 6 million tasks in more than 100 cities.

I think it's very easy to fall in love with your first idea, but entrepreneurship is not a straight path. If we had stayed with the old model, we would have run out of money. I distinctly remember advice I heard from investors and founders who had been through another crisis, the 2008 recession: Whatever you did in the past, forget it. That's how you did business in the past. Now you have to look forward, figure out the new market opportunity, and have the courage to jump and go after it.

—Allison Campbell (MBA 2018)
cofounder of Zubale;
Alumni track finalist, 2019

Entrepreneurship is about having a vision combined with a mixture of grit and passion to make it real. On that journey, the traction can sometimes create a blind spot and put your company at serious risk.

Back in 2018, when we raised our first round of seed funding, we learned this the hard way. We had great traction and a lot of venture capital firms willing to join. With such momentum, we could choose between great options. We decided to go for what we thought would be a winning investor team composed of a renowned venture firm and three large, industry-related business angels. A signed term sheet was shared by the venture team very quickly, and we thought it was a done deal. It turned out, though, that the angels asked to change some conditions in a radical way one day prior to the closing. This put us in a delicate cash position, yet we refused to renegotiate, and the deal collapsed.

In the end, we were lucky enough to be oversubscribed and could still secure our round, but we learned our lesson: Until the funds are wired to your bank account, there is no deal.

—Benoit M.M. Dupont (PLDA 20, 2016)
cofounder and CEO, WeMaintain;
Alumni track, European region, finalist and crowd favorite, 2018

People are the most important ingredient in any company. Our first hires stayed with us for years—even before we raised any money—in part because Jana Care is a very mission-driven company. That was an important lesson for us: Money is not the only motivating factor in a small company. If you can build the right dynamics and have the right set of values instilled early on, that helps you run the marathon. And it is a marathon, not a sprint—especially in life sciences, where it can take several years to get products to market. So culture is critical: You need people who can last, and, even if they don’t stay on until the end, pass on the baton to someone who can keep the business moving along.

—Sidhant Jena (MBA 2011)
cofounder, Jana Care
Social Enterprise Track winner, 2011

As a green-behind-the-ears entrepreneur, you place the majority of the value on ideas. As a wizened serial entrepreneur, you put virtually all of the value on execution. This is another way of stating the VC mantra, “I’d rather back an A team with a B plan than a B team with an A plan.” A plan is a basis for change, and thus navigating and persevering through that change is where the value is created. Navigating the crash of the internet bubble and the financial crisis as a thinly capitalized, loss-making technology company is what it took for me to learn that!

—Steve Papa (MBA 1999)
founder of Endeca; founder and current CEO at Parallel Wireless;
longtime NVC judge and mentor

I applied to grad school hoping to find ways to make the developing world more inclusive, and building a health insurtech company was not part of the plan. But in 2020, the pandemic led countless uninsured Filipinos to poverty, debt, or death. Growing up in the Philippines, I knew that underinsurance was a pervasive problem; I’ve witnessed friends and colleagues struggle painfully with finances every time a family member gets an unexpected diagnosis.

We started Hive Health to make health insurance more accessible to the employees (and their loved ones) of small- to medium-size businesses, and we did so in the middle of the uncertainty of the pandemic. But entrepreneurship has taught me to lean into surprises. Between border shutdowns, lockdowns right before launch, and other unexpected turns, I’ve learned to adapt, iterate, and persevere amid uncertainty.

Though solving health care inaccessibility may seem impossible, especially in an unprecedented pandemic, I draw inspiration from the advice of one of our professors at Harvard Kennedy School, Samantha Power: “Shrink the change.” Though anxiety can easily turn into inaction, I find the conviction to move in something that is certain: the importance and urgency of our mission.

—Camille Ang (MBA/MPA-ID 2022)
CEO and cofounder, Hive Health;
Business track co-grand prize winner, 2021

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