"At least we don't have to do the cleaning," says one of the interns.

While doing various jobs in the eight year period before business school, I would sometimes come across other people doing other jobs - jobs I would deem "worse" than my own. I would be grateful that I was not one of those people doing those jobs. Yet, this week I have been doing those very same "worse" jobs - and learning a lot.

My first job out of undergrad was as a software developer. In that role, I would often work with software testers - people who would go through and test all the functionality of the software that we developed, making sure it all worked perfectly. During the early part of this week, this was exactly what I was doing. As we polished up the first iteration of a prototype developed by a software engineering class during the Spring quarter, I've been getting my hands dirty making sure it all works perfectly for when it comes to demo.

Later on in my career, as I moved into managing software development teams, I would sometimes peer over the wall towards the sales team and watch them trying to develop new sales leads - so the software development teams would have something to develop. Developing customers is how I spent the latter part of the week, sending out numerous emails and making calls. This was all with the purpose of setting up meetings with the types of people who may be our customers. We want to test our assumptions against these end consumers to ensure it has value for them.

The end consumers we are targeting are of two varieties: researchers in academia and researchers in industry. The academics have been relatively easy to meet with - the professors at Northwestern have been pretty open to meeting. The researchers in industry have not been as open. I've been using the Northwestern Alumni directory to reach out to these folk, but often the contact details are wrong. Secondly, when I do get through to the alums, they will often not be inclined to help. This is a learning process though, and I'm getting a better sense of the approach I should take.

Through all this, I've developed a minor health problem, which has been affecting my level of positivity. A less than positive mental attitude signals all the wrong things to the rest of the team (the interns), as well as the people I meet. Part of this game has to be projecting confidence and believing success will come - creating the virtuous circle where confidence and success reinforce each other. So I've turned to music to keep my spirits up; it has been surprisingly effective. We might be doing the "worst" jobs, but at least we can do them the way we want to, playing music in the office that we want to. This week, it's a lot of AC/DC.

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My startup is incubated on the top (attic) floor of Fisk Hall, the home of Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism.

"I never thought any of this equipment would see use again," says one of the staff members at Northwestern's Media Management Center. Pulling out computers from the basement of Fisk Hall, we are literally dusting off old equipment and piecing together what we can to get ourselves set up for the thirteen weeks we have of the Summer. Thirteen weeks is all we have to develop and prove a business model that will generate revenue. Thankfully, we are building on work already completed during my first year at Kellogg.

My focus this past first week has been on getting things set up, as well as team-building. I've hired two software engineering students from Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering as interns for the summer. Out of my keenness to get them on board with the mission, I had us all review the team-related slides from the MORS430 (Organisational Behavior) course. A highly rated course at Kellogg, I genuinely believe in the importance of this stuff.

The MORS430 course explains the differences between high-performing and low-performing teams. For example, in high-performing teams there are clear divisions of responsibility in the team. There is also greater emphasis on co-ordination of activities than any one person leading. Also, as we learned in a Lego game during the course, the better the team does in initial planning, the quicker and easier the team finds it in ultimately executing the necessary activities. Thankfully, the interns thought the material to be as interesting as I do.

As much as this is the first week of a summer adventure, this is just the current phase of my ongoing project. This is the project I undertook, when I started business school, to start a new media venture. During the Spring Quarter I was fortunate enough to have a number of student teams take on my startup as part of their class projects:

• A software engineering class at the McCormick engineering school developed some mock-ups and a basic outline of the web-based service that we are building.
• A marketing research class at Kellogg (MKT450) completed market research on some of the end users that would use the service, developing some findings on their preferences and motivations.
• An entrepreneurial selling class at Kellogg (ENTR903A) developed a slide-deck and sales presentation for presenting the business to channel partners.

During the Winter quarter I was even more fortunate to have won funding, via Northwestern's Media Management Center, from the McCormick Journalism Foundation. This funding is what provides the financial support for the summer activities that I am now undertaking.

With all these past efforts from the Winter and Spring quarters, another part of "setting up" this first week has been getting together and shaping up what we already have, so that it is ready for use in the upcoming weeks.

At this stage it is difficult to say how these thirteen weeks will unfold, but it will perhaps be a more interesting ride than the MBA admissions process or even the first year of business school.

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Spring quarter has started at business school, which means it is business plan season.

Business plan competitions with strange acronyms are flocking from every corner, from RBPC to NUVC. For someone like me, who is starting a business from business school, these competitions are great motivators and milestones for writing and rewriting my business plan.

The competitions rarely ask for a full business plan, as least in the early stages. Instead, an executive summary or abstract is asked for. Someone recently said to me that, in selling my business, I need a 1 minute pitch, 10 minute pitch and 45 minute pitch. These summary documents are analogous to the 10 minute pitches.

So I've been writing these "10 minute" summary versions of my business plan. As I write these documents, I realize that for every line in a one page document, there is probably tens of hours of work of work behind it. Yet this will not be apparent at all in reading the document. Take, for example, a line that says "a team from an undergraduate class will build a prototype". This line does not describe the other alternatives I had investigated and thrown away, such as looking to contract software engineers or developing relationships with researchers who might help build it. It will not even describe the pain experienced in some of these not working out.

At first, it is tearful to not unravel the full story behind the window dressing that is the business plan. But it is important to realize that the business plan is largely window dressing. I'm learning more and more that a business plan is not a document with intricate details that you design and create to carefully help you navigate yourself to your dream. It is not even an aid to help people understand how you will set up your business. A business plan is a marketing document. Its sole purpose is to convince people - to excite people into giving you whatever it is you need.

Though I have only entered two competitions thus far, I already feel that each competition helps iterate and refine my ideas - solidifying them, creating more punchy descriptions and ultimately improving what I'm working on. I'm looking forward to what my business plan will look like at the end of Spring quarter, at the end of the business plan competition season.

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I've managed to assemble a few good mentors to help me develop my business.

Several people have asked me how it came to be that I'm now working with these mentors. The answer to this question comes from MORS430 - a course that all Kellogg students complete during pre-term. We are taught that we should "seek advice" from people who can help us. When seeking this advice, we must demonstrate likability and competence.

Before even starting at Kellogg, during the admit weekend (DAK), I took the opportunity to meet professors and others who might talk to me. During these conversations, I often managed to demonstrate my enthusiasm and interest, if not take their thinking in different directions. For the people that did not meet me, when school started, I was soon at coffee chats that they frequented. I was soon able to demonstrate my commitment, if nothing else.

As my ideas developed, becoming more realistic and tangible, then the moment of magic occurred - one of these people said, "that's a really great idea - I'd love to work with you on it". Pretty soon, the next person was saying, "wow - how'd you manage to get that person on board?". My credibility was increasing.

Through this continual process of seeking advice and demonstrating likability and credibility, I've now gained access to two valuable resources - a team that will help me prototype my idea (some undergrads) and some money. I hope to find the limits of this seeking advice/likability/credibility strategy.

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg created competitive advantage over other social networks by first creating a closed environment for just the students at Harvard.

Competitive advantage comes from a firm's resources. Often this advantage is rooted in the very origins of the firm. At Kellogg, this is one of the first lessons we learnt in our Strategy course during the Fall quarter. For me, working on creating a startup while at business school, this lesson has taken on a whole new meaning.

Southwest started life with the ambition to be the cheapest airline available. As a consequence, it developed resources (e.g. culture and processes) that meant costs were always kept low, comparative to other airlines. From the beginning, McKinsey prided itself on having consultants who were generalists - and the firm continues to have a generalist bias even as other firms use specialists to give them an edge.

Before there was Facebook, many social networking sites existed. However, Facebook was the first such site where users did not feel the need to be anonymous. As a consequence, it became far easier to find your friends and keep up with what they are doing. Facebook was able to achieve this because it first started as a closed system for use within universities. Within such a closed environment, it felt safe for the s initial users to reveal their identities. By the time Facebook became public, there was a critical mass of people who felt comfortable with exposing their identities online. Facebook was able to get its user base to reveal their identities - and thus create a key differentiator - because it spawned out of closed university environments where people felt it was safe to do so. Faceboook's competitive advantage was due to the unique resources (the university environment) that it had comparative to other social networks.

So, in starting up my own business, I'm utilising the resources that I have available to me at business school. I've spent a long thinking - what do I have available here that lets me build something that others can't? What is available here that let's me build something in a different way to which others have - enabling me to create some kind of competitive advantage? Perhaps it's the alumni network? Perhaps faculty? Perhaps students? Perhaps the buildings and facilities? Perhaps the student culture? As Facebook has shown, I believe the vastly different dynamics of a university to the outside world are sure to provide opportunities for new kinds of firms to flourish.

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Following the VC trek, a number of Kellogg students (including myself) visited startups in the Bay Area. The companies visited were Fusion One, Cubetree, Minekey, Terrapass, Hollrr, Widgetbox and Engine Yard. We then joined Kellogg's official Entrepreneurship Trek, visting Chegg, the Plug and Play Incubator, SnapLogic, Founder Institute, Sinexus, Yammer, EventBrite, Bump, and Meebo. What follows are some "lessons learned" that the entrepreneurs shared with us.

It is better to build a business that exits for $25M - $50M than one that exits for $1B. Building a $1B business is very difficult and requires extraordinary luck and/or skill. It usually also requires a lot of investment and dilution of your shares. The venture capital firms are looking to build $1B businesses, yet very few businesses ever become $1B businesses. In the meanwhile, there are many $25M - $50M exits where the founders have walked away with as much returns as those who have in a $1B exit. These exits are easier to execute. VC firms will not invest in a business that wants to exit at $25M - $50M, but it is a more realistic goal to create such a business.

Many successful firms start out doing one thing, with little success, but then discover they have acquired all the resources needed to do something else really profitably. As an example, Chegg started out as a Craigslist type classifieds service for students. There were many competitors doing similar things, but the growth of the business was small. They then experimented with renting text books and found this was proving to be a popular service. They suddenly found that the resources they had from the classifieds business, such as students lists and on-campus champions, put them in the perfect position to execute on this business. There were similar stories of experimenting, building resources and finding eureka monetization moments at other companies also.

Milestones are important. When building your business, you need to set milestones for when you are going to accomplish certain things, e.g. get FDA approval for a drug, release feature X or acquire 1M customers. If you don’t reach a milestone, you have to ask yourself why this is not the case – is it because of motivation? Because of resources or skills? If you are not able to address the shortcomings to reaching your milestones, you need to revisit what your business can accomplish. Milestones are paramount when it comes to fundraising; to obtain the next round of funding, you need to accomplish the milestones that give confidence to the next round of investors.

Networking is key. Several firms had obtained substantial expertise from others, people that the founders had worked with before. One particular firm had for its first two corporate customers two of the founders’ best friends from earlier in life. An executive from at another firm had previously roomed with an executive from yet another. The Bay Area seems to be full of incestuous relationships such as these – particular circles of people that control money and other resources, which ultimately enable the startups to succeed or fail. The difference was clear between those startups where the founders are "plugged in" to particular networks, and those where the founders seemed to continue to struggle with little success.

Viral growth. A lot of startups in the consumer internet space focused on building products that could create viral growth – this was the predominant growth strategy. If the product is good enough, the product will create huge engagement, as well as customer acquisition, purely from the way it works. Bump, the iPhone application, is an example of a product with huge viral customer acquisition.

Start with a core team. A startup needs a core team of 2 or 3 people who are extremely capable, work well together and can deliver and iterate the product quickly. This creates momentum and pushes the startup forward to funding and traction.

Don't spend time convincing people they have a problem. Instead, focus on finding the people who are already convinced that they have a problem. In sales, in hiring or anything else, targeting these people is the most effective use of your time. Convincing people from scratch that the problem exists consumes a large amount of time and effort.

Corporate IT departments are gatekeepers preventing SaaS from becoming a multi-billion dollar business. IT departments, threatened by the flocking of technology to the cloud (and consequent redundancy of their jobs), are proving to be resistant to SaaS adoption. Ultimately, in the long run, SaaS will win through, but their resistance is slowing the pace of adoption.

Laser focus on customers means competitors are not as important. If you focus on a particular segment and satisfy their needs really well, you don’t need to worry as much about competitors. Your product will simply be the best thing for the customers you are targeting.

The most important thing is getting traction. If your product is getting traction, everything else will be easy – getting investors, hiring, mentors etc. If users are flocking to your product, all these other resources and people will come and find you.

Doing a startup is an emotional rollercoaster. Experienced entrepreneurs become numb to the ups and downs. You just have to accept it and learn to manage it.

Realise the phases of a startup and do what you are naturally good at. E.g. the early phase of bringing an idea together versus the phase of building a business – know in which phase your capabilities lie and focus on that, handing over to other people for other phases.

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