Where Are They Now?

Sebastian Rivas (Andes STR) interviewed by Mark Tebbe

Matt Maloney admits he had a bit of an ego when he entered the New Venture Challenge. He had already launched Grubhub, had a few customers, and had landed at a top business school.

But during his first presentation to the NVC judges, he fell on his face.

“You could tell mid-way through, the blank stares, people were expecting unit model economics,” Maloney, MBA ’10, recalls. “They’re expecting financial plan. What do you need to invest? What’s the runway? What’s the outcome? What’s the next round? What’s your marketing plan? What’s your hiring plan? We weren’t even doing a good job of explaining the technology and the product itself.”

Maloney followed the advice to speak to all of the Booth advisors he could in order to gain insights on everything from marketing to quantifying the opportunity. Grubhub ended up tying for first-place in the 2006 NVC and the following year secured a $1.1 million Series A.

“We didn’t change the product. The opportunity didn’t change. The solution didn’t change. It was completely about how did I go about communicating to potential investors the opportunity, the solution, and the potential payout,” Maloney said.

Chicago-based Grubhub, which went public in 2014, has since become a mammoth food delivery company. A deal to be acquired by Amsterdam-based Just Eat Takeaway for $7.3 billion is set to close June 15.

In this episode, Maloney, who continues as Grubhub’s CEO, speaks with Mark Tebbe, an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Booth who calls Maloney the “poster child” for the NVC.

They discuss the leadership challenges at a fast-growing company, why some markets were not successful for Grubhub, and the difficulty of learning how to sell.

Coco Meers’ career has centered on helping women look and feel their best. When she caught the entrepreneurship bug and looked for a pain point to solve in that space, she kept remembering a long flight delay she had when traveling between Paris and New York and how she wished she could spend the time getting an eyebrow wax in town – if only she knew what salons were good, nearby, and available.

Her idea for PrettyQuick was to offer a marketplace for booking beauty services much like OpenTable does for restaurant reservations. She chose to attend Chicago Booth so she could take the idea through the New Venture Challenge, where in 2011 she tied for third place and received $10,000.

She recalls presenting to the panel of judges, which at the time was overwhelmingly male, and feeling that they couldn’t quite identify with the problem.

“With the emergency of eyebrow and bikini wax booking, I didn’t get a lot of confirmatory nods at the time,” Meers, MBA ’14, laughed.

Meers, who sold PrettyQuick to Groupon in 2015, has since committed to helping improve gender diversity among startup founders and investors. She launched Rebelle Collective, an angel fund that invests in women-owned companies, and through that platform cofounded Equilibria, a premium CBD company targeting women.

In conversation with Starr Marcello, deputy dean for MBA programs at Chicago Booth and former executive director of the Polsky Center, Meers discusses the times PrettyQuick nearly failed, why marketplaces are so difficult, and why she made the tough choice to sell to Groupon.

Growing up in a small, religious town in Utah, Bryan Johnson felt he existed in a video game where the rules were all mapped out. His favorite part of the day as a kid were the early mornings he spent wandering the fields with his dog, shooting at targets with his BB gun, which gave him a feeling of “endless possibility.”

Now he’s playing in a video game of his own making, as he puts it, that allows him to explore the “infinite expanse” of the brain and how it might be measured and shaped to help humanity thrive.

But before he could found Kernel, a neurotech company building scalable brain-recording devices, Johnson had to sell Braintree – a pioneering mobile payment platform that he took through the New Venture Challenge.
In this podcast episode, Johnson, MBA ’07, speaks with Starr Marcello, deputy dean of MBA programs at Chicago Booth and formerly executive director of the Polsky Center.

In a fascinating, at times mind-bending interview, Johnson discusses how the NVC taught him to communicate his vision for Braintree; why big ecommerce companies trusted his tiny startup with their payment platforms; and how he leads sophisticated engineering companies without being an engineer himself.

Johnson, who sold Braintree to PayPal for $800 million and used the money to start Kernel, also reveals that he rarely spends time in the present anymore as he contemplates what intelligence will look like in the future.

“For some reason, I don’t know why, I feel responsible for the year 2500,” he said.

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

As a Black founder, Seyi Fabode, MBA ’10, has experienced the challenge of investors taking him seriously.

Fabode, an immigrant from Nigeria, recalls an investor calling him and his African-American partner in his first venture, Power2Switch, “boys.” It happened again 10 years later, after Fabode had founded the clean water company Varuna Tech.

“I have two kids, I’m a grown man,” Fabode said. “And you can tell there’s this, I’ll say, discount and disregard and disrespect that is just embedded in some of these conversations that I can’t imagine some of my White counterparts experience.”

In this podcast episode, Fabode speaks about his entrepreneurship journey with Ellen Rudnick, a senior advisor on entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth and the first executive director of the Polsky Center.

He took Power2Switch, an online marketplace to help people choose electricity suppliers, through the New Venture Challenge in 2009. And while it was not selected to advance to the finals, the experience was pivotal in helping to make the business a success, he said.

The entrepreneurial peers Fabode met through the program continue to serve as mentors and investors. The early mistakes he made in his haste to assemble a team taught him the value of hiring slowly. And Michael Polsky himself, the namesake of the Polsky Center and CEO of Invenergy, served as chairman of his board.

Power2Switch was acquired by Choose Energy in 2013, and five years later Fabode launched Varuna Tech, which uses sensors to measure water health in municipal water systems and alerts the proper authorities if something is wrong. The company is drawing interest as the world comes to grips with the dangers of water contamination.

“I feel we’ve timed this right,” Fabode said.

In his interview, Fabode discussed what makes a good hire, the need for more mental health support for entrepreneurs, and the challenges that continue to face minority and women founders.

Foxtrot cofounder and CEO Mike LaVitola, MBA ’14, has become expert at hearing “no.” He was not initially accepted into the New Venture Challenge, and after he talked his way in, his team did not make the finals. Despite steady revenue, it took years to put together a seed round.

But LaVitola remained committed to his idea of a reimagined convenience store, with curated locally-made products that could be ordered online for delivery on demand.

The ecommerce model soon evolved to include physical stores after Foxtrot’s first distribution warehouse, in the West Loop, became a community gathering place and organic marketing for the brand.

“People were in and having an espresso in the morning and taking meetings there and grabbing wine after work, and it just became this total embodiment for the brand,” LaVitola said.

Chicago-based Foxtrot in February announced a $45 million Series B round. It has eight stores in Chicago, two in Dallas and two in Washington, DC, with plans to double its store count this year. It is also recently launched nationwide shipping.

In this episode, LaVitola speaks with Waverly Deutsch, a professor of entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth and academic director of University-wide entrepreneurship content. She was on the committee that initially rejected Foxtrot’s NVC application.

Katlin Smith, founder and CEO of Simple Mills, wowed her first buyer with a muffin recipe using almond flour. Now the Chicago-based natural baking brand is the category leader in baking mixes and crackers. Its products are in more than 27,000 stores, from Whole Foods to Walmart.

Smith, who had her products in just four stores when she started at Chicago Booth, was a co-winner of the 2014 Edward L. New Venture Challenge. The NVC helped her understand the importance of spending on marketing for her brand and how to make a case to investors, she said.

Still, the first funding round was tough. Her parents mortgaged their house to give her $200,000 to get her company to a point where it could raise money.

“It’s hard to sleep at night when you know your parents’ retirement hinges on your business doing well,” Smith said.

In this episode, Smith tells the story of her startup journey to Chris McGowan, an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Booth, Investor in Residence at the Polsky Center and general partner of the private equity firm CJM Ventures. McGowan is also a former board member of Simple Mills.

They cover why everyone should have a leadership coach, the mistakes Smith made when hiring, and how she is broadening the ambition of Simple Mills to shape how food is grown, through initiatives to help farmers employ regenerative agriculture techniques.

Ashish Rangnekar, MBA ’11, grew up in a sleepy town in India where success looked like a white-collar job, not entrepreneurship.

But early on he encountered a problem: he had few resources to prepare for college entrance exams. A decade later, when he was living in New York and planning for the GMAT, he realized test prep options were still lacking outside of lugging a big book around or attending expensive in-person classes.

It was the dawn of the Apple app store, so Rangnekar and a friend launched a mobile GMAT test prep app, priced it at $9.99 per download, and hoped some friends might sign up. In the first month, it was downloaded by more than 1,000 people in 20 different countries.

“That was the first aha moment,” Rangnekar said.

The second “aha moment,” he said, was when he won the 2010 Edward L. Kaplan New Venture Challenge, giving him the confidence that his little test prep business could make it big.

BenchPrep, headquartered in Chicago’s Willis Tower, is now an online learning platform for standardized tests as well as professional certifications, credentialing and training. It has raised $28 million, partnered with 50 learning organizations and helped 7 million learners. It counts more than 130 employees.

In a conversation with Michael Alter, a clinical professor of entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth, Rangenkar, BenchPrep’s CEO, reveals the stumbles along the way – including how the company regrouped after a deal to be acquired fell through at the last minute.

“That was the moment of reckoning,” Rangnekar said.

Jennifer Fried, MBA ’15, started her MBA at Chicago Booth with dreams of a career in venture capital. By the time she graduated, she had launched a healthcare tech company that helps ensure surgical procedures go smoothly — and today her product is becoming a must-have in operating rooms.

Fried, MBA ’15, took second place in the Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge (NVC) with ExplORer Surgical, a digital playbook that helps surgical teams coordinate and communicate during procedures.

The Chicago-based company recently closed a $2.5 million round, bringing its total funding to $11 million.

In a conversation with Steve Kaplan, her former Booth professor and co-founder of the New Venture Challenge, Fried discusses how she went from having no medical experience to being a healthcare entrepreneur, and how the NVC helped steer her toward a viable concept.

“We got destroyed in our pitch presentations,” Fried recalled. “The judges just ripped apart everything we did, and it made us so much stronger as a company to push on our business model and think through the problem and what evidence did we have to show and how could we validate it.”

Fried, who left her “dream job” at a VC firm to run the company, reveals the sweat that went into finding the right investors, the challenge of making sales and the hardest part of being the boss. She describes how the company found a foothold by partnering with medical device reps and how the COVID-19 pandemic catapulted her business as hospitals sought ways to go virtual.

“I think 2020 was the inflection point for us where we went from, candidly, I think, a nice-to-have product that might’ve been a little bit ahead of its time to being a must-have product that the entire medical device industry needs and is looking for,” Fried said.

When it launched 25 years ago, the University of Chicago’s New Venture Challenge (NVC) was a pioneer in helping business school students get their startups off the ground.

Now the program is consistently ranked as the nation’s top university accelerator, with its alumni companies having raised nearly $2 billion in capital and achieved more than $8.5 billion in mergers and exits. 

Podcast host and Chicago Booth alum Colin Keeley, MBA ’19, interviews three key leaders responsible for the success of the NVC: Steve Kaplan, Neubauer Family Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at Booth and Kessenich E.P. Faculty Director at the Polsky Center; Ellen Rudnick, the first executive director of the Polsky Center and currently a professor of entrepreneurship at Booth; and Mark Tebbe, who served as an NVC judge and mentor for years before joining the Booth faculty and Polsky Center as an entrepreneur-in-residence.

They dish about what distinguishes the NVC, a yearlong class capped off with a business plan competition, and how it evolved.

“What is I think really differentiating about us, and I'm sort of puzzled more people don't do it, is presenting early to really smart people and to a bunch of them,” Kaplan said. “And we have now somewhere between 10 and 20 people in the room who are entrepreneurs or investors, and you really get just — bludgeoned is probably the wrong word. You get intense criticism. And it is so healthy to get that intense criticism early, because you find out where your weaknesses are.”