Running a business while at school

Your single biggest obstacle when it comes to entrepreneurship is opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is the size of your current pay check that you would forgo, if you stepped out as an entrepreneur. If you earn a six figure pay check today, letting it go to starve and struggle for a few years may not fit in your definition of moving up in society. At school you have already given up the paycheck (and the opportunity cost problem) in your quest for self improvement.

Can you actually do it? Graduate school is a walk in the park if you tackle the problem of mixing business with studies correctly. In my last term at school I structured my classes from 8 am to 6 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, wrapped up my assignments by 9pm the same day, and was free to work on Avicena for the remaining five days of the week.

In that term I made the dean’s list, competed in two business plan competitions, finished the proof of concept, marketing, strategy and financial projection documents, closed the Aleph and Appsys deals, managed an introduction with a recently retired head of a big five accounting firm and moved to California.

School is also interesting in that you have access to a unique microcosm of society that may open future doors and give you valuable feedback for free. My social network at Columbia had a Bankers Trust MD, a hedge fund analyst, a fund raiser for the Clinton campaign, a member of Reuters management team in North America, the son of IBM’s CEO, four actuaries, an F-14 pilot, two nuclear submariners, two engineers from Qualcom and Intel, a popup video editor, a fair mix of Indians, Pakistanis, Portuguese, French, Englishmen, Australians, Peruvian, Italian and exactly one Venezuelan (potential) contender for the Miss Universe title. This was just my network; imagine what the other 700 students looked like.