would then bid up or down shares of the company listed on a mock stock market. It was akin to a classroom version of the hit show Shark Tank. We learned the hard way that becoming a start‐up rock star at HBS could be just as brutal as the television version.
Back then, we were calling our fledgling company Rent‐A‐Nerd. The concept was relatively simple. Small, entrepreneurial, mostly owner‐run businesses needed help with issues like marketing and strategy, same as their larger counterparts. These well‐known corporate behemoths were well accustomed to turning to the stalwart, blue‐chip business of management consulting for their solutions. However, the smaller companies we were targeting couldn't afford the services of a big consulting firm like McKinsey or Bain. One of us had already worked at a large consulting firm prior to arriving at HBS. So had many of our classmates. Big company consulting was the lingua franca at HBS. That's where our concept took flight. What if we challenged these rulers of the universe and disrupted the traditional model? What if there was a way to help small business owners and in the same breath, turn old‐school consulting upside down on its head?
At the time we hatched our idea, we were suggesting the equivalent of a Craigslist website for small businesses and MBAs. Our company would be a matchmaking service that allowed small businesses to enlist, at an affordable price, the services of MBA students from the country's top business schools, to share their expertise. And just in case that database was not quite seasoned enough, what if we threw in the weight of the top schools' alumni as well? We proposed to “match” small businesses to a talent pool of tried and proven experts. The small business could post a project on our platform, and anyone enrolled at a top‐tier business school with an email address to prove it could bid on the job. What was our equation for success? The small business solves their work problem. The hungry grad student gets a paycheck, not to mention some very nice CV padding. And our fledgling company would take its cut as a percentage of completed deals, thus generating a revenue stream. On the surface, it made perfect sense to us. Why not put it out there?
There were 900 students in our first‐year class. The school divided us into 10 sections of 90 each. The 15 teams in our section, Section F, pitched the “investors” of Section J, who then would trade shares in our 15 companies on the simulated stock market. The stocks of the start‐ups that seemed most promising would rise, while the prices of those that seemed most far‐fetched would fall. This would be the first benchmark in a competition that lasted through the spring. The true winner would presumably be the company that won in this simulated marketplace.
Everyone sharpened their tools and dug in. It soon became apparent that our competition, the 14 other groups of Section F, had sharper pencils than we did. They were creating these incredible multimedia presentations. You'd think they'd all just walked out of the latest Microsoft PowerPoint refresher course with a gold star. No bells and whistles were too much. In contrast, we had thrown together maybe a half dozen slides, including one of Scrooge McDuck (yes, Donald Duck's uncle!) jumping into a pile of coins. We had wanted to reinforce the moneymaking aspect of our endeavor, but the sight gag fell as flat as day‐old coffee.
As Idea Pitch Day fast approached, our problems multiplied when one‐third of our brain trust, Pat, tragically lost a cousin just before our presentation. So now we were one man down with a Disney cartoon character as our ace in the hole, positioned against a roster of future wannabe TED presenters. It wasn't until late the night before Pitch Day that we even figured out who was going to say what. Suffice it to say, things were looking grim.
Come the Big Day, we sat in stony silence, watching as one Fortune 500–worthy pitch after another rolled off the tongues and laptops of our competitors. When our turn finally arrived, we took the stage and let it rip. We came off disjointed and ill prepared, not to mention the fact that our presentation was considerably shorter than the others. Our fellow judges – the faux potential investors – peppered us with questions, exposing our lack of preparation. Apparently, the future investors of Section J were thick with students who had worked for large management consulting firms prior to business school. They were dubious of our prospects, to say the least. The big firms, we were unceremoniously informed, had a “secret sauce” that our business start‐up could never replicate. And the smaller boutique firms offered access to a caliber of specialist we could never attract to our platform. One woman even stood to say that her group had thought of our very idea themselves, but they had actually done some market research and rejected it hands down after concluding that small businesses weren't interested. “What makes you think you're going to succeed?” she asked in an incredulous voice. We took turns looking at one another and intermittently inspecting the shoes on our feet. We didn't have a clue.
Once we had finished suffering through the 14 other meticulously prepared pitches, the school's simulated stock market opened for business. By day's end shares in our company were trading dead last – 150th of the 150 companies launched that day. Nice job!
We were back in our room licking our wounds when an email popped in from our section professor. Kudos was not the order of the day. “You phoned it in,” he began. The presentation was flat, the support materials sketchy. Even we didn't seem excited by the idea, he cajoled. Adding insult to injury, he brought up the holes in our pitch that our fellow students were able to poke entire fists through. “If you still intend to pursue this as your business project, you need to pick it up,” he warned. Our humiliation was complete.
Criticism is sometimes easy to slough off. Dismiss the source and with it the negative feedback presented. But these were our HBS peers and presumably some of the best and brightest young business minds in the country. And they were telling us that our idea was so bad they were valuing it at less than the six T‐shirt companies that were pitched that day. We even lagged behind an app for free hugs.
We were embarrassed, as well we should have been. But we were also furious. We knew we were better than our subpar performance suggested. We also believed our idea was better than the lion's share of what we saw that day, and we were determined to prove it – to our classmates, but even more so to ourselves. We grabbed a screenshot of the class rankings to remember how horribly we had performed. Pat laid down the gauntlet for our team and vowed to tattoo the company logo on his backside if we could regroup and end the year in first place. He was challenging us to shame him for life on the backs of our success.
Rent‐a‐Nerd had been Rob's idea, and he seemed to take the rebuke from our classmates even more personally than the rest of us. “They're basically telling me I'm the stupidest person on campus,” he said. Based on our stellar pitch and end of day one ratings, it was hard to argue with him.
But out of the ashes, something else was going on. This spirit of injustice, tempered with our fierce will to compete, was creating a spark of something in our room that night that refused to fizzle out. Looking back, honestly, if we had done a half‐decent job of selling the company in the first place and ended up in the middle of the pack at the end of Pitch Day, there might not be the company we run today known as Catalant. There was something uniquely humiliating about our dead‐last finish that fired up our competitive juices. We commiserated over our failure, wrote it off, and threw ourselves into the project of converting Rent‐a‐Nerd into a real business.
As the year unfolded, there would be more stumbles and more setbacks awaiting us. Still, the root of our idea felt like it was sprouting wings, and we had aspirations that far exceeded our classroom on the Charles. Emboldened, when the semester ended, we decided to take a flyer and travel to the West Coast to talk with potential investors. Between us, we were able to dust off enough connections to secure meetings with partners at nearly two dozen top‐tier Silicon Valley venture firms. As awesome as that felt in the planning stages, the reality translated into a far gloomier tableau. Anyone who ever suggests that pitching to the Valley is sexy has not spent days listening to West Coast venture capitalists tell you how little they think of you and your idea. What's more, truth be told, we had not ventured all that far from our original less‐than‐impressive Pitch Day debut. Case in point, one morning we found ourselves sitting in the parking garage on Microsoft's Redmond campus, chugging coffee, pumping ourselves up to music, and counting down the minutes until we were ready to go in and shake things up. It's amazing we even heard the phone beep with a text. “Where the hell are you guys? We're all sitting here waiting for you!” It seemed we were well on