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Asserting Boston College’s claim as home to one of the finest business programs in the country, a team of MBA and MSF students is going global – heading to the finals of the Venture Capital Investment Competition, where they will take on top teams from around the country and the world.
The team won the Northeast regionals at Babson College on Feb. 21, and now advances to the global finals on April 10-12 at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where they will take on UNC, Columbia, Berkeley, Brigham Young, University of Colorado, Yale and the international regional winners: Copenhagen, Oxford, Nanyang Technological University, and China Europe International Business School.
“We’re really confident; we feel like we can bring it home,” says team member Matthew Trainor, an evening MBA student. “Our level of preparedness is what helped us stand out.”
Unlike a business plan competition where a team presents its own idea to venture capitalists, at the VCIC it’s the students who are the investors, and real entrepreneurs pitch to them. Judges critique the team’s interaction with the entrepreneur, the quality of the questions posed, the accuracy of its valuation of the entrepreneur’s business, and the reasonability of the terms between team and entrepreneur.
Trainor, along with teammates Matt Person, Xiakai Cheng, Zhen Wang, and Joe Mooney, credits advisor and Carroll School of Management Lecturer Greg Stoller with introducing them to so many mentors along the way.
“We’ve met with real entrepreneurs,” says Trainor. “We met with real venture capitalists and a lawyer. They’ve been so generous with their time and they’ve given us such great insight.”
“I’m incredibly proud of these five students,” says Stoller. “Most importantly, and well beyond VCIC, the knowledge they’ve acquired and discipline should be quite beneficial to their business careers.”