An Exhilarating Day!!!

Do forgive me if I have not been regular...The pressure is killing us right now in terms of the sheer volume of work that we have. This has already been termed the "Hell-ary" Term "(as opposed to Hilary).We have our exams starting 19th finishing 5 days later and then I am finally off to India to be with my family !!!
The last few weeks have been good and bad...Bad because assignments have killed us outright (the marks were also not encouraging), good because we have had a couple of interviews and one hell of an EXHILARATING day today for our Entrepreneurship Project presentation.
OK, I will tell you why...One of the major features of the Oxford MBA , as I have mentioned before , is the Entrepreneurship Project, where teams of 5 people essentally write a business plan for a business they WANT to establish (a start up). Wait for the good part.Not only is this assessed, each team then has to present its plan to a panel of Venture Capitalists...The people who formed the panel this year were as follows1) Marcos Battisti, Senior Investment Manager, Intel Capital.2) Martin Chilcott, CEO, Place Group Ltd.3) Jon Conibear, Chairman, Medic to Medic ( subsidiary of Informa PLC)4) Graham Clempson, European managing Partner, MidOcean Partners.5) David Cottam, Partner, Park Square Capital.6) Martin Gibson,Partner, Atlas Venture7) Chris Jones, Ex CEO, J walter Thompson.8) Stephen Chambers , Head MBA Program at Said Business School.9) Stewart Niblock, Head of New Projects at easyGroup Inc.10) Charles MacKinnon, Managing Director, Thurleigh Investment Managers11) Jon Moynihan OBE, Executive Chairment , PA Consulting Group12) Jeremy Long, CEO (Europe), MTR Corporation.
and a number of other stars of industry.
Now our team (incidentally with only 3 people, which was a massive disadvantage from the start) went into the presentations armed with 2 sets of presentations. One which we gave and the other which held support slides with data on every aspect of our operations and financials (Can't reveal the idea here...You understand how it is!!!) .Some of the comments that we got from some of the guys listed above are as follows
" Fabulous Job. You guys have really gone in depth on Costs and Financials.."

" Excellent Plan..You should think of doing this on a national scale instead of starting in one city."

" I am sure if we sat here and asked you guys questions for another hour, you would have backup slides to answer every one of them. Good Job"

" Fabulous idea...If you clubbed it with "* Another Idea*" I think you have a winner"

"It is obvious that you guys have put in a lot of work on this...."

For the record, we asked for 2.32 Million Pounds Sterling of investment!!!

It is a great feeling to be told by leaders of such stature that you have done an excellent job !! It lifts your spirits up massively!!..Sumit and Shubradeep, you guys rock bigtime!!!!

Bring on the exams...We are ready for them!!!