During my masters in accounting program, I had the opportunity to take courses outside of accounting and join MBA classes. One of the classes was New Venture Planning and involved joining a multi-disciplined team to model a business plan, pitch it to investors, and ultimately create the product. It was one of my favorite classes, not just for what I learned, but for who I was able to learn from and work with.
I joined a team of 3 that had a background as diverse as it comes. One had a depth of experience in marketing, another in film, and the leader of the group and who's idea we'd run with, had an extensive background in software development and engineering. I would add my finance expertise, and we would forge ahead attempting to revolutionize how people talk about sports.
Spordeaux (pronounced Spore-Dough) was our take on a social media platform solely revolving around sports. Our founder had identified a market opportunity to engage users on a level that would enhance conversations they were interested in having. Conversations largely took place on pre-existing platforms, (Facebook, Twitter) but those platforms never took the opportunity to enhance the conversations their users were having. Even today, Twitter has still not amplified their sports conversation tools to the level many conversation seekers would hope.
During the course of a term, we worked tirelessly to develop the project by holding focus groups, test runs, and meetings with advisers who's opinion we valued. After several pitches, presentations, and business models we felt we had a great start to the solution of the sports conversation problem. After our final class, we decided to move in different directions, and keep pursuing our paths of education. The project was an incredible learning experience for me. Not only did it teach me about finance and accounting from a business perspecitve, it taught me much more about marketing, sales, and operations. Most importantly, it taught me the importance of a team and the necessity to learn about others. I so greatly enjoyed my time with my team mates and will remember that term for a long time to come.