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March-April 2005
Haas
Team Wins VCIC Championship
Cal
Bears ruled once more on April 7-9 when a team of Haas MBA
students bested 40 other top business schools in the national
Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC®)
at the University of North Carolina Kenan Flagler Business
School.
Winners of the $10,000 grand prize were Manuel Rodriguez,
Alex Jeffers, Daniel Yoo, Josh Scott, Camille Landis (who
could not make the trip to UNC), and Jeff Renaud (who ably
stood in for her). They beat competing business school teams
from the universities of Chicago, Colorado, Harvard, MIT,
Texas, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania (Wharton).
“This is a huge victory for the Haas School’s
budding entrepreneurs and venture capitalists,” said
Jerome Engel, executive director of the Lester Center, who
served as the team’s faculty advisor. “To win,
they not only had to beat their peers from seven of the best
business schools in the US, they also had to trump all 43
participating teams in the regional finals.”
As part of the competition, participating teams evaluated
business plans and presentations to decide which plans they
would fund in their role as venture capitalists. A panel of
actual venture capitalists then judged the teams’ investment
decisions. The Berkeley MBA team’s winning strategy
was not to fund any of the business plans presented to them.
Manuel Rodriguez, MBA ’05, defended their unorthodox
strategy. “We thought that we executed the right real-world
strategy, defended it well under fire, and it paid off. Even
if we hadn't won, we felt that we could walk away from the
competition knowing we had done the right thing. It’s
rare to be part a team that is so well-rounded and works incredibly
efficiently together.”
“We definitely owe our success to the Haas Venture
Capital & Private Equity Class, taught by Jerry Engel,
Terry Opdendyk of Onset Ventures, and Sean Foote of Labrador
Ventures, which the majority of our team took during the Fall,”
said teammate Dan Yoo, MBA 05. “Moreover, the coaches
that the Lester Center arranged, including Steve Kishi of
Hummer Winblad, were able to give us valuable feedback for
both the regional and national rounds.”
This success is the result of two years’ work, begun
when Enlai Chu and David Geisler, both MBA ’04 and members
of the Haas team that competed in 2003, inaugurated the Haas
Venture Capital Competition to identify the best possible
Haas contestants for the VCIC. With the help of Aaron Mendelson,
MBA ’03, of the 2002 team, now with Credit Suisse First
Boston, they created a program that brought together members
of the Bay Area venture capital community to support this
effort.
This year’s competition was ably organized by Ameet
Ranadive and Irv Remedios, both MBA ’05 and members
of the 2004 team, and Nathan Dintenfass, MBA ’06.
Thanks are most especially due to our Haas judges and mentors:
Rick Bolander, Gabriel Venture Partners
David Britts, ComVentures
Paul Hsu, NeoCarta Ventures
Steve Kishi, Hummer Winblad
Tom McKinley, Partech International
John Occhipinti, Woodside Fund
Terry Opdendyk, Onset Ventures
Ned Scheetz, Piper Jaffray Ventures
Russ Siegelman, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
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