The MBA Draft

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 15 May 2000 15:00:00 -0700

It's been a busy spring for Gil Penchina. The senior manager for corporate development at eBay (EBAY) has made the rounds at three high-tech MBA conferences this year, "selling students on why eBay is a great place to work." It feels like every time you turn around, there's Gil.

Penchina estimates eBay hired a half-dozen MBAs last year in departments like marketing, business development and finance, and this year he expects the company to hire even more.

At one event, Harvard Business School's Cyberposium in February, over 1,000 MBAs networked with more than 120 companies - plus numerous student-run startups sprouting like kudzu across academia. "You are a marketable commodity right now," said Rob Schmults, VP of strategy at Fort Point Partners. "It's a great time to be you."

It's been a great time to be an MBA for a while. Back when The Standard first noted that MBAs were shifting from traditional careers in consulting and banking firms to Internet startups ["MBA Draft, March 29, 1999], the trend has accelerated markedly.

These days "safe" MBA destinations like McKinsey & Co. and Goldman Sachs are having so much trouble landing students from the top schools that they've started to prowl second-tier universities. It doesn't seem to be working. Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., reports that 43 percent of its MBA students have accepted positions at Internet-related companies, twice as many who are going into consulting and financial services.

Jennifer Lawrence, assistant dean for career services at Boston University (dossier) School of Management, estimates that about 25 percent of her school's MBAs are jumping into Internet-related careers this year, a huge increase from the previous year.

"Eighty-five percent of dot-coms are here for the first time," she says. "Most of them don't know what the hell they're doing." She remembers a recent call from Bill Peverill, a friend and cofounder at NetVentures, an e-commerce incubator in Cambridge, Mass. "Give me people," he begged. Lawrence says she now finds herself teaching dot-coms the basics of HR and "how to market yourself to talent."

At first-tier schools, many students have already locked up jobs in the Internet Economy - if they aren't starting their own companies. At MIT's Sloan School of Management, students are still going into traditional fields, but the real action's in the Net. Professor Nader Tavassoli, director of Sloan's e-business track, reports that 80 percent of entrepreneurs there want to go into dot-coms. "Even the students going into consulting are going into e-business consulting," he says.

All this activity doesn't mean everyone's hitting the exits for startups: Only two students have dropped out this year at Sloan. In fact, 20 Sloan students are starting their own firms, and all intend to graduate. At Stanford, about 17 percent of this year's class are starting their own companies.

At UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, 23 percent of the class of 1999 went into Internet/e-commerce/software. This year should be even higher: "The challenge is in figuring out which offer is the best, especially when you are dealing with startups that may or may not have a future," says Ilse Evans, executive director of MBA admissions and career services.

At every school surveyed, interest was high in b-to-b and "established" tech companies. "In my 30 years in education, I have never seen such a voracious appetite for talent," says Meyer Feldberg, dean of Columbia Business School.

Could there possibly be any MBAs left who haven't taken Net Economy jobs? "I am definitely seeing some career-planning maturity on the part of students following the timetable that's right for them, rather than allowing the 24/7 frenzy to sweep them away," says Lawrence.

To find these level-headed souls, The Standard scouted the world for Class of 2000 MBAs who are eager to play for team Internet and who are still on the market. With the help of professors at dozens of schools, we pared the list to five students who have the right mix of accomplishment, Internet experience and a damn good story to tell. We also selected a few runners-up.

We presented these all-stars to three of the nation's top recruitment experts. We even asked how much they're worth on the open market. The average price: $101,100 (up 7 percent from last year).

By no means are these students the "best" MBAs, but they're pretty close.

THE PICKS

Draft pick #1: Atif Rafiq
Click here for resume

Draft pick #2: Patricia Shores
Click here for resume

Draft pick #3: Dan Rapaport
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Draft pick #4: Emmanuelle Skala
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Draft pick #5: Ann Williams Alvez
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THE RUNNERS-UP

Edward Diffendal, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College

Krishnaraj "Krish" Inbarajan, London Business School

Lisa Pautler, Georgetown University (dossier)

Robert Rich, University of Michigan Business School

John Weiss, Florida International University

THE JUDGES

Cheryl Eisen
The president and founder of FindNetwork, a boutique firm in Manhattan, Eisen has been running new-media and Internet searches for seven years.

Jonathan Goldstein
From his office in Los Angeles, Goldstein conducts senior-level searches for Russell Reynolds Associates (dossier)' new-media practice. Earlier in his career, Goldstein placed graduating MBAs.

Jana Rich
As a principal in Korn/Ferry International (KFY)'s San Francisco office, Rich leads the new-media and Internet practice for Northern California. She has six years of recruitment experience, and works strictly on top-level searches.

Behind the Judges' Numbers
Students' scores are based on averages of the judges' individual ratings. The salaries listed are averages of the judges' estimates of each student's worth, in terms of base salary (not including signing bonuses and options) for Internet companies ranging from pre-IPO, seed-stage startups to well-funded, post-IPO companies.

Profiles by Mickey Butts and Deborah Giattina.

NO. 1 DRAFT PICK
Atif Rafiq

College: University of Chicago Graduate School of Business
Age: 26
Hometown: Flushing, N.Y.
Other Degrees: B.A. in mathematics and economics, Wesleyan University, 1994
E-mail: atifrafiq@aol.com
Web site: http://gsb.uchicago.edu

RESUME AT A GLANCE
After a two-year stint as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, Rafiq jumped to AOL's corporate development and business affairs group. While there, he helped pioneer AOL's model of "strategic portal arrangements" and executed multimillion-dollar deals with major e-commerce players. During B-school, as director of business development at Audible (ADBL), he helped engineer a marketing alliance between the spoken-word audio company and Amazon.com (AMZN). He's an early adopter, too: His senior project at Wesleyan in 1994 was titled "Creating the Information Superhighway."

HOOP DREAMS
Rafiq says he'd like to be a principal in a VC firm, but he's also open to a senior business development role in an early stage dot-com. If you want him for your team, you'll have to move fast: Rafiq says he's currently in discussions with Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, (dossier) Technology Crossover Ventures and Softbank.

When we quizzed him about the viability of Kozmo.com's (dossier) business model, he said that the one-hour delivery service has a future if it can figure out how to scale nationally and make the economics of delivering a $2 latte attractive.

Meanwhile, the former AOL dealmaker has some advice for startups looking to dance with the portals: "Up until now the model for many startups has been to raise big VC dollars, pursue high-risk, high-reward partnerships with portals to lock up traffic and accelerate going public before competitors. Startups will now need to do deals with the portals that include more risk sharing and true partnership." For the right company, Rafiq just might reveal his secret to marketing success.

THE JUDGES SAY
"The combination of top-notch investment banking and substantive online experience is killer," says Jonathan Goldstein.
Rating: 9.7
Salary: $129,000

NO. 2 DRAFT PICK
Patricia Shores

College: Harvard Business School
Age: 28
Hometown: Kansas City, Mo.
Other Degrees: B.A. in American history and pre-med, Harvard University (dossier), 1994
E-mail: patricia_shores@yahoo.com
Web site: www.hbs.edu

RESUME AT A GLANCE
At Amazon.com, Shores was one of two product managers who helped launch the Seattle retailer's successful toys category. She did such a bang-up job that Joe Galli, president and COO of Amazon, approached a Standard reporter at Harvard Business School's Cyberposium to give an enthusiastic recommendation to whomever hires Shores. If he has his way, he says it'll be him. Before she entered B-school, Shores mastered marketing as an associate consultant at Deloitte Consulting in Boston, working in the health care industry. While at Harvard, she helped pen a hip-hop site's business plan, and she launched a Webcasting site aimed at teens.

HOOP DREAMS
Shores remains loyal to the b-to-c model, although she can't stand the term, and hopes her next job will be in marketing and strategy. She's also itching to be a part of the wireless Internet, which might explain why she's keeping Amazon at bay.

Shores predicts that we'll not only see a spate of mergers and acquisitions among phone companies, ISPs and cable companies to "secure their relevance and value across all devices," but we'll also see traditional retailers acquire or partner with pure-plays - Toys (TOY)"R" Us and eToys (ETYS), Home Depot and Garden.com (GDEN), Circuit City and Buy.com.

She says the craziest thing she's done was move to Paris without first lining up a job or apartment, so naturally she doesn't fear failure: "If you are working for a startup with terrific management, even if you fail you will both benefit from experienced managers and learn by doing."

THE JUDGES SAY
"While a perfect fit might be in a health care dot-com, she seems to be keenly interested in wireless and telecom," says Jana Rich. "I would advise her to follow her passion in this emerging sector."
Rating: 8.6
Salary: $101,000

NO. 3 DRAFT PICK
Dan Rapaport

College: Stanford Graduate School of Business
Age: 29
Other Degrees: B.A. in economics, University of California at Berkeley, 1994
Hometown: Los Altos, Calif.
E-mail: rapaport_dan@gsb.stanford.edu
Web site: www.gsb.stanford.edu

RESUME AT A GLANCE
As a summer associate at Offroad Capital, Rapaport performed due diligence and valuation analysis on Internet companies, as well as soaked up the finer points of statistical analysis from Susan Woodward, former chief economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He's spent the past year as director of marketing for ConsumerSpot.com, a startup that provides post-sale services. Currently, he's president of his class at Stanford. Before B-school, Rapaport spent four years doing financial consulting at Cornerstone Research. He's also been CEO of Urban Ministry, a homeless services nonprofit; CFO of Start Up, a nonprofit that assists low-income entrepreneurs; and CEO of Berkeley Housing Association, a $24 million, 1,200-member agency. In college, he led a team that excavated a historic Russian fort in Alaska.

HOOP DREAMS
For Rapaport, the most important factor in choosing an employer is finding a business plan that he's passionate about. He's certainly keeping his options open: He's looking for a position at a high-tech startup, incubator or venture capital firm. He says he knew he was destined for startups when he started moonlighting while at his day job in finance. During his off hours he says he saved three nonprofits from bankruptcy. That's experience any startup CEO needs these days.

All that, and Rapaport has found the time to start the mysterious "Dead Sea Fishing Club," read the Harry Potter series and think deep thoughts about the future of the Internet Economy: Watch out for "consumer-to-government" e-commerce and something about sub-wavelength and holographic lithography. Like any good VC, he's thinking one step ahead of the pack.

THE JUDGES SAY
"The general smarts, strong analytics and eclectic interests make this guy a star athlete," says Jonathan Goldstein.
Rating: 8.2
Salary: $99,000

NO. 4 DRAFT PICK
Emmanuelle Skala

College: Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University (dossier)
Age: 28
Hometown: Newton, Mass.
Other Degrees: B.S. in Industrial Management and French, Carnegie Mellon University, 1994
E-mail: e_skala@yahoo.com
Web Site: www.stern.nyu.edu

RESUME AT A GLANCE
Skala thinks the most important experience she's had so far is helping startup Expert Commerce, where she's director of business development and sales, shift from a b-to-c to a b-to-b business model. But she also knows her way around corporate venture capital from working at Lucent's New Ventures Group, and she developed solid project-management skills inside Intel (INTC).

HOOP DREAMS
Even though Skala always wanted to get her MBA, she initially had reservations about going to business school. "In the Internet Economy, now's the time to be out there," says Skala. It was the full scholarship to Stern that clinched the deal for her.

A self-described "self-starter and great networker," she vowed to learn in real time by working three out of four semesters while at school. Her last part-time gig at Expert Commerce required her to develop the business plan and build a team. Now she's looking to join an early-stage Internet technology or infrastructure company with a great management team that needs her to lead business development. But the job has to be in Boston, where her husband will be attending business school next year.

Reading books like Tom Peters' The Pursuit of Wow! provided some inspiration she couldn't get in the ivory tower. "It helps you define your goals and makes you want to go out and conquer the world," she says.

Skala likes to wow herself by skydiving and running three to four miles a day. Don't expect her to return your e-mail in June, though: She and her husband will be whitewater rafting the Amazon.

THE JUDGES SAY
"She has the strength of a significant amount of operating experience that will be directly applicable to the Internet environment," says Jana Rich.
Rating: 7.2
Salary: $89,000

NO. 4 DRAFT PICK
Ann Williams Alvez

College: Texas Business School, University of Texas at Austin
Age: 33
Hometown: Tucson, Ariz.
Other Degrees: Master of public affairs, LBJ School, UT Austin, 2000; B.A. in linguistics, Stanford University (dossier), 1989
E-mail: amwa@onebox.com
Web Site: www.bus.utexas.edu

RESUME AT A GLANCE
Before Williams Alvez started evaluating business plans for SSM Ventures, an Austin, Texas, venture capital firm with $160 million under management, she consulted for local Internet startups while at business school. But it's her former life in the nonprofit sector - as assistant program director for a Corporation for National Service program - that taught her the most valuable lesson in the Internet industry: Make the money last.

HOOP DREAMS
With a wealth of experience in Latin America - from consulting to the director of strategic initiatives in Motorola (MOT)'s Latin American trade division to teaching in Lima, Peru, when the country was under attack from Shining Path guerrillas - Williams Alvez is ready to work for an Internet company looking to capitalize on Latin America. "I think the Internet is applicable to Latin America in terms of connecting people and in terms of getting people access to goods and services that they wouldn't normally be able to access," she says.

That's why you won't find her working at any company that describes itself as a "play." She thinks such language "implies their company is just that - a play or gamble instead of a solid innovation to serve a compelling customer need."

The worst business model she's ever heard of is paying people to track their behavior online: "Who subscribes? Poor students, Internet junkies or people willing to sell their privacy for a few free CDs."

THE JUDGES SAY
"She differentiates herself by having identified a trend early on and making gutsy career moves," says Cheryl Eisen.
Rating: 7
Salary: $87,500

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The MBA Draft