I attended my first Wharton Entrepreneurship conference in February. The theme of the conference was ‘Entrepreneurship in a rising economy’. My favorite speaker was Andy Dunn, Founder and CEO of Banobos, a company that designs men's pants. Andy’s spoke to a packed room and was a thoroughly engaging speaker. He ran his session as a case study, in which he took students through the process of starting a company and asked them questions about what they would do in the entrepreneur's position.
He conveyed many lessons that I found useful. Most importantly, if you’re hoping to start a business in business school, the best thing you can do is meet people and network. Also, Andy discussed the merits of having a ‘contratrian’ viewpoint. This means trying to do things the opposite of how everyone does them to separate and differentiate your business from the competition.
The e-conference was apparently less exciting than in 2009, where the keynote speaker was Donny Deutsch (from CNBC’s Big Idea with Donny Deutsch). However, I do think that the conference could be shortened to be more impactful and that the conference theme could be highlighted a bit more. As always, I recommend more ways to elicit quality audience participation. Still, I'm glad I went and enjoyed meeting several student entrepreneurs.
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