So You Want to Be an Entrepreneur: Inside the Entrepreneurship Summer School Experience

By Darla Bautista, MBA2025

When I applied to Entrepreneurship Summer School (ESS), I had one main goal: bring to life a new business idea. Last Spring, my friend and constant teammate for entrepreneurial competitions, Chris, shared with me a startup idea for an AI shopping assistant chatbot. Knowing how online shopping can get too complex and overwhelming with choice, I thought it was exciting to explore and enable next-level personalisation and recommendation. Coupled with my background in co-founding a wellness supplements venture in the Philippines, I couldn’t resist teaming up to see what cool things we could do in launching a new venture in MarTech.

The course was worth it, as it turned out to be transformative. I left the class taking away so much more, especially on self-reflection and honing key entrepreneurial skills. 

What exactly is ‘Entrepreneurship Summer School?’

The class, led by Professor Jeff Skinner, had one main project: test the viability of our business idea, and present the findings to a panel of investors/entrepreneurs from the Enterprise 100 Club. To support this project, we experienced a July block week and August weekend with intense classes from 8am until around 5pm-7pm. These featured panels, lectures, and workshops with entrepreneurs and investors in the UK startup scene. 

It’s a special environment because of the high exposure and interaction with entrepreneurial classmates through breakout sessions and socials to work on our ideas together. Plus, after the main block week, we were given 6 weeks to finally test and refine our idea by mixing various market research methods and receiving mentorship feedback from alumni.

How do you even ‘learn’ to be an entrepreneur in 3 months?

The experience may have been intense because of the ‘sprint’ towards testing an idea, but it provided a good snapshot of what it takes to be an entrepreneur. In just 3 months, I learned how to evaluate business ideas, become comfortable and brave to make pivots early, and build a habit of ‘socialising’ ideas to get diverse feedback on every step.

Step 1  –  The Rigor of Opportunity Assessment: 

Before even diving into starting a venture, I learned it was important to take a step back to quickly assess if it’s worth launching the idea. My first venture was a gut health supplements brand co-founded with my university professor and friends; this made waves in the Philippines largely due to fortunate timing: we meta promising Thai fiber drink manufacturer and invested in building the detox portfolio, right before gut health boomed on E-Commerce due to the pandemic. ESS gave me a structured lens to understand what actually drove our success and what I could take from that into a potential second venture, using frameworks like the Seven Domains and 7 Powers, to understand these success drivers. I continued sharpening my intuition as we repeatedly used such frameworks in initially assessing classmates’ and guest speakers’ ideas. 

Step 2 – The Agility and Comfort in Pivoting: 

Once you’ve initially identified a potential opportunity, I learned that you need to quickly test and assess it. Before ESS, I was optimistic about my understanding of customer needs in the AI shopping assistant space due to my E-commerce background. But I realised that this intuition had to undergo rigorous market research rounds and objective data assessment. As we gathered feedback from shoppers and shop owners, it became clear that an AI Ecommerce shopping assistant was actually non-viable due to a lack of urgent demand from the market; time-consuming product research was not one of the top factors leading to low online conversion. However, we became confident to pivot to other ideas that potential customers clamoured for, such as ideas in social listening and AI for analytics in community management. This process made me more confident in declaring when changes needed to be made. In the end, knowing what is not going to work is a reward in itself because it saves you from wasted resources and effort.

Step 3  –  The Gift of Feedback

Whereas I used to be shy and scared to share unpolished ideas, I learned that it’s critical to share ideas early on. ESS taught me that it’s precisely when ideas are rough that external perspectives add the most value to all stakeholders. It was truly rewarding to maximise the high interaction with EMBAs and entrepreneurs/investors by building ideas collaboratively. We had weekly check-ins with our alumni mentor, who shared her own takeaways from her past and current ventures so we could avoid making the same mistakes. One judge even offered to connect us with an AI company founder to explore mutual learnings -  a connection we might have missed without openly sharing our “non-viable” idea and following up after our session.

Ultimately, I ended ESS with a renewed entrepreneurial spirit. Chris and I wrapped up the summer by being awarded ‘Best Non-viable Pitch,’ for extensively showing the analysis towards non-viability and clearly explaining our pivot to a potentially viable idea. The experience affirmed that whatever I do post-MBA, it’s fulfilling to embrace and harness my entrepreneurial side. I’m glad that I took this rare opportunity to learn alongside other students who are also keen to take risks and get a thrill from testing an idea, see what works and what doesn’t, and share it with others.

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