Hello Everyone!
The first semester is almost at end. Having gone through a whirlwind of classes, exams, club activities and recruiting events this entire time, my previous job seems like a lifetime ago now. However, given a chance I would repeat it all again, and I am already planning on doing all the things I missed, next semester.
To this point, I feel one of the best learning experiences at business school are the different case competitions. In addition to applying some of the newly learnt concepts to realistic business simulations, you get a feel of the work culture of the company which is running or sponsoring the competition.
Just this past week, NYU Stern hosted the finals of the Amazon.com Innovation Competition. This was different from some of the other case competitions, as we had to pitch a new venture that Amazon could get into, instead of solving a specific business problem. We were given three weeks to submit a 4 – 6 page proposal. The three best proposals were then selected by Amazon, and the teams were to present their ideas and field questions from Amazon’s senior executives, at the finals.
I partnered with four first year friends, and we came up with Amazon “Box”, a personalized product discovery model for luxury products; piggybacking on the current popularity of sample subscription boxes, while leveraging Amazon’s customer database and its Prime program. Even though we had formed our team at random, we realized our diverse backgrounds ranging from Advertising, Venture Capital to Tech startups gave us an end to end skillset while building the proposal. One of my own takeaways was learning how to do cohort analysis for subscriber attrition rates in the e-commerce industry (and it wasn’t even in a class!).
We were one of the teams selected for the finals. At the Q&A, we were challenged on a number of facets of our idea, which I felt we were able to defend. The overall feedback was that our idea was quite logical and practical to implement at Amazon. In the end, we won the first place, and an invite to meet Amazon execs at their Seattle office to discuss our business idea.
I feel that by participating in these competitions at Stern, I am gradually learning how to better evaluate and find holes in an idea, analyze its potential downstream impact and convey the message better.
I recommend everyone try competing in at least a few. You might inadvertently come up with the next Amazon!
Cheers everyone, while I try to be brief in my next post.
Aditya