Julian sweet used to be an aeronautical engineer who designed flight control and other systems for commercial aircraft. It was a job that the Briton loved for its technical challenges and the opportunities it gave him to work overseas. Gradually, however, his work became more customer-facing and he realised that projects were being hampered more by marketing and business aspects than technical possibilities.

“We would have been able to win more contracts had we sold the commercial case as well as we sold the technical case,” he says. “So I spent my time with marketing ... [and] I could see how to build a better business case but I did not have the authority to do it, so I realised that I had to go and study business.”

The California-based consultant’s decision about what sort of MBA to do was shaped by his out-of-hours experience of helping one of his friends to develop a business plan for a fuel cell stack that he’d designed.

“I worked with them to see how to turn the chemical principle into a business and operational plan and help them to build the company. That gave me an overview of the dynamics of a start-up and showed me how powerful the venture capital model is at taking an idea out of the laboratory and into a commercial product.” The clean tech company in which Sweet invested is doing very well and is backed by some of the biggest venture capitalists (VCs) in the area.

Cinema pulls a career into focus

Anna Carrington tells why she started out as a clapper loader despite having a degree in cinematography

BACKGROUND

• What not to do in turbulent times

• A breeding ground for future leaders

• Research chemists make a real difference

• New angle plus capital turns ideas into reality

Related Internet Links

• Snakes & Ladders

• Graduate jobs

• Search for an internship

Having enjoyed the international nature of his career to date – “I love the US approach to work. They give you enough rope to hang yourself and they don’t fire you when you do because they consider it a learning experience” – he also decided to look for an MBA that would let him broaden his overseas experience while focusing on entrepreneurship and venture capitalism. In the end he decided on IESE in Spain, thanks in part to its Entrepreneurship Accelerator programme, run with Insead. The course links MBA students with serial entrepreneurs who run high-growth start-up companies.

While many students take this course because they are interested in starting their own businesses, Sweet comes at it from a slightly different perspective in that the company he plans to start will help VCs to decide which start-up companies to support.

“I looked at the way that entrepreneurship functions all the way up the chain,” he says. “I identified that there is plenty of money and plenty of ideas out there, but the problem is getting them together with the right management team. I decided that I could be that management team.”

He started talking to VCs to see if he could help them to make better investments in clean technology while he was still studying; now, a year after finishing his MBA, he’s working as a due diligence consultant and helping start-ups to polish their business plans while preparing to set up his own company in the next year.

“I was warned against doing an MBA by a number of people in the UK. They felt I was losing experience by stepping outside the work ladder, but that’s wrong. The MBA was a great thing and exactly the right choice for me.”