Feeling the Timbuk2 Love . . .

In our Processes and Operations Management class, we study the mathematics that allows some businesses to operate, and causes others to fail (I use the words ‘allow’ and ‘cause’ carefully). Our most recent study was the company Timbuk2. Timbuk2 is the yellow-swirly branded maker of messenger bags founded and headquartered in the City and County of San Francisco. Not all of their bags are made in the city anymore, but a respectable number of them are, and certainly the highest margins are earned there on a per-bag basis.

Timbuk2 is justifiably special to me. I purchased (or rather, my father purchased for me) my first Timbuk2 bag in 1998, priced at $70. It took me through the end of high school and throughout my undergrad years commuting to class on rollerblade. The laptop-messenger pictured is the third bag I’ve owned. It has seen me through all weather conditions in more than ten developing and developed countries. The company continuously fixes design faults and adds appropriate features as the model matures.
(I think it’s notable that the original messenger bag remains offered today for precisely $70, considering all of the things that affect price change over time, including but not limited to manufacturing cost, inflation, consumer demand, and the company’s preference to maintain consumer’s psychological price anchors.)

Earlier after first arriving on campus for the MBA program, no one ever had reason to give my red-and-grey shoulder bag a second look other than that it appeared a bit odd – why not a leather satchel? Now people stop me in the hallway and ask, “Hey, is that a Timbuk2 bag? We just studied that company in our operations class.”

It is definitely a point of pride that we can (or that at least someone can) still make things in San Francisco. The trick is customization. Many companies manufacture uniform, low cost products in China and ship them over a long lead time over water to the US. Apple can contract to manufacture uniform high price, high margin products, and fly them to the US. Dell and other laptop manufacturers can, only after extreme capital equipment expenditures, contract to manufacture customized high price, high margin products to be flown to the US. If you’re a small concern operating locally, you’d better manufacture customized products and capture as much of a consumer’s willingness to pay for the customization as possible. That’s what Timbuk2 does for a significant segment of its products. The rest follows the first China (and Philippines, it turns out) outsourcing model of long lead manufacturing and sea freight.

The company was covered in our operations class for two reasons. First, for the customization (and associated value-add) capability from its website, and second, from a manufacturing process called “bump back” which for its novelty is something I’m still trying to nail down. And as I’m studying for finals, I have to become pretty familiar with this operation.

Entrepreneurship

It’s rare that I read news that actually has a near term affect on my life and those around me. I think we are bombarded with a lot of noise for the sake of infotainment. When I read a newspaper under a time constraint, I challenge myself on how much I can ignore, instead of seeing how many morsels of happenings I can suck from the headlines. So I derive some kind of mildly schadenfreudian pleasure from (non-catastrophic) news events that actually affect me and people around me.

Case in point. Recently a volcano blew in bankrupted Iceland. (My finance professor relayed a quip from their Brit lenders, “We asked for cash, they sent us ash”). Who knew that volcanic ash clouds could down airliners? Anyways, it has caused transportation chaos throughout Europe. To exacerbate things, the French rail network in the vicinity of Paris went on strike. That left only the Eurostar (Chunnel) line (remember two posts ago?) operating. People around me were definitely affected. A friend missed a UK interview, the CEO of the company that designs Ferraris could not fly in, and half the class missed a long-planned sports trip to Barcelona. But there's no reason why the volcano has to stop erupting anytime soon, so my flight to Singapore in early May is in jeopardy.

On with the week’s post. Entrepreneurship – A five-syllable buzzword if ever there was one. It captures imaginations, it instils fear. For some it represents dreams to be fulfilled, and for others I suppose it ranks with having root canal at the local dentist. I wanted to talk about INSEAD with respect to entrepreneurship. Distinct from departments such as Marketing and Strategy, which I think are all critical for entrepreneurial endeavours, INSEAD offers these courses specifically for Entrepreneurship on the Singapore campus.

Startup Bootcamp
New Business Ventures
Entrepreneurial Leadership
Entrepreneurial Field Studies
Building Business in China
Building Businesses in India
Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Brazil & Emerging Markets
Explorations in Social Entrepreneurship
Business Planning Workshop
Effective Fundraising for Entrepreneurs
Realising Entrepreneurial Potential
Private Equity (read, 'Venture Capital')
Entrepreneurship in Action

It’s actually impossible to take them all due to schedule conflicts. Even given the largest set of courses that don’t conflict with each other, I doubt that even the most entrepreneurially minded students would take them all take of them. After all, there’s other interesting courses like Business to Business Marketing, Strategy for Product and Service Development, and Economics and Management in Developing Countries.

I took the Startup Bootcamp weekend course already. This was a fantastic retreat, comprising fast paced business plan writing, cash flow formulating, and pitching competition. Thirty of us arrived to the offsite Friday evening, had an idea brainstorm, and formed into groups (companies). The next day, we clarified the ideas, fleshed out the business model, rigorously defined how cash is transferred from customers to ourselves, and after running cash flows in Excel, determined the net value of the company. Sunday we prepared our pitches to Venture Capitalists (VCs) - short and sweet, perhaps thirty seconds per person. Of course the preparation took much longer than this. As a model, the instructor brought in the former CEO of NASDAQ Europe. This added in the appropriate level of stress and sweat.

Some people may pursue the ideas coming out of this event, most probably will not. The point is that we all came away with a rigorous early stage execution formula applicable to any endeavour we will set out to accomplish in the future. I am most grateful to our instructors and entrepreneurs in their own right, Paul Keweine-Hite and Peter Sage for their offering their time. Photographed is the practice pitching session.

When I applied to INSEAD the first time, one of my biggest fears was that there wouldn't be other entrepreneurs or support for entrepreneurs on arriving here. After deferring to pursue my business, reapplying, and finally entering, I'm rather pleased with the enterprising aspirations of many of the folks I've met and what's on offer, although the final verdict for the courses won't come until after I've taken them.

"IT Rep!"

One responsibility I've undertaken at INSEAD is to become IT Rep for my section. It certainly takes up a lot of my scarce, scarce time, so let me illustrate:

Each class intake of 500 students is divided into about 7 sections of around 70-75 students. Fontainebleau campus has 4 such sections. At the beginning of the curriculum, the sections' students elect representatives - Academic reps to interact with the professors, Career reps to interact with Career services and keep students apprised of upcoming recruiting events, Social reps to organize parties, and an IT rep to spearhead mitigating IT and facilities issues the students face. I'll preface the following by repeating the classic IT person's lament, that when systems are working, little credit is given, but when things go wrong, much credit is taken.

Many components come together to give a school its reputation. From the point of view of its students, INSEAD's greatest strength is its faculty, who are truly superior. There are long term faculty, and temporary visiting professors. Both are exceedingly strong. INSEAD's next strength is it's career services. Career services work efficiently and tirelessly to get consultancies, banks, and industry to come onto campus for recruiting. The largest and top-tier consulting firms maintain consultant-caliber staff exclusively for recruitment from *this* school. (What is a consultant? You're forgiven if you're as unfamiliar as I was before the beginning of term, but you'd be better served by your own research into this than my explanation). Then, after school culture, the remaining component that drives a school’s student experience, and by extension it’s reputation, is the quality of its facilities and IT (Information Technology) systems. These include all of the PC’s on campus, the campus local area network, the campus connection to the outside world, PC virus security, e-mail services, and about 20 other items all of which, like parts of an automobile, require regular attention and maintenance.

Unfortunately, it is at this point that the school falls far short of the mark – printers fail, the network goes down, email (e.g. from recruiters) stops receiving after filling an unbelievably low 100MB quota, and much, much, more.

One thing I recognized early on starting the MBA program was that the many and disparate IT problems the campus faced were organizational in nature, not technical. For example, follow this train of thought: “Why is email down? Because they haven’t upgraded to a new mail server version. Why not? Because there are IT contractor issues. Why? Because they don’t have enough budget to properly incentivize the contractor or hire a superior one. Why not get quality in-house IT specialists? Because if you inadvertently hire the wrong ones in-house, they are too expensive to fire because of severance pay laws here in France. Why hasn’t someone figured whatever issues, stopgaps, drivers, and incentives exist or are necessary to make the organization robust? Because management, at some level, is not yet up to task.

I actually sought the challenge of figuring out what process distills human and human-created issues into tangible real-world physical effects. Looking from this point of view, you begin to understand that airplanes don’t fly because of differences in air pressure across a wing, they fly because Boeing/Airbus and the airlines will them to fly with no tolerance for failure.

To become a ‘rep’ , one runs for the position in an informal election. So I ran unopposed, for the rep position because I knew there were problems that needed to be solved, and I figured I was as reasonable a choice as the next person to solve them, and do a favor for my class in the process. My campaign platform noted all the problems we face and getting responsiveness from the IT department + facilities. There were three other IT reps, and they made clear early on that they didn’t share the same level of enthusiasm as I did for “getting things done”.

But over time, the class perceived my role as being Mr. Fix-It, instead of the role I intended: someone to take complaint surveys and push for organization change while learning more about how people and organizations work in the process. While I found the undesired fix-it view disheartening, it also pushed me to find the people throughout INSEAD responsible for how things work around here. Now I can solve most major things that go wrong in a technology-enabled classroom with a phone call or polite text message in French, and the relationships I have with the staff give me a peek into what isn’t working on an organizational level. By contrast, I’ve heard that the other reps experience great frustration because they didn’t know where to start when a problem struck and the pressure from the class built to do something about it – one rep even quit because he couldn’t handle the pressure.

It was about halfway through the first 10-week period of school that the senior class’s rep got on board my campaign and we managed to identify exactly who in the IT department it was we were supposed to meet with in order to start getting things done. Org chart? No way; doesn’t exist even if people weren’t too fearful of their jobs to give us one. What about tips from previous years’ reps? Well although these kinds of efforts have been taken up before, there’s very little continuity from intake to intake in the one-year MBA. Along with so many student clubs, like industry and affinity clubs, on campus, everything gets built from scratch every 6-months to a year. This phenomenon which in part represents the efficiency of the INSEAD curriculum, also represents a lack of continuity, deteriorating the effectiveness of the clubs (and the reps) – the contacts they make, and the cultures they create. For efforts expecting only long-term results, you have to pursue them knowing you and those around you won’t get to benefit from them since they’ll graduate in less than a year. Instead you operate on the knowledge that you’re helping the next class, and that has to be enough even though you know the next class will never tangibly realize what you did to make their experience better, or be able to thank you for it. In turn, we know that we are benefiting from earlier classes of students in perhaps intangible ways.

Eventually we managed to get weekly meetings in place that people actually attend. And after all of our haranguing, the IT Department is starting to “get it”. We’re seeing some specific improvements we’ve pushed for, like replacing lots of the printers with new ones, making some Windows7 support software available, and more excessively mundane issues that 1) drive people nuts when they encounter them and 2) don’t need mentioning here for their sheer obscurity. I have another meeting with the Dean of the school coming up. And after newer updates to my section and new surveys I’ve taken from them on their complaints, now I have enough political capital to get org charts and start asking about incentive schemes without feeling like I’m trodding on sensitive territory.

We at INSEAD like to compare ourselves among the top and penultimate tiers of American business schools. These include (not exclusively) Harvard, Columbia, Wharton, Stanford, Sloan, and Kellogg, Fuqua, Haas. If we expect to truly hold our own, IT+facilities absolutely have to be improved.

More than any student on this campus I am acutely aware of IT systems near term future. In light of that, to future MBA's intending to spend time on the Fontainebleau campus, I have to make the following recommendations: 1) Bring and rely on your own laptop - for example, an Asus mediabook is ideal – reliable, very portable + good size screen, long battery life. 2) Foot the bill for a Blackberry, it provides a lot of communications robustness independent of INSEAD systems. You'll be on a contract with Orange that you can, with some trouble, get out of if/when you switch campuses.

Having covered IT more than anyone should ever have been interested, look for discussion of Entrepreneurship next post, and Social life in a following one.

This period is tough

The "elders" of the school, those students who entered 5 months earlier than we did, warned us: The second period (in which we are currently in) is much harder than the first period, completed in early March. They are correct in terms of work quantity - we have almost one new case per course per session to review before the start of class (after which commences some Harvard-style Q+A). But it's not as heavy on completely new, brain twisting concepts. Put-call parity is one notable exception. Instead, the coverage feels much more practicable than last period - especially Strategy, Marketing, and Leading Organizations. I spent pretty much all day yesterday reading the optional reading - because during week this reading is the first thing to get de-prioritized, assuming it ever makes it into the work queue at all.
Ah, "de-prioritize" - that practice I partake in on a daily basis. Reminds me of a little story this week - I was walking with some of my Chinese peers, who were speaking in Mandarin amongst themselves. What you find among Chinese who've spent a lot of time in international circles is that they often use English words intermingled with Chinese speech. Instead of just being a widely used technical English word, it might be an English word that conveys a special idea or emotion. Recent examples I've picked up include "frustrated" and "de-prioritize". I'm interested in language usage, so I asked my Chinese friends why didn't they just use the Chinese word for "de-prioritize" - after all, didn't this word exist in Chinese? Their response: "Of course we have this word in Chinese!". To which I said, "Great! So what is it?" About two minutes of head scratching and nervous contemplating ensued, after which they could not come up with a suitable word to describe de-prioritization. I'm fond of supposing that words and linguistic constructs in modern Chinese should reflect the accumulated collective experience over 4000 of Chinese history. So I retorted, "You mean in 4000 years no Chinese has ever de-prioritized anything? Man, you guys work HARD."
Last point on Chinese - I thank you for praying to your favored Supreme Being, minor deity, or capricious zephyr for my success on the Chinese exam. I've passed INSEAD's exit language requirement, and so it's one more major hurdle off my plate!
I realize I'm remiss on photo-posting. There's been a number of recent photo-heavy events for which I've sworn not to post photos, due to the cross-dressing nature they may or may not depict. Such is culture at INSEAD. Off to an IT meeting, I'm representing the class to improve our ancient IT systems vis-a-vis the school administration. One day that quixotic effort will be worth a blog post in itself.
Also on deck for coverage: Next week I must write about the Entrepreneurial Bootcamp we had. Stay tuned.

London

I missed last week's post -- a digression for which you have my apology. It was the middle of finals, and although getting into the top percentiles isn't my top priority (and if it was, it would be exceedingly challenging ; there are some smart cookies at this school, and relative to me, far more than the 30 it would take to bar me from the lofty end of the curve) I did study hard. Why study so hard, so much as to shirk blogging responsibility, if not to outcompete the Jones'? Well, because I'm trying really hard to actually learn useful material at this school. I know that once finals are over I won't try so hard to sort out everything I was exposed to. I had to turn exposure into practice. And lets face it - this school is expensive - I want to have knowledge to show for the digits missing from the bank account.
This past week was a student holiday. After a day of catching up on personal admin, I hopped on the Eurostar train with direct service from Paris to London. Most other students went to any among Morocco, skiing in France, or to warmer climes in the country's South. I participated in a business case competition at Imperial College whose campus is set against London's Hyde Park.
The Chunnel is an amazing achievement. And even though the tunnel is treated as a monopoly, and even though this monopoly *still* loses money and has to be bailed out by the two governments that supported it, I'm still thankful it exists. Because a flight plus associated trains would take twice as long and cost at least as much. Curiously, Ryanair, the low cost carrier, doesn't offer a Paris-London route. This seems strange, considering they could outcompete the Chunnel train hands down. I wonder if they managed favorable tax status with the UK/France governments in favor of sidestepping competition for the lucrative government-backed rail route.
People say London is expensive. With respect to taxis, this is absolutely true. It cost twenty pounds to take a typical trip of 2 miles. The dollar is trading at 1.5 to the pound. For food, this poor value is less the case. It also cost twenty pounds on average for the restaurant meals I ate in different part of downtown - and those meals were *excellent*. The key is ethnic food. You're not (easily) going to find a "British restaurant"; they abdicated superiority in food preparation long ago. (all though fish and chips in pubs abound) But Indian, Chinese, Thai, and many other kinds of food abound, and they're done really well. Lastly, a decent seat to watch a Broadway-caliber show costs 35 pounds if purchased shortly before showtime (if seats are still available). I saw "Avenue Q" -- hilarious!!
The business case competition was for the organization called One Laptop Per Child. For some reason I find technology for emerging markets and developing world consumers really enticing. OLPC grew out of an MIT Media Lab project under Nicholas Negroponte whose goal was simply to get a ruggedized, simplified laptop in the hands of every poor rural kid on this globe aged 6-12 years old. It took some finagling, but against odds (not worth explaining here) I managed to get registered for the event and to join one of the other INSEAD teams at Imperial. The challenge was straightforward. The OLPC project has been having difficulty getting traction from developing world governments to subsidize and order the computers. They invited students from Cambridge, London Business School, Oxford's Said school, and INSEAD to compete in proposing a roadmap for creating a sustainable market for OLPC-style laptops into childrens' hands, whether they fall under the OLPC moniker or not.
What I found especially interesting was how the competition played out - Two finalists were announced, from whom one winner was selected. However the tension represented by the two finalists beautifully reflected the internal tensions at work in how I see my career developing: One finalist was, proudly, from INSEAD (alas, not my own team). The teammates represented the best of the INSEAD MBA tradition, made up primarily of former and likely future consultants. They identified an opportunity for corporate sponsorship, and a long term pathway for local component production to lower the devices' cost. The presentation slides were polished silk, and they delivered them well. Now the second team was a group of undergraduates studying at Imperial College -- two electrical engineers, and two scientists. I remember them as being very charming when I introduced myself to them before any finalists were announced (the b-school version of, "I knew them before they were big"). They didn't answer the competition question directly, but instead identified the incumbent OLPC cost as too high, and so proposed and photoshopped up a similar product they estimated would have significantly lower cost - change the LCD to an e-Ink screen, turn the device into a monolithic tablet instead of a foldable laptop. The decreased cost would increase uptake, they theorized. Guess who won? Well today, it was a victory of the engineers over the MBAs. I was simultaneously hurt as an MBA and exceedingly proud based on my engineering background - certainly a conflicted state, especially while I was defending the judges' decision to my fellow MBAs.
My class consists of many former engineers. I frequently study with one of them for final exams. A technical PhD followed by related production work in the telecoms industry, he progressed much, much further into his engineering career than me before starting business school. He remains (for the time being at least) imaginative, and tries to explore different possible approaches to a problem at hand. I can see him struggling with the way case problems are posed at INSEAD, enough that I find it depressing. Depressing because they are the same struggles that I have, but somehow it seems more difficult for him; trying to apply as much cold logic as possible, incapable of accepting the likely but inexact solution (that challenge right there encapsulates perhaps 80% of our struggles with Financial Accounting, by the way). One time for both of our benefit, I had to derive a microeconomics concept in engineering terms. Other students would have found this work unnecessary, taking the concept on faith without needing to generalize it to underlying fundamentals, the better to apply them to any new situation posed. By this point I'm suspecting that the other students' approach is superior, not just for this school, but for life in general. (Somewhere in Boston now, a thousand MIT professors' voices scream out in unison).
So the ongoing conflict is this: Do I leave my engineering mindset behind? Success on the more difficult problems in MIT problem sets and projects usually required out-of-the-box thinking - for example marrying an otherwise unrelated concept learned in a completely different technical discipline to the problem at hand to achieve success. This is what the Imperial engineers did. In business school, we're conditioned (or we condition each other?) to think in a very conventional way. No surprises needed, no a-ha moments. Just take the data at hand, and assemble it appropriately to identify the path forward. This is what the INSEAD consultants did. Summary? If a war rages between engineers and consultants, or the engineering mindset and the consulting mindset, then the engineers won last weekend's battle.
And so today I am back in Fontainebleau for our second of five periods. Courses are Marketing Management, Processes and Operations, Managerial Accounting, Leading Organizations, and . . . one more that doesn't come to mind right now. Let's hope it's titled, "Improving Memory 101". I regret that Macroeconomics isn't being taught until the third period of this year. I would have appreciated having more time to stew on this interesting subject before graduating. It's sort of like the Microeconomics course I took back in undergrad (and again last period) - in that you can observe what they teach playing out around you every time you open a newspaper.
Lastly, please wish me a little bit of luck. I just took my (written) Mandarin exit language exam. Although I'm borderline for passing it, I think I have a good shot at it. If I'm too borderline, I'll have to take an oral exam, in which case please wish the gods of foreign speech synthesis to smile on me that day. I'll know the results in a week or so.

Singapore on the Horizon

This post will probably apply more to prospective MBAs. "One School, Two Campuses" - part of INSEAD's brand. INSEAD comprises one campus in Fontainebleau, one in Singapore, and depending on how you do the accounting, various modest research centers scattered across the globe, though strangely, nary an office in the USA.
You'd think that a student could freely change campuses to suit his development and career needs subject only to course offering schedule. However in practice, there's scarcity. And where there's scarcity, either a central body has to allocate the scarce resources, or you set up a market. True to b-school form, INSEAD chooses the latter. By contrast, my undergraduate institution used a randomized lottery system to allocate dormitory rooms.
Here's how INSEAD's worked this year - they will probably use something similar in following years. INSEAD has 5 2-month academic periods, just like quarters or semesters, only shorter and much more stressful. 200 "points" are allocated to each student. They can use these points to bid on any combination of course electives and campus exchange. The minimum successfully allocated bid becomes the amount deducted from all bidders' point accounts. Most students I know bid a combination of their maximum allocation of 200 points across two or three periods' worth of exchange. Period 5 during France's winter understandably shows the highest demand.
So as you can see from my bids, I successfully pushed for Singapore during Periods 3, 4, and 5 (We are just finishing P1 now, entering P2), betting all 200 of my points. Because of the minimum-successful-bid deduction, 115 point still remain. Having just received the bid results yesterday, I must now buy a plane ticket and arrange housing - which brings me to the second topic for this week's post: Time.
Time management is a force that unceasingly breathes down everyone's neck. We even learn about something called "time abuse" and "time abusers". A time abuser is clinically defined as "every one of us". The first step to reconciliation with these difficulties is accepting that "you can't do everything". It hurts, many of us try to, taking on new responsibilities as we find we have a modicum of free time. None of us wants to miss out on anything. (The "senior class", called P3's, have gotten so used to this that you can't get them to commit to *anything* - they're completely maxed out, and if free time develops, they wish to cherish it).
Time management is a source of stress. During January and part of February, the biggest time sink outside of school work was French registration, car, and insurance, and being unstructured required the most effort to plan. By contrast, academics are already largely pre-scheduled and structured, so it doesn't stress me out to progress in them. Now, let's look at my to-do list:
1) Pay my speeding ticket (done!)
2) Write this blog post (in progress!)
3) Provide status update to the class in my capacity as IT rep (whew, there goes my school anonymity - but if another student couldn't figure out who's writing this by this point, they shouldn't be at this school . . .)
4) Plan period break trip (way behind on this - many students are going to Morocco, and I'm beginning to think I should have joined them.
5) Buy ticket to Singapore.
6) Set up residence in Singapore.
7) Execute errands associated with my company
8) Continue career development via networking and internship applications.
There are more, especially with respect to my company, I'm just not showing. Notice the lack of academics in the to-do list - unless there's a particular project or paper coming to a head, they won't show up, because I treat it as the default activity to execute during almost all other free time. This is arguably unhealthy, as perhaps the default activity should be heavy socializing (ie. as one has time). I sneak it in during some evenings, but in this I fall far short of my peers. It probably deserves more priority. We were taught a four-quadrant approach to prioritization which the gurus of time-management will recognize immediately - I think it's time to exercise it. Successful implementation of that method is probably even more valuable than all of the courses combined.

INSEAD, Week 7

Socializing is an integral part of life at INSEAD, although the students I'm sharing the library with this Sunday might debate that. Partaking students call it "networking". I can be on board with that. I've been doing a whole lot of networking recently.
The workload has been lower the past week, perhaps to give us more time to focus on career identification. Sometimes the school, vaunted as it is, resembles an exalted careers placement service on steroids based on the emphasis that is put on job finding in the form of on-campus events, CV reviews, and industry info sessions. Of course the school is excellent, and I'm not just saying that to promote the brand. The professors are tops, the students are engaged and serious, and the alumni network is far reaching. I'm confident that given the diligence I'm supplying, the school will enable me to find, earn, and accept the position that is best suited to my growth as an individual while also satisfying material needs (in spades, hopefully). I thought I'd illustrate the socializing-career connection through the attached images. First image (grainy, above) is a recent party near campus. Remember, this is network-building. Second image (below) came from my tooling on the two alumni network databases to which I have access. It is a listing of number of school alums by work country, filtering for a few randomly-thought-of nations. Yes, some countries still aren't making either list, but I thought this was a reasonable illustration of network breadth. So when you're trying to set up that all-important business deal or emerging market entry into Cambodia, you know who to talk to. Well, this is an anonymous blog after all - if you don't know me, you'll have to exercise the 'Comments' feature. In fact though, just because someone shows up in a database doesn't mean a lot can come from reaching them. In my limited experience with this, connecting with people via an alumni database simply removes one or two layers of unfamiliarity, but you still have to 'prove yourself' to the person to whom you're reaching out. The partying from the first photo? Maybe it serves to strip off a few more layers . . . of unfamiliarity. And to have a really, really good time while we're all trying to learn the nuts and bolts of modern business.