Tag: Venture Consulting Course

Student teams in the Venture Advising Consulting Course taught by Clifford Holekamp, senior lecturer in entrepreneurship, spend 10 days in Budapest, Hungary immersed in the startup community and working on specific projects with founders. They also learn about Eastern European history and culture. Each team in this year’s course will submit a blog post about their experience and consulting project.

We are fortunate to have been selected to work on a consulting project in Budapest, Hungary for a company that creates software and apps for e-bike navigation: GPS Tuner, a leader in the field of software development for GPS navigation. GPS Tuner currently works with original equipment manufacturers (OEM’s) to build GPS navigation devices for e-bikes. They aim to transition into launching their own application for the end consumer.

Our project is to identify a strategy to differentiate GPS Tuner’s e-bicycle navigation app by conducting a competitive analysis, crafting a clear value proposition for the app, and developing a strategy that will solidify the company’s strategic position going forward.

Throughout our week in Budapest, we’ve focused on developing a hypothesis tree to clearly define and tackle our project. This problem-solving strategy is focused on finding one core business issue and then delving deeper into mutually exclusive, but collectively exhaustive sub-issues, which might be causing the business problem.

Our work with the client, GPS Tuner, introduced us to the struggles of a fragmented market and how a setup like this can lead to beneficial results for an incumbent market leader. From an academic standpoint, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that all markets operate as efficiently as possible, making it very difficult to sustain a competitive edge.

After our conversations with the CEO, we learned that the cycling industry operates in a unique situation. The industry leader currently benefits from keeping every aspect of e-bike design and manufacturing in-house, and from minimizing compatibility with competing hardware components. As a result, we’ve identified an inherent opportunity for GPS Tuner within the market.

Although our time in Budapest has been short, it has provided a tremendous opportunity for both academic and personal growth. We’ve received excellent feedback from Professor Orban, which has guided our analysis and allowed us to set up a framework for our project going forward.

We are also lucky to have had the opportunity to work with Ivan Pap during our time here at Oriens. He has been a fantastic guide and mentor, and he has made our trip very memorable. Although we are sad to leave the amazing city of Budapest, we are confident in our direction and look forward to diving deeper into the opportunities GPS Tuner faces as it enters its newest growth stage.

Team GPS Turner: MBA students Courtney Callegari, Douglas Mullenix, and Kirtika Singh.

It was a great way to start the summer for twelve Washington University students to travel to Hungary to experience the Hungarian entrepreneurial character firsthand through Olin Business School’s Venture Advising course.

Though our visit to the beautiful city of Budapest has involved touring and events presented by our gracious Hungarian hosts at Oriens Capital Management and its leader, Krisztian Orban, we quickly began work on three projects presented to us by Oriens.

Oriens is an independent, privately owned boutique investment management firm that focuses on firms located in Central and Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia with activities in private equity and corporate finance advisory.

Our team, consisting of Olin’s Nelson Nolte (PMBA 34), Lena Wang (MBA ’15), Jaemin Ryu (MBA ’15) and Connor Jacobs (BS Systems Eng.), worked with startup !444! (http://444.hu), an edgy Hungarian language media site.  !444! asked us to investigate alternative strategies that !444! could implement to increase its revenue and profitability in the challenging world of online media.

We worked in Oriens’s offices and in Budapest cafes throughout the week and have often been busy late into the evening. We met with the !444!’s CEO and its founder to learn about !444!’s business and then met again to present an initial hypotheses and plan of action.

Additionally, we have received interesting and lively presentations from Krisztian Orban on Hungarian history, culture and entrepreneurial spirit.  Prof. Orban (he’s an adjunct at Olin), explained how Hungary has emerged from world wars and the fall of the Iron Curtain, how those periods destroyed an entire generation of wealth, and left Hungary without the equity to spur its own economic redevelopment.  Oriens has endeavored to raise the necessary international capital that Central and Eastern Europe need to guide it to a brighter economic future.

The real-world experience of solving entrepreneurial problems and our immersion into the Budapest culture has been an unequaled learning experience.

submitted by Nelson Nolte, PMBA 34