John Doe '96

"I took Dr. Todd's class for hands-on experience in new-product development. My team created an application for voice-recognition technology developed by Pure Speech, a company cofounded by one of Marco's former students. We tackled every phase of the development cycle from market research to actually building the prototype and discovered what it really takes to bring out a good product. We all learned a lot from testing our ideas and working through alternative solutions when something didn't work well initially.

Some other interesting ideas coming out of this class were worth pursuing further. At the time, I was president of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Club and decided to write a proposal to create a business plan contest to help turn these ideas into actual businesses. I worked with Bill Nussey (MBA '96) on this as a project for our Venture Capital class, and the contest has since taken off UB.

After graduating, I realized that one of the best ways to develop more skills before I launched my own business would be to work for a great company. I joined Intuit as a product manager for the online banking group. After only a few months, Scott Cook (MBA '76) asked a colleague and me to analyze the viability of a new Internet-based business that would help consumers comparison shop for mortgages on the Internet. I conducted a complete business analysis and was struck by how relevant and helpful my coursework at HBS was to this project in fact, I actually referred to my case materials. Even better, after we completed the study, we were given the go-ahead to implement our ideas, and we are already working on the second release of QuickenMortgage.com. I have the best of both worlds my job is completely entrepreneurial but with the resources of Intuit."

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