I did my full-time MBA at London Business School during 2015-2017 and took out a Prodigy Finance loan for both years, covering my tuition only. I repaid my entire student loan within 3 years of graduation, and started a fintech company backed by Techstars London, while studying my MBA.
My company, AssetVault is a multi-award winning fintech based out of London. Since 2016, AssetVault has been associated with several of the world’s leading fintech accelerators and innovation programmes including SXSW Fintech Finalist, UBS Future of Finance, Munich Re Mundi Lab, Accenture Fintech Lab, and PwC Scale Lab.
Prior to B-School, I worked at the UK’s first fintech unicorn as a product manager and before that was with Bain and Company, India. I studied electronics engineering and physics at BITS-Pilani, India and read nanotechnology at Cambridge University.
In this blog, I’ll share advice on how and why you should pursue entrepreneurship opportunities during B-School.
Starting-up while studying my MBA
During the third term of my first year, my co-founder, Farid, and I started AssetVault. We raised our first round of funding from Techstars London. My summer internship was with AssetVault in London and fortunately, the Techstars programme coincided with the summer break. So it was a fantastic entrepreneurial experience / opportunity. One of the most effective ways of trying out entrepreneurship is to actually do it. It is hard to grasp these concepts theoretically.
My primary reason for doing the LBS MBA was to become a founder. To be perfectly honest, I believed there was a 60% chance that I could actually accomplish that during the two-year programme at LBS.