Building a business in the new economy is a little like sailing to the New World: if you can get on board a seaworthy vessel and you’ve got desire, tenacity, and skill, there’s no telling how far you can go. The promise of adventure and the possibility of fortune have enticed more than a few MBA students to abandon the classroom and join e-business start-ups. HBR’s Dana Lissy recently talked with one of them: Jonathan Seelig. In 1998, Seelig took a leave from MIT’s Sloan School of Management to cofound Akamai Technologies, a high-flying Internet company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is currently Akamai’s vice president of strategy and corporate development. Why did you decide to leave business school? About a semester into my first year at Sloan, I met up with two guys who were working in MIT’s Lab for Computer Science—Tom Leighton, a professor, and Danny Lewin, a grad student. They’d been developing mathematical algorithms for speeding up the delivery of content over the Internet, and the three of us started thinking about ways to commercialize their technology. After aggressively working on a business plan over the summer, we decided that a real market opportunity was out there and that, to seize it, we’d have to move fast. If we waited another year for me to finish business school and for Danny to get his PhD, we’d lose the opportunity. So in 1998, we left to form Akamai. Do you think you’ll ever go back? When I left school, I saw it as a temporary move—I assumed I’d go back. Now, I’m not so sure. The challenge of growing this business—of scaling it from three people to hundreds of people in a very short period of time—is phenomenal. I got a lot out of my first year at Sloan, but the stuff I’m learning now you can’t really teach in a school. I have an awesome job. Do you see yourself as a trendsetter? Will we see more students leaving B-school to join start-ups? I’m not comfortable calling myself a trendsetter. But I think it’s clear that for young people today, there are business opportunities unlike any that have existed before. A lot of new industries and new business models are being pioneered, and you don’t necessarily have to have a lot of business experience to play a key role in developing them. Experience is invaluable for some positions—I couldn’t be the CEO of this company, for example, and I couldn’t be our liaison with Wall Street. But when it comes to thinking about how Akamai should evolve, I’m in as good a position as anybody because the industry has only existed for two years, and I was there in week one. For young people today, there are business opportunities unlike any before. So you can see why business school students would be interested in doing what I’m doing. There are big opportunities, you don’t necessarily need a lot of experience to capitalize on them, and those who act fast will tend to get the biggest rewards. Is it a trend? I don’t know. Is it going to continue to happen? Yes. Are there things business schools can do to prevent students from leaving? I don’t think that’s the right question. If anything, I think schools should encourage students who have opportunities like the one I had to go ahead and pursue them. If the students fail, then they’ll go back to school with important lessons to share with other students and professors. If they succeed, they’ll become important resources for the school to draw on—direct links into the business world. It used to be that a B-school student only had one exit point: at graduation, after the second year. I think now schools and students alike have to start to think about multiple exit points. I’m sure I would have learned useful things during a second year at Sloan, but I’m not sure it would have prepared me any better for what I’m doing now. Sloan, to its credit, didn’t try to stop me from leaving. They supported what I and the other cofounders were doing. They said, “Yeah, if there’s cool stuff for you to do, great. Take off and give it a shot. Come back if it doesn’t work—and come back if it does.” I’ve heard that some other schools are less encouraging, and I think that’s a mistake.
