The other lesson here? It’s going to take way longer than you think. But today, the UN uses our software in 50 countries around the world to deliver life-saving support. It took more than three years to get our first contract. Lesson: in B2B you can’t do it all yourself. In the end, we were rescued by a champion at the client who was willing to do battle on behalf of us and our product. Most of my time was spent waiting around, quite opposite to the fast-paced way startup life is portrayed. Here we invented a new product category – and one that would affect the lives of people in at least five departments: IT, Finance, Strategy, Monitoring, and Knowledge Management. Moreover, while selling accounting software is surely hard, you’re still selling a known product to a single department. B2B, when the other B is the UN, is probably the hardest kind. We built it into a beautiful software platform called Systmapp, that was to totally changed the way the UN does business. It was an elegant theory for managing and measuring progress when there was no revenue to check against. In between first and second year I summered at the United Nations, and I had this grand idea to save the world. I turned down a full time offer to go back to the Boston Consulting Group, foregoing free dinners at Nobu and an office that looks like this, to work out of a food court in Hell’s Kitchen. Life after graduating from Wharton’s MBA program went fast.
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