An alternative route to business school

Having only recently sold his start-up company to global technology giant Oracle, Fazal tells TopMBA.com’s sister publication, the QS Top MBA Career Guide how his entrepreneurial skill-set was perfected during his MBA.

Rahim Fazal commenced his entrepreneurial career at a young age, selling his first company, a web hosting business for US$1.5 million during his senior exams in high school.

Because of this, the uninitiated might wonder whether business school was really a necessity for him, but as the youngest student ever to be admitted on the Richard Ivey MBA, Fazal certainly feels strongly that his business education paid off dividends.

Building a robust problem solving framework at business school

“At business school, you develop a very solid framework for solving problems. As an entrepreneur with, up to that point, just practical experience, you develop your own methodology for building your business, interacting with others, and solving problems.

“But being able to compliment that with an academic framework and really round out a more robust, flexible, and scalable problem solving system - it made me tremendously better at solving problems and operating a business.”

The results of Fazal’s MBA education speak for themselves. Six years after completing his MBA, he sold Involver, the social media management software business he co-founded to Oracle Corporation.

“We started Involver at the beginning of 2007,” Fazal recounts. “It was an incredible journey.

“We had a really big idea for trying to do better in social media. We felt that all the banner and text ads that were popping up on MySpace and Facebook were taking away from the experience, and not giving brands an opportunity to truly take advantage of the social media opportunity by developing relationships with brand new customers.

“So we built a platform that would take video and other mixed content, and build interesting campaigns around that content. Things like contests, quizzes, surveys, video galleries, and so on. And we began offering it into the market.

“We grew that customer base to over 1.2 million companies on Facebook.”

In that time, Fazal, alongside co-founder Noah Horton, were named in Inc. Magazine’s Top 30 Under 30, and Fazal has also been named one of the world’s Top 25 Digital Thought-Leaders by iMedia. Add to this guest speaking appearances on the TEDx program, and an award at the White House for both his entrepreneurial success at Involver and his dedication to nurturing the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Failure as a catalyst for entrepreneurial success

However, it wasn’t always success for Fazal.

His second business suffered during the Dot Com Bust and had to be wound down. Possessing more of a vocational, rather than an academic background, Fazal credits much of his success to biting the metaphorical bullet as a result and returning to the world of education.

That, plus a lucky encounter.

“It was pretty difficult to start back at ground zero and take introductions to computers, accounting, and business economics after having this successful company and taking another one public. But I still went and did it.

“I was about 20 at the time and about six months into it, one of the instructors in the business program told me that she had marked my exam and thought that I had cheated because I had done so well. We walked through my answers and she realized they were all from personal experience, and then she remembered that I was in a newspaper she’d read a couple of years prior – she had talked about me in her class.

“She gave me tickets for an alumni dinner for the Richard Ivey School of Business, where she was a graduate. I went there and by great fortune, ran into the dean of the school and had a really brief conversation with her - I told her that I wanted to be in her program.

“The dean was intrigued and said: Alright, give me a call. But then she came back a few minutes later and said: Why don’t you meet me for lunch tomorrow at my hotel before I leave? When I met her, we had a great conversation for a couple hours and at the end she said: We’ve never done this for any student before, I mean, the school’s been around for over 80 years. I’m going to go bat for you and I’m going to try to get you in the MBA program.”

Nine months later, Fazal was enrolled and proving his worth to the school by sharing his wealth of entrepreneurial experience with his cohort, while at the same time perfecting his own business acumen.

The value of business school

“Ivey is 100% case study based. All the experiences that we would read about are all real life, practical experiences. The benefit of being able to connect with what I’m reading, one way or another really made the lessons come alive. It really takes learning to a completely new level.

“Another highlight was the people - both your classmates as well as the alumni that you become a part of. There are classmates I still keep in touch with - we’ve all moved on and they’re all living in different parts of the world doing amazing things.

“It’s pretty substantial alumni network too – when I travel, I’m able to connect with someone here or a group there, and become part of a club that I wouldn’t have otherwise been a part of had I not got on the MBA.”

With Fazal, like with many other MBAs around the world, it’s the experience prior to business school that really made the program worthwhile, and enabled him to gain from it. Though Fazal enrolled at an unusually young age, and lacking an undergraduate degree, it was his prior experience in setting up two companies, with a healthy mix of both success and failure, that then enabled him to succeed both during and after his MBA.

“It really helped having the entrepreneurial experience before getting to Ivey, because by itself, an MBA doesn’t really give you the full value of being able to learn from the past – a mix of academic background and practical experience works. It really helps you develop a context of what you’re learning about.”