The email hit our phones late one night while we were doing what first‐year grad students do—namely, hanging out with one another. Sure, the grad school happened to be Harvard Business School, or HBS as we all referred to it, which came with its reputation, along with plenty of expectations.

The message was directed at the students who had yet to formally submit a team for the school's entrepreneurial face‐off, the faux stock market competition. So right then and there, at Harvard Square landmark Tommy Doyle's (since departed), we assembled our six‐person brain trust. It would be the three of us and three other friends from our section: Jose Pelaez,¹ who had worked for an energy start‐up after earning a degree in chemical engineering at Columbia; Marshall Martin,² a Georgia Tech grad who had worked as an analyst at the consulting firm Accenture; and Kyle Snook,³ a West Point grad who had served as a platoon leader in Afghanistan before enrolling at business school. At the time, it felt like an all‐star roster to us. In retrospect, we probably should have given a little more thought to things like diversity of work experience and complementary skills when assembling our team. None of us knew much, if anything, about sales, marketing, or design. We had no experience in product management. We were friends. We enjoyed one another's company. So we became a team.

The first step was coming up with a concept for a business. And it had better be a winner, because whatever we dreamt up, we had to live with for the rest of the semester. Kyle suggested an application that would let people move down to better seats at sporting events. We all enjoyed a night at Fenway or the Garden, so we bandied that about. If you were stuck high up in the nosebleed section at Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play, wouldn't you snap up a better seat if that were available? Made sense to us. Our proposed app would let you pay to sit closer to the action. In theory, both the sports venues and the teams that played there would embrace the idea because it would allow them to better optimize revenues. Unfortunately, we lacked the expertise to build even a rudimentary prototype. We decided that while the idea was a good one, we weren't the best people to pursue it. Next!

Boston was a notoriously cold place to be in the winter, so Pat suggested we sell what he called “nose bags,” to be worn outside with your hat, muffler, and gloves on those really cold days. It was something he had seen during a play when he was younger: a small knit pouch held in place by a rope around the ears. The idea seemed so absurd as to be laughable, but it was a tangible product that vendors could sell, and we were running out of time. Pat offered an impassioned plea: “We'll push it like hell and win the competition by working harder than everybody else.” No one could ever argue with Pat's contagious enthusiasm. Rob, however, who was probably the most serious and academic of us, hated the idea. The more he sputtered about the notion of selling a mitten for the face, the harder Pat pushed back. The fact that the product seemed so silly, he insisted, would make it that much sweeter when we took the grand prize. The idea died in committee.

As the night grew long and a cold, wintry walk home loomed, it didn't seem we were any closer to a solution. We might have gotten behind those nosebags if Rob wasn't so disgusted by the idea. In desperation, he shared with everyone a business plan he had secretly written the night before, for a concept called Rent‐A‐Nerd. He began to wax poetic about the concept, inspired by his father, who often asked Rob for on‐demand pinch‐hit finance help for his small company. Like many of our fathers' generation, and despite having an MBA from Harvard and a long career of business success, Rob's father had found that recent financial modeling technology changed too quickly to stay current. We had grown up on the stuff, and we were used to our elders turning to us for help. In Rob's case, it might take him 30 minutes to work up a spreadsheet that could take his father far longer. What if we matched up young, skilled, hungry grad students like ourselves with small business people and business owners who were as in the dark about this newfangled stuff as Rob's dad was? Not everyone tasked with running his own firm has a son or daughter who has worked as an analyst for Goldman Sachs. Why not build a matchmaking site to help small businesses gain access to MBA and business graduates who possess the same skills as expensive consultants but cost a lot less? The other five of us snapped into reality. Did this have legs?

Each of us had at least some direct exposure to the tried, true, and inefficient system we call the consulting industry. Two of us had cut our teeth prior to grad school working for large corporations that were regular customers of blue chip consulting firms. These lucrative arrangements most definitely worked for the consulting firm partners, who were paid exorbitant amounts for their services. However, the deal rarely worked out for those on the purchasing side of the equation. The consulting firms' pricing was opaque, and the black‐box services they provided were often ill‐defined. About the only thing that was clear was that the big firms were paid a lot, no matter the quality of their deliverables, which only sometimes included recommendations that might even help people who had hired them make an actual decision.

Pat had worked on the supply side—he was a consultant himself for a few years—which meant he got to witness the absurdities firsthand. As one of the young recruits in the trenches, he was paid the equivalent of around 30 bucks an hour. The dirty little secret, of course, is that in the consulting industry it's common to bill closer to $500 an hour (and far more for senior resources). What's more, there was seemingly little quality control or accountability to the clients who were forking out the big bucks. Pat was a generalist, but he was frequently hired out to provide expertise he didn't have in industries he didn't know. The client would pay an inflated rate just for the time it took Pat to get up to speed. Confounding matters even more, his first assignments as a consultant seemed to have no purpose. If there was a working business model here, Pat was not privy to it. Later, after jumping to a boutique firm in Boston, he had a much healthier experience, but even then it revealed segments of a model desperately in need of fixing. While he had the utmost respect for the partner he worked with, he also saw that he spent most of his time selling work, rather than actually doing it, which is what he most enjoyed and thought he had signed on for. Based on Pat's experience, along with Rob's observation that people like his father could benefit from a pool of highly trained talent, it seemed like the $100‐billion‐a‐year consulting industry might well be ripe for disruption. The question was: Where do we begin?

Some on the team had reservations. Creating a marketplace would prove a huge challenge, especially given the limited time we had for the assignment. Add to that, none of us knew the first thing about creating or designing a website, which would be the obvious first step toward creating the company. For that matter, none of us had any experience in selling, marketing, or any of the other skill sets we would need to pull off what we were describing. There were also the limits placed on us by the class guidelines. We had less than three months to prove the viability of our concept. And we had a limited budget of $5,000 to pull it all off. Even if we spent some of our up‐front money paying someone to build our website, that would take time. So would populating a marketplace that would require explaining what we had in mind to every potential consultant or customer we could scare up between classes. The challenges were daunting, to say the least. But in the end, we liked the idea. It surely beat the nosebags by a length. We figured we could fake it 'til we made it.

Of course the birth of Rent‐A‐Nerd was an unmitigated flop when we presented it to the class. Along with our epic disorganization and Scrooge McDuck graphics, we at least knew enough to throw in a slide noting the size of the consulting industry and the opportunity to bite into it, should we ever actually figure out what we were doing. Looking back, we can see we did so poorly in the bake‐off that day in part because of the brash optimism of our concept. We were young upstarts in a sea of young upstarts, professing that we had something no one else did that could change the world. That was bound to draw a strong reaction—more so than if you're with the team that claims they're going to sell the perfect reversible belt (one side brown, the other black!). The same held true for all those T‐shirt companies and other more conventional business ideas pitched that day. In contrast, we were trying to sell our fellow students on a company that we claimed could take a big bite of business from the very same consulting firms that at least some hoped would employ them after graduation. And it didn't help that we couldn't even answer the most basic questions about a company like ours with such bold ambitions. Basically, we put ourselves squarely in the firing line. You can't hate a reversible belt—but you can have a visceral reaction to someone who says they are going to destroy your future chosen industry!

As our rollout started gaining steam, we were forced to look inward and figure out why we were doing this in the first place. One of us had initially looked on the start‐up competition as simply a part of graduating from school. He was going to spend his career optimizing the workings of established businesses, not start one of his own. Rather than a potentially life‐altering event, he saw the class at first as part of the educational experience. Rob had been focused on starting a company when applying to business school, but by the time he entered four years later, he had self‐selected out of the start‐up scene. Lacking computer skills and creativity, he didn't see himself as Silicon Valley material. He might have had the right skills to serve as an early stage manager but certainly didn't fancy himself someone to start something big. Rob was also the practical sort, the kind of grounded, rational guy who simply couldn't help but run the numbers. And when he did, the odds of survival were long. For every Facebook or Airbnb, there were probably a thousand failures. Ten thousand. A hundred thousand! And even the rare success had to be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. All wins are not created equal. For every Mark Zuckerberg, there are hundreds more entrepreneurs still running a company they started—except instead of sexy Facebook or Instagram, it's a regional manufacturing concern chugging along with an app that tracks boxcars, or a new piece of technology that can attach buttons to shirts on the line in Vietnam more efficiently. Rob had arrived at Harvard sponsored by Bain Capital, and was very excited by returning to the firm that had treated him so well and he had enjoyed so much. Never far from the front of his mind, Pitch Day and the subsequent race to the bottom began as a class exercise, not a life's pursuit.

Peter arrived at business school seeking to move into an operating role at a non‐financial firm—a departure from his short career to that point. Like Rob, he didn't feel prepared to start a company and was dubious about the risk‐reward tradeoff at this point in his life. His general aversion to risk—something that made him valuable as an offsetting complement to Rob and Pat over time—made him a skeptic. Peter viewed the start‐up competition as a means to an end: graduating business school and moving on to the next step in his career.

Pat was the most entrepreneurial among us, but he was also the most dubious about the utility of this start‐up experiment to prove much of anything. As constructed on paper, companies that racked up quick, short‐term sales would be rewarded, while those building for the long‐term would be devalued. There might be some valuable lessons woven into this exercise, but it did not play to his higher consciousness. One day, Pat surmised, he might start a company based on something that moved him with people he cared about. But he wasn't ready. He still had more to learn. And he was convinced you need a perfectly formed, well thought‐out idea before jumping into the start‐up waters.

Looking back on our underwhelming cache of product confidence, one might argue that out of the gate we were not exactly the go‐to model for start‐up success. Still, ranking 150th out of 150 in our class competition got under our skin. It really needled us. So maybe our presentation skills at the early stage were lacking. Coming in last lit a fire under us. It changed everything.

We put that chip on our shoulder into sheer man hours, spending every last minute of free time pushing Rent‐A‐Nerd, which, because the domain name wasn't available, we renamed HourlyNerd. At that point, we were six people going on three. We divvied up assignments, but it was clear that Jose, Marshall, and Kyle were less excited about the idea than we were. As the semester unspooled and the workload accelerated, they confessed that they were lukewarm. They were looking to help work on a class project but were less excited about dedicating all available time to the idea.

Our task list grew even as our ranks thinned. We needed to find someone to build the website while simultaneously doing those things that professors expect when you're still in business school: for example, demonstrating proof points of concept. We fumbled for a few days seeking email lists of small companies but quickly realized the only way to test our idea was to talk with actual human beings. So we became door‐to‐door salesmen and took HourlyNerd to the street. We found talkers, which was a long cry from takers when it came down to it. It was easy for a small business owner to say he was open to quality consulting help from young experts, but would he actually be willing to part with some of his hard‐earned cash to make it happen? We needed to sell business owners on the wisdom of signing up for our service and then convince them to post projects on our site. We also needed to recruit our “Nerds”—the MBA students and recent business school grads we imagined scouring through our website and then bidding on the jobs that theoretically would appear out of thin air.

In order to find these Nerds, our idea was to print up what we called “Nerdy Bucks”—regular‐sized dollar bills with our logo in place of George Washington's head. A goofy idea for a give‐away for sure, but then again, it was brought to you by the people who thought Scrooge McDuck was a compelling sales figure. Emboldened by our newfound passion and complete lack of shame, we printed out the phony bills that would double as flyers and then proceeded to hand them out while loitering around the halls of MIT's Sloan School of Management and the Questrom School of Business at Boston University. (One of the rules of our in‐class competition was that we couldn't involve our fellow students in the business. No one said anything about the rest of the hungry Boston graduate student population.) Our pitch was straightforward: “Hey, we started this company. Do you wanna make a few extra bucks?” We got some hostile pushback right out of the gate because people thought we had tricked them into checking out our brilliant opportunity by handing out fake money. Mostly we got ignored. It really made you feel for the sandwich board folks who still stroll the streets of Boston and New York hawking everything from bike tours to chicken nugget samples. There's thankless work, then there's thankless work. As we plied the streets, maybe 1 in 10 would hear us out. “Hey, dude! You can make a hundred dollars an hour helping small businesses in the area with cool projects.” Uh‐huh. We reached out to friends we had at other top‐tier business schools: Dartmouth's Tuck School of Management, Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Perseverance has its virtues. By the end of the semester, more than 550 MBAs had signed up on our site.

The other half of the equation proved a much bigger challenge. Finding businesses to keep these Nerds busy took up the bulk of those 500 or so hours each of us put into the company while it was still a class project. When meeting with potential business owners we hoped to sign up, we talked about them paying $50 an hour for our service, not a few hundred. For that very reasonable fee, you would gain access to the kind of pointy‐headed MBAs who would soon be out of reach once they began working for the blue‐chip firms and Fortune 1000 companies that would greedily scoop them up after graduation. We thought the price break made sense, but even $50 an hour seemed high to the people we were selling. Professional managers in the world of corporate finance were a world apart from the small business owners, who would be paying that fee from their own pockets.

Usually we worked in pairs. Each afternoon after class and on weekends we'd take turns donning a blazer and khakis and walking into nearby businesses to sell them on our idea. We started with the storefronts near the business school, which is located in Boston, across the Charles River from the university's main campus in Cambridge. We methodically moved to the bars, restaurants, and shops on and around Harvard Square and then pounded the pavement in the surrounding neighborhoods. We hit laundromats and salons, pizza shops and yoga studios. We eventually branched out into professional‐looking services—anything with a storefront office or a shingle hanging from a second floor. This was probably not what our parents imagined when they agreed to help us pay for our continuing education at America's most renowned institute of higher learning. We heard a lot of “no's.” Occasionally we heard more than just no. “Get out!” the owner of one diner yelled at us, except in more colorful language, forcefully delivered in the local dialect. Sometimes, when we did not read the tea leaves quickly enough, we found ourselves running steps ahead of an angry shop owner clattering out of his property's front door.

You can't say we didn't learn anything from our early forays into sales and marketing. Lesson No. 1: lose the blazers, or at least sound a little bit less like the business school students that we were. There are some built‐in prejudices to what we were doing, so the least we could do is not look the role that our detractors accused us of being.

Through trial and error we quickly learned that selling something as esoteric as the professional consulting services of an MBA student required more than a fake dollar bill and our rose‐colored‐glasses pitch. Our “MBA services” needed to be repackaged, and pronto. The clock was ticking. We came upon a new plan. Instead of hawking a generic suite of services, what if we figured out these potential customers' pain points and sold solutions to those? “Do you need someone who can work up ideas for an inexpensive marketing campaign to draw more customers? What about some new ideas for your social media strategy? Don't have one yet? Maybe we can help!”

Salvation arrived in the last place we would have expected. Veggie Galaxy, a burrito joint on Central Square in Cambridge, was nestled between a cacophony of bustling, student‐oriented food establishments. The first time we walked in was on a Saturday around lunchtime. Every other place on the square was packed. There were maybe two people in the Veggie Galaxy. We asked for the manager, who turned out to be the owner as well. Perfect. If ever there was a company that needed some marketing help, this was the place. We introduced ourselves and cut to the chase. “Your business is lacking customers. What if we could give you low‐price access to experts who could devise a marketing strategy that gets some of those people off the street and into your establishment?” The owner practically jumped. “Oh my god, I need help,” he confessed. As it turned out, he had hired someone through Craigslist who billed himself as a marketing wiz and left him wondering if the guy even knew how to spell hashtag. The so‐called consultant had set him back a week's worth of inventory and barely made a dent in his lackluster business returns.

We tried not to step on each other's toes in our enthusiasm to ring up the sale. This poor guy's story could cut one of two ways. He'd either realize that we were the real deal, offering him a valid solution, or he could chase us straight out the door. Pat, who had a real workingman's knowledge and ability to read his audience, opened up his laptop and forged ahead. “I know you're on a budget, but I know you want the best people,” he began. “Our people have worked at places like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. They've worked as analysts at top private equity funds.” Pat called up the resume of one of our preselected Nerds and invited the owner to peer over his shoulder. “This guy's got three years at Proctor & Gamble and now he's at Dartmouth's Tuck.” Pat paused, dramatically, giving the owner a moment to ponder. “Think you could work with someone like this?” The next words the owner uttered would ring in Pat's ears for years to come, whenever anyone expressed doubts about our company. “I would pay anything to get that person! When can they start?”

We learned some valuable lessons from this exchange. One, know your customer. Pat rightly read that this gentleman would appreciate the level of expertise we were offering, and yet he didn't talk down to him. Others might want different examples. Pat got this one exactly right.

Second, understand pain. Many small businesses were desperate, or at least this one certainly was. Understand the product you are selling and what you can do to help someone with real needs. With our company, we had figured out the broad outlines for a platform that allows small business owners real‐time access to the talent they need to solve their problems. At the outset, we had focused on price when imagining the lure of our platform. Now we realized that quick turnaround could also be a selling point. Learn how to dance on a dime when you are making your pitch.

Our experience on the street was illustrating what our greatest challenge was going to be. Nerds were relatively easy to come by, but customers were a whole different ballgame. Despite our enthusiasm to quickly scale the business, we still had the day job of classes to attend and in fact, there were still competitors vying for first place on “IPO Day,” as the school dubbed the final competition among the student ventures.

In early May of 2012, the entire first‐year class gathered across 10 rooms in Aldrich Hall, the business school's core first‐year classroom building, where the process of crowning the ultimate winner would begin. Each team was given 10 minutes to make the case that its company was the most promising of the 15 founded by those of us in Section F. This time we were prepared. Three months earlier, we had no clue if businesses would even want what we were selling. We didn't know if MBA students had the time or inclination to sign up for our service. But now we had retained nearly 250 businesses, and roughly 100 of them had already posted a project. We could also say with certainty that we would have no trouble bringing experts, or “Nerds,” onboard. More than 500 MBAs had already signed up at the site.

At that point, we were describing HourlyNerd as a “cloud‐based talent management platform.” Pretty generic tech‐speak, in retrospect, but fortunately we had real numbers to back up our talk. There were 27.9 million small businesses in the United States at the start of the 2010s, generating $7.8 trillion in annual revenues. We needed only to capture a small sliver of those dollars to build a sizable business. A shift in our business model now meant that we were collecting a fee on both sides of the equation: a 10 percent share of every deal a business consummated on our site, along with a 5 percent cut of the MBA's payday. We spoke of expanding our offering by reaching into engineering and design schools and laid out other potential new revenue streams (resume sales, advertising) that we would end up never pursuing. We cited a model we had run that showed us generating $100 million just from the MBA vertical inside of five years.

Maybe we just imagined the nods as we looked around the room. We had not forgotten how foolish we came off looking the first time out of the gate. This time felt different. Maybe our business model was resonating precisely because the room was full of former consultants and those who had worked for companies that spilled millions every year on consulting services for no clear payoff.

As IPO Day unfolded, the other teams resorted to an abundance of slick videos and multimedia tools to tout their companies. We chose a more traditional approach and let the numbers do the talking. The school's 150 teams had collectively earned roughly $16,000 in revenue over the semester. We had generated just under $9,000 of those dollars, and we were boldly predictive of the fact we could have done a lot better. “The Field 3 funding parameters severely limit our ability to build out the requisite technological sophistication, which has prevented us from closing more business,” we wrote in the three‐page pitch we had worked up for the final day of the competition. If we had been allowed to spend the money to build a better functioning, more professional‐looking website, we figured we would have booked closer to $20,000 in revenue. We had started off the class as our make‐believe stock market's worst performing equity. Every company had an opening price of $100 and we had hit a low of $32. We ended the semester trading at $351 a share—the class's top‐performing stock.

Outside judges, including professors, local venture capitalists (VCs), and prominent alumni, had been brought in to declare the winner in each section. We were psyched about our performance, but guardedly optimistic after we won the first round of judging. There was a 30‐minute break and then the entire class gathered in the school auditorium for the final face‐off among the 10 section winners. There was a reality show vibe to the whole affair. The first‐place finisher would be determined by both the audience—our fellow students—and the judges. The audience would count for half the vote, the judges the other half.

Waiting to present in front of more than 900 people, we felt a combination of excitement, dread, and nausea. The business was demanding more and more of our time, and yet we still had to keep up with our work for other classes. We were burning the candle practically around the clock. As the finals proceeded, the three of us were operating on adrenalin, Dunkin' Donuts coffee, and little else.

We were the last group to present. There were other strong contenders, including an app created to help people deal remotely with an ailing parent. That struck us as a clever and worthy idea, but from a strictly commercial standpoint, it didn't seem to have the moneymaking potential to claim the grand prize. Other businesses got up on stage and clearly knew how to present: they employed slick marketing techniques and a lot of savvy, but to our minds that was mostly smoke and not so much fire—all intended to distract the judges from their team's lack of revenues. Ours was the most unapologetically commercial of all the ideas presented, which presumably would serve us well inside a business school. Despite our nerves and lack of sleep, when it was finally our turn on stage, we turned it on and felt we hit it out of the park. As the judges conferred, we felt so bullish about our chances that Pat was already talking about his trip to the tattoo parlor that he had promised if we won.

The student vote flashed up on‐screen. We ended up taking a very close second to the ailing parent concept. Maybe that was inevitable. Ours was a boring business‐to‐business (B‐to‐B) proposition up against a trendy app aimed at a clearly sympathetic and much broader consumer market. Still, we thought we had a chance to play catch‐up and sweep the vote among the investors, entrepreneurs, and other like‐minded capitalist/judges. The grand finale arrived. No deal. We ended up taking second place, even among the judges.

We knew we should have been proud. Taking second out of 150 teams was a great accomplishment. At the very least, Pat should have been relieved that he wouldn't be walking around for the rest of his life with the company logo tattooed on his butt. We felt keenly disappointed. On the other hand, we had another motivator to stoke the fires burning within each of us: to prove that our classmates and the judges had made a mistake.

There was a reception for the top three teams immediately following the contest, but Pat was so angry over the second‐place finish that he didn't want to go. Rob cajoled him with the inducement of a free dinner and limitless upside of mingling with successful HBS alumni. Besides, we reasoned, if nothing else, it was a chance to meet the judges.

It's a good thing we did. Once there, Pat settled back into his usual congenial and gregarious self, which in no small part contributed to him meeting a man named Bob Doris. Doris was an HBS grad himself, who had recently sold—for nearly $800 million—the technology company he and his wife had cofounded in the 1980s. He was now an active angel investor who liked spending time on campus in search of interesting young start‐ups. He had been one of the judges in our section and also had judged the school‐wide competition.

“I thought you guys should have won,” Bob confided to Pat. We didn't argue with him. Bob was now based in the San Francisco Bay Area and had a front‐row seat to the rise of the gig economy. He told us he saw potential in our project for an online marketplace for a different (higher‐end) segment of the labor force. “I think you have a real business here,” he said. He gave us his card and told us if we were ever in the Bay Area, we should look him up. We played it cool—Pat said something about how we were probably going to bootstrap it for a while. We had a few thousand dollars in our coffers. None of us were clear on what the future might hold for HourlyNerd. But we'd put this much time and sweat equity into the project. We had a second‐place ribbon and now a contact in the Silicon Valley. Why not make a fund‐raising trip to California? Who was to say our little boondoggle might not be the pot of gold at the end of the VC rainbow?