Wharton San Francisco
VIP-SF Fall Application Open
Venture Initiation Program (VIP) San Francisco
VIP-SF is an accelerator open to Penn students and alumni entrepreneurs who are developing their own ventures. This four-month program runs twice a year, in the fall and in the spring. The team must be based in the San Francisco/Bay Area during their time in VIP-SF.
For More Information >>
Application Deadline
Monday, July 30th 11:59PM PDT
Questions? Email entrepreneurshipSF@wharton.upenn.edu
Wharton Scale School Workshop Series Strikes a Chord with Bay Area Alumni
By Colleen Mullarkey
Nearly 60 Wharton and Penn alumni crowded into a classroom at Wharton San Francisco one evening in December for a workshop with Bay Area industry executives on alternatives to equity financing. They talked about how companies optimize their capital structure over the various life stages of growth—from grants and accelerator programs to term loans and lines of credit.
Read more Wharton Scale School Workshop Series Strikes a Chord with Bay Area Alumni
Start Up Selling with Jeffrey Goodman WG’96 (Video)
Who are the most strategic customers—in terms of companies and people—for a startup to target? And once you have decided who your best sales targets are, how do you connect with and sell to them as people?
In this Entrepreneurial Workshop with Jeffrey Goodman,WG’96, VP of Sales at Genweb2, held at Wharton San Francisco, takeaways include:
- A framework for relationship-based selling;
- Why it is important to be able to sell to people based on their social style instead of yours… and a structured approach for doing so;
- A powerful model for targeting the right kinds of customers—both companies and people—based on the growth stage of a technology company.
Pitching to Wharton San Francisco
By Miranda Wang C’16, founder of BioCellection
Editor’s note: Before she was the first undergraduate to win the Business Plan Competition (with a record breaking five prizes!), Miranda Wang attended Spring Pitch at Wharton San Francisco.
At first, I didn’t even know that Wharton had a campus in San Francisco.
Then when I did learn about Wharton San Francisco, it sounded too fancy for someone like me: a mere undergrad, always running around trying to get small grants here and there to bootstrap a startup. Rumor had it that the lecture halls looked like Huntsman classrooms except “much nicer”—but I didn’t actually know anyone who had been inside.
Calgary Entrepreneur Shares His Wharton|San Francisco Experience
By Meghan Laska
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the Executive MBA Stories blog.
What is it really like to be an EMBA student at Wharton San Francisco? We asked first-year student Jory Lamb, president and founder of VistaVu Solutions in Calgary, Canada. Here’s what he said:
On Impact:
The best way to explain the impact of Wharton’s EMBA program is with the post-mortem I did at the end of term one. I’ve run my own business since 1996 and came here to gain the frameworks needed to allow me to manage and lead my company at a higher level. At the end of the first term, I counted eight specific things I had brought back to improve or change at my organization. While the commitment of time, dollars, and effort is great, there is nowhere else you could get this type of experience.
Read more Calgary Entrepreneur Shares His Wharton|San Francisco Experience
At Wharton | San Francisco, Spring Means Spring Pitch
By Munish Dayal WG’15, Co-founder of Bloom2Bloom
In addition to Wharton’s Business Plan Competition, Wharton’s Spring Pitch competition is the capstone event of a year filled with entrepreneurial activities at Wharton | San Francisco. Every year, hundreds of teams compete for a chance to pitch their startup in front of prominent venture capitalists, angel investors, entrepreneurs, and members of the wider Wharton community who attend the event. I was lucky enough to be selected to pitch a startup company I co-founded with my friend Laurenne Resnik called Bloom2Bloom.
Read more At Wharton | San Francisco, Spring Means Spring Pitch
San Francisco Through Student Eyes
By Lauren Li W’16
Students in Professor Lori Rosenkopf’s new course WH 297x: Wharton Industry Exploration Program: The San Francisco Bay Area Tech Sector spent a week in early January 2015 in San Francisco. The trip featured visits to tech-sector businesses, lectures at Wharton ǀ San Francisco, extracurricular activities, and networking opportunities with alumni in the Bay Area. Wharton junior Lauren Li agreed to give us her insider’s view of this exciting new course.
Building Transformative Relationships: Entrepreneurs Summit at WhartonǀSan Francisco
By Nadine Kavanaugh, Associate Director, Wharton Entrepreneurship
WhartonǀSan Francisco and Wharton Entrepreneurship co-hosted a very successful Entrepreneurs Summit last week, connecting entrepreneurs with investors and talent in the Bay Area. Relationships are at the heart of every entrepreneurial endeavor, and this summit gave entrepreneurs a chance to learn more about the importance of relationships—and to build some new ones.
Read more Building Transformative Relationships: Entrepreneurs Summit at WhartonǀSan Francisco
No Such Thing As A Perfect Pitch
By Zander Adell WG’12, founder of Doorman
Some people are born orators, or at least have enough practice at it that public speaking is an unremarkable part of their week. And some are born salesmen, daring the world to say No so they can get closer to that Yes.
