Next week is the last week for the Cambridge MBA class of 2012. This is a time when students are busy completing final assignments, and crossing out their bucket list of things to do before they leave Cambridge. For three students though, this is a particularly frantic period as they try to start a company through kickstarter. One of the students, Tom Britton, picks up the story :
“So let’s briefly mention the 800lb gorilla in the room so I can go on to more about the course…I’m Tom and with two of my co-MBA-ers (Graham and Bonnie) we’ve started teastorks, a tea company aiming to disrupt the way we find out about, order, and consume tea. Sounds like a mouthful but unless we have lofty ambitions we’ll never be any more than a standard company and that’s the last thing we want to be.
Now, back to the start. I’ve had ambitions of starting a company for a long time though I’d always felt a little unsure about my abilities to manage the ins and outs of the business which is why I decided to pursue an MBA. I picked Cambridge for the opportunity to study entrepreneurship and be surrounded by the healthy start-up environment. What I got was a lot more than I bargained for. In strategy we discussed methods for differentiating the business model. In Marketing and Brand Management we learned how to position the company to stand out and create a new market for our service. Management Science helped us forecast and Accounting helped to reconcile. The list goes on and though we’re not quite done with the tweaking (no successful entrepreneur is), we’re learning each day and we’ll get there.
The idea for the tea company came from a class in entrepreneurship. At break Graham and I would always go for a cup of tea with Bonnie and figured we loved tea so much we’d try and do something involving tea. So we started to look for good tea ideas and planned to meet up at my dorm. Lo and behold I realised I was actually out of tea and that lead to our story. You can carry on with the story at www.teastorks.com ”
