MAKING MONEY IN NETWORKING

MAKING MONEY IN NETWORKING

Networking is the new must have skill. Naturally, any way to make it easier will have a guaranteed market. These three MBA students found a way to bank on this. Find out what they did here!

Entrepreneur shares…

David Lieb, CEO and co-founder of Bump Technologies, entered the University of Chicago’s MBA program in the fall of 2008.

While attending an accounting class, Lieb’s mind drifted from the lecture to imagining an easy, efficient way to share contact information. “Business school is all about meeting people and networking, and the first week, I found myself entering in phone number after phone number, and name after name,” Lieb says.

As a former employee of Texas Instruments, Lieb had a solid background in technology development. He believed he could create a more automated method of sharing contact information using smartphones.

With a concept in mind, he enlisted former Texas Instruments colleague Andy Huibers (now Bump’s co-founder and technical lead) and fellow MBA student Jake Mintz (another Texas Instruments alum, who would become Bump’s third co-founder) to help transform his idea into a working prototype.

Two weeks later, in October 2008, Huibers had rigged a rudimentary demo using a laptop; five months later, the team had completed the first version of a mobile app that lets iPhone users share photos and contact information by simply bumping their phones together.

Appropriately named Bump, the app launched officially in March 2009 and exploded in popularity, accumulating more than 42 million downloads to date and becoming the seventh most popular iPhone app in the United States.

To run a company that has raised $19.9 million and grown to 26 employees and 11 interns–while also continuing to add and improve features–Lieb and Mintz left their MBAprogram at the end of their first year. But quitting school didn’t mean they stopped learning.

Mintz says two lessons in particular continue to apply: the importance of a strong team able to weather the ups and downs of an unpredictable and fluctuating startup, and the need to regularly test not only products, but also assumptions.

Get the entire story at Entrepreneur!