Dartmouth undergraduates, Tuck students, entrepreneurs, investors and alumni poured into the Tuck School of Business Saturday for Greener Ventures 2004, an annual entrepreneurship conference that featured a keynote address and fireside chat with Jeffrey Immelt '78, chairman and CEO of General Electric.
Immelt emphasized that there exists an initiative at GE to cultivate a culture of innovation and new ideas. He further stressed that the future of business lies in the international arena, mentioning China, India and Russia in specific.
"There is no success without friendship," Immelt said, explaining that the best thing he accomplished at Dartmouth was to develop an unbelievable set of friends who helped him through the tumultuous times during which he was considered for succession to Jack Welch, former CEO of GE.
When speaking of managing such a large company like GE, he elaborated on the importance of working with and delegating to competent people.
"We operate a lot on trust," he said. "News must travel up through the system with great rapidity."
Immelt also offered advice for students who hoped to follow a similar career path in the future, stressing the importance of following a linear career path straight after business school.
"Leadership in the future will be about depth before breadth," Immelt said. "Do every job like you're going to have it forever."
This year's conference focused on "Trends and Opportunities," concentrating on how entrepreneurs can use the constantly changing world to their benefit. The conference brought numerous successful Dartmouth entrepreneur alumni to speak on several different panels about their experiences. The panels were divided into three categories: Trends and Opportunities, Execution, and Financing and Exiting.
The panels all stressed the importance of networking, working with the right people and actively pursuing opportunities.
"The best way to start a company is to learn to sell yourself," said Rob McGrath '82 Tu '92, President and CEO of Private Retreats.
Many of the panelists humorously referred to themselves as "serial" entrepreneurs, starting up nine or 10 companies before finally succeeding.
"[Starting up a company] isn't very glamorous," McGrath said, "It's almost embarrassing, but it pays off when you get more ownership [of the company] later on."
The panelists told of their stories in succeeding in the business world, using their experiences to offer advice to an enthusiastic audience.
The "Dartmouth Entrepreneurs and Their Stories" panel emphasized the benefit of working through failures to gain valuable experience.
"You learn more from what you do wrong than what you do right," said Gregg Engles '79, chairman and CEO of Dean Foods Company.
Likewise, Amanda Reed '86, a partner at Palomar Ventures, stressed that if she had not worked through her first company's darkest hours, she would not have had the experience to successfully work in her current position.
The conference culminated in a business plan competition, in which three finalists, companies in some way connected to Dartmouth, presented their ideas to judges who acted as potential investors. The three companies who participated this year included Artemis Woman, a line of wellness-inspired beauty products, Dynamic Clinical Systems, who uses software and clinical processes to collect, manage, and analyze patient-reported health status information, and Woomera Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to developing markers for treatment of specific cancers.
