Stanford GSB Acceptance Phone Call

I guess it's the round 2 notification day for Stanford GSB. A neat thing about the school is the head of admissions calls informs you personally about your acceptance. For those of us that attend the school, the phone call is a long-cherished memory.

To all the applicants out there, good luck getting the phone call! And if you don't, may you receive many fat envelopes.

Stanford GSB Interview Questions

When applying to the Stanford GSB, a bunch of my friends came up with common interview questions for the admissions process. At Stanford, you have to be interviewed to get accepted. They interview only about 25% of applicants so getting an interview is a good sign! Hopefully this non-official list of Stanford GSB interview questions helps:
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Stanford Specific Questions

Tell me about your background. Why do you want to change from your current career? What do you want to do? Why? And how will the Stanford MBA help.

Why do you want to go back to school?

Why Stanford?

Clubs you’d be interested in joining at Stanford?

What other schools did you apply to and why Stanford?

If you don’t get an MBA offer, what will you do?

What value you can bring to Stanford?

What are your Long-term/Short-term goals?



Leadership / Team Work

Tell me about how you dealt with someone who was terrible to work with and how you handled it

Tell me about a leadership experience you’ve had.

Tell me about a time you’ve failed – what did you do?

Tell me about a time you were in a team and achieved a great outcome

Tell me about a time when you displayed leadership.

What is you leadership style?


Other

A book you’ve read recently and what you learned from it.

What books have you read that were unrelated to work?

Tell me about something you are interested in outside of work – why does this excite you?

What questions do you have for me? (this was w/ about 15 minutes left, so is important to have good questions)

Reflections on Entrepreneurship from Stanford GSB

Going through an old notebook of mine, I found a page of things I had learned about startups and entrepreneurship from my time in the MBA program at Stanford GSB. I wrote it on 6/12/07, about a week before i graduated. I culled these from things I learned from various classes, lectures, meetings, books, and during the early days of starting Personforce.

• Entrepreneurship is about building something with little to zero resources
• Do rather than analyze. Err on the side of speed than precision
• Building a company is an iterative process. Test and learn.
• There is a mental inflection point when the startup moves from idea to actual business
• The micro-details of the product, the sales pitch, the contract matter.
• There is a way to solve any problem. There is a way to sell anything. It might just be harder than you are prepared to work.
• Differentiated businesses require lots of hard work
• Do the dogs want to eat the dog food?
• Your sheer force of will is a competitive advantage
• Work with people who have different skills but similar values to you
• You have to give equity away to make the pie larger
• You have to strike and scale while the iron is hot
• Successful entrepreneurs are just normal people
• You need to commit to something to succeed. Good things start happening and it provides focus. "Throw your cap over the fence"
• Little is gained by secrecy, good things happen when talking to smart people
• Act weak when you are strong. Act still when you are about to move.
• Little companies can crush competitors
• Achieving public success has an irrevocable price
• Don't add costs to the business
• To succeed, you need to be contrarian and right
• Selling into existing markets can be easier to sell to. Creating new markets can be powerful.
• Great businesses create an impact far in excess of the capital invested in them.
• Every early decision has strategic and ethical implications
• Before every fork in the road, ask your self exactly what it is that you are trying to accomplish
  

Perhaps at a later date I'll write about which of these points I found to be true, especially true, or not sure true in starting a business.