MicroMRI:

Winner of the Wharton Business Plan Competition Recaps his Experiences

It’s April 4^th, 2003, and Dr. Bryon Gomberg is busy wrestling a 2x4 cardboard plaque into the suit cabinet at the front door of the airplane. The stewardess told him the plaque could easily fit into the overhead cabin, but Dr. Gomberg did not want to take the chance of the plaque getting scratched. The plaque depicted a blow-up of a $15,000 check awarded by HP to our company, MicroMRI, and the chief engineer was convinced that we could actually cash the oversized print at our local PNC bank.

Look, he told me, as he struggled with about ten unused wire hangers in the cabinet, the blow-up has its own serial number, bank account number and a “wet signature” femininely painted with a black marker, so it is legal tender.

At that time I was entering my first year at Wharton in the Healthcare program, and feeling what foreigners often feel when they first enter a new country, that their past was being erased. It had taken me thirty years to develop a qualified resume in Israeli professional circles, to afford furniture and a stereo system that were not hand-me-downs, and to know the people that put me on the right guest list in Tel-Aviv nightspots. Now, in a new country, I felt those accomplishments were gone. Nobody knew the name of the school I went to, the name of the company I worked for, nor the name of the model I once dated for ten minutes.

Prior to entering Wharton, I worked for an Angel VC firm where my job was to prepare portfolio companies for Series A round. I was in charge of writing the business plans to submit to professional investors, mostly in the U.S. Therefore when Bryon began scouting for potential partners to assist him in writing a business plan, I was intrigued. Bryon also enlisted Eileen Stephens, I brought in my friend Matt Pickens, and Envisia Microimaging was born. Later we renamed the company to MicroMRI, since www.micromri.com was available, and www.envisia.com was not. Together, we entered the 2002 Wharton Business Plan Competition.

One of the earliest things I observed about this country is in its fascination with winners. Nobody here remembers the second guy to walk on the moon, interviews the person that came in second, and cares about the half court perfect shot that failed to provide the upset. Here’s my two-bit, stating-the-obvious, smart-ass piece of advice: If you want instant recognition in America, Win Something.

After Envisia won the first prize in the Wharton BP Competition, enough people were genuinely interested in the venture that we thought seriously about pursuing this further. With Eileen off to non-profit, Matt off to J&J, and a horrible job market for foreigners in Summer 2002, we decided to reinvest some of the prize money in the Company to sustain me while I attempt to investigate further the commercialization. One of the perks of winning the competition was automatic acceptance to the Venture Initiation Program at the Wharton Small Business Development Center, so I had a cubicle, a micro-Staples and a small time-share in a secretary to assist me.

People warned me, yet I didn’t believe them. Entrepreneurship is like bungee jumping. Unless you experience it, you can’t even begin to understand it. For the last twelve months, I have been through the most exhilarating, exhausting and uplifting roller coaster of my life. For every letter of endorsement we received from a top physician, we had doors slam shut in our faces by a VC. For every potential customer we contacted, we met a technological setback. For every partnership we secured, we had a flawed business concept that we scrapped.

Getting four hours of sleep a night were on good days as I tried to balance the Wharton academic rigor with the venture and some attempt for a social life. Saturdays became a great time to polish the presentation, a midnight trip to the bathroom a terrific occasion to jot down a few notes, and Spring Break a wonderful opportunity to conduct an investor road show.

Nobody could have prepared me to the funding environment of 2003. The down-round bloodbaths around us are “not” encouraging new investments in seed stage deals. My imminent graduation forced me to make a few hard choices about the risks I’m taking, the loans I need to repay and my professional future. So we had to make the decision whether we try to bootstrap the business for a while, or call it quits. Maybe that’s what it takes to be an entrepreneur, to stare at reality in the eye, and ignore it.

We decided to scrap for cash, and hang in there with our nails. I am writing this article on the plane from Houston, where we plucked first prize at the Rice University Business Plan Competition, a great venue, where we where we competed before over 80 venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and oil barons. Next weekend, we will fly to San Francisco, where we will hopefully get closer to a deal with our first customer, meet three angels, and participate at the USF Business Plan Competition. In the weekend after that, we will return to Texas, to participate in the MOOT CORPS competition for $100,000 at Austin.

We will close a FFF round soon, leverage public funds and grants, and make this happen. For me, this will be a grueling, draining and lonely experience, but it sure beats working for a living.