MBA careers in Entrepreneurship

Overview

8% of our most recent graduating class started their own business straight out of the MBA. Cambridge Judge and the Cambridge MBA have always offered a diverse student body, bringing together a wide range of industries and sector backgrounds to foster innovation and entrepreneurial thinking in business.

As well as the access our MBAs have to the Cambridge Judge Business School Entrepreneurship Centre and other innovative research centres across the Business School, our students are offered access to a wide network of successful entrepreneurs operating in the Cambridge Cluster and Silcon Fen.

An MBA from Cambridge Judge Business School offers aspiring entrepreneurs a great platform for idea generation, development and venture launch. The curriculum offers tailored entrepreneurship courses, covering business planning, innovation management and funding.

MBA careers in entrepreneurship.
%
7

of our recent graduates developed startups upon graduating

Statistics shown are from the most recent Cambridge MBA employment report.

The Cambridge MBA can progress your entrepreneurship career

Find out what you need to know, information on career outcomes, hear from alumni and sign up to an event to talk to us.

Everything entrepreneurs want to know about the Cambridge MBA

Can I start a new business during my MBA year? Can I still run my business and study for an MBA alongside? How do I develop my ideas before taking the leap? What resources are available to budding entrepreneurs in Cambridge itself?

Entrepreneurship career outcomes

From renewable energy to tech startups meet the founders and CEOs born out of the Cambridge MBA programme and the drive for innovation and impact in their careers.

So, you want to be an entrepreneur? – events focus

We will be holding a new series of career focused events this Summer. In the meantime, please view the recording from the event series – So you want to be an entrepreneur? Pivot, perform, progress.

Hear from Oliver Tromp

Oliver Tromp, USA, chose to do an MBA for international experience, the network and the access to Silicon Fen and to explore entrepreneurship and innovation in his career journey.

Before my MBA, I did seven years in public accounting, and then I did one year at a digital advertising startup as the COO. I knew I wanted to pivot out of public accounting and go more into an operational type role, but I also thought I needed an MBA to kind of give more validity to that move.

I’ve always loved travelling and Cambridge is amazing

I’ve always loved travelling. I’ve always wanted to be more in an international business role, and so the MBA abroad was sort of my first step in, getting a job abroad and living abroad, and having that experience. When I was thinking about an MBA, I didn’t want to just get a business degree. So what I was really after was a community and a place where I could also grow in areas outside of business. I was really interested in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and kind of the tech hub that we have here in Cambridge. Then you have this amazing town that you live in, with all these incredible historical traditions and brilliant people from every different subject matter. So all of those things in one was the appeal of Cambridge for me.

Entrepreneurship resources

So there’s a lot of resources, like through the entrepreneurship SIG, or the VC Significant Interest Group, there’s a lot of resources that were kind of thrown on me day one. I got connected to the other classmates of mine that were interested in entrepreneurship. Each team has definitely been different. In every team, I’ve had people from completely different countries. Honestly, that’s part of the reason I came to Cambridge, is I wanted to work with people from all over the world, all different professional backgrounds, all different cultural backgrounds, social backgrounds.

Deep relationships on the Cambridge MBA

I think I knew I was going to make friends on the MBA, but I didn’t realise how deep of relationships I’d make in just one year. So much happens in such a short amount of time that you really bond with people. Coming into the programme, competitions were on my radar.

I also was interested in entrepreneurship

That was a big pull for me. I’ve never started a business. I have worked at a startup, but I’ve never actually started anything myself. We came up with this idea for a fintech venture and that idea developed, and we continued refining it, continued working on it, and entered into the McKinsey Venture Academy Competition and made it all the way to the finals and ended up winning that one. So it was pretty amazing. I think, coming to the MBA, I saw this as an opportunity to experiment a little bit.

We don’t have many chances and Cambridge offers everything

We don’t have that many chances in our lives to just experiment. Most of the things that I’ve done on the MBA that have been the most valuable have been things that were outside of my comfort zone. I knew I just wanted to experiment and spread the net really wide, and then figure out what I like and what I don’t like. My goal within the next five years is to be in a leadership position at a tech company that’s fast growing, but just being connected with so many high-performing, driven, engaging, interested people opens up more doors than you could imagine. Cambridge has so much appeal because of everything that it offers. It’s a very strong MBA. It’s a beautiful city. It’s an amazing institution and people from all over the world. So yeah, I think to me, Cambridge is, it’s kind of the one place that offers everything.

View video with transcript

Video: Cambridge MBA Oliver Tromp talks entrepreneurship.

Recent MBA recruiters

Top