A friend of mine is doing an MBA. Her course this semester follows the Startup School model - each week they have lectures regarding issues a startup face while creating a startup at the same time. They have to create a product for the startup that they create. They first have to find customers and solve their customers problems, and create a product and startup around the problem.
The problem her team discovered was this: Graduating MBA students from her school cannot find jobs in Management Consulting, citing the lack of project experience as the reason.
Having dinner with her, I pitched this idea to solve the problem. It gets quite convoluted, so I’ll attempt to be clear.
- Problem: Graduating MBA students lack project experience hence are unable to transition into Management Consulting.
- Product: A programme (A) catered to the MBA students (the prospective customers) to do a single project (B) such that they are able to list it in their resumés.
- Twist: The project (B) that forms the product is as follows: create a programme catered to MBA students to do a single project ( C ) such that they are able to list it in their resumés. This allows the customers to cite managerial experience. The catch is: the project ( C ) that forms the programme is to create a programme catered to MBA students to do a single project (D) such that they are able to list it in their resumés… and so on and so forth.
This clearly is recursive and will go on and on forever.
We know of one such thing that enables μ-recursion, so I closed the pitch by giving the idea the most appropriate name: the Y-combinator.
Nobody was amused. I was. Plus it was excellent vegan Thai food.