The Story of NVC

When it launched 25 years ago, the University of Chicago’s New Venture Challenge (NVC) was a pioneer in helping business school students get their startups off the ground.

Now the program is consistently ranked as the nation’s top university accelerator, with its alumni companies having raised nearly $2 billion in capital and achieved more than $8.5 billion in mergers and exits. 

Podcast host and Chicago Booth alum Colin Keeley, MBA ’19, interviews three key leaders responsible for the success of the NVC: Steve Kaplan, Neubauer Family Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at Booth and Kessenich E.P. Faculty Director at the Polsky Center; Ellen Rudnick, the first executive director of the Polsky Center and currently a professor of entrepreneurship at Booth; and Mark Tebbe, who served as an NVC judge and mentor for years before joining the Booth faculty and Polsky Center as an entrepreneur-in-residence.

They dish about what distinguishes the NVC, a yearlong class capped off with a business plan competition, and how it evolved.

“What is I think really differentiating about us, and I'm sort of puzzled more people don't do it, is presenting early to really smart people and to a bunch of them,” Kaplan said. “And we have now somewhere between 10 and 20 people in the room who are entrepreneurs or investors, and you really get just — bludgeoned is probably the wrong word. You get intense criticism. And it is so healthy to get that intense criticism early, because you find out where your weaknesses are.”