By Ankit Mahajan, MBA Class of 2014

On April 3rd, PSEN and VLS members had an opportunity to discuss the nuances of entrepreneurship with Matt Sheehan at the Smeal College of Business. Matt is a Smeal Alumni and former Vice President/General Manager of Redbox. Matt talked about how he helped grow Redbox from a small startup to the leader in automated retail DVD rental kiosks and a Coinstar company and also about the learning he had along the way. Matt joined Redbox after completing his MBA at Penn State and was one of the early members of the leadership team. He helped to grow the company from 200 kiosks to over 33,000 kiosks in 27,800 locations. Matt discussed with the students various ideas that the students were working on. He underlined the importance of bootstrapping during the initial phases of the startup and had very pertinent responses to the questions of the students.

It was a great opportunity for the attendees to learn firsthand and apply these skills to the business plans they were working on with their VLS teams.