Last Friday a couple of Fridays ago I was invited to attend Scott Kirsner’s Entrepreneurs’ Breakfast at ZINK’s Bedford headquarters. To put it in Scott’s own words, “the sole focus was connecting entrepreneurs who have something of a consumer bent” and provide a “schmoozing opportunity for student entrepreneurs”, which personally was what got me into the privileged group. 

It was great to meet and hear the stories of proven entrepreneurs that today guide companies like Pixily, GamersDNA, Tourfilter, Chestnut Hill Sound, to name a few. It was also amazing to meet there other Babsonian friends like Matt Lauzon and Rush Hambleton (whose company, I must say, I really admire and look up to). I think that the sole activity of connecting these entrepreneurs with students (entrepreneurs-to-be) is not only necessary, but extremely beneficial to the startup ecosystem in New England. A week later, Scott would revisit this issue in his Sunday column in the Globe by answering the question: How can we hold on to student talent?. He also wrote a long and thorough post about the role every trade association in New England is playing in engaging student entrepreneurs in local business activities with the purpose of retaining their talent in the region. Some of them scored low and others are doing well and contributing to this important endeavor. From my experience, I know that MITX is aware of the “brain export problem” and is taking concrete actions to further investigate and contribute to solving it.

From this humble blog I just want to thank Scott for being not only a Maven but a true Connector (sorry for all the Gladwell references but I’m just in the middle of reading The Tipping Point). If you ask me today, my first choice would be to graduate and stay in Boston to either start my company or work for a startup.

Now back to the job hunt.

For more than a year I’ve been following the digital footprint of Argentinean entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky (his blog and on Twitter), a spirited and successful businessman/salesman/thinker that (at least for me) represents all the right decisions and philosophies that somebody can implement in order to live life at its fullest.

Here’s the video of the conversation he had with Tim O’Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe, held in Berlin last week. I hear him mention, yet again, what I’ve been hearing for quite some time about the single most important success factor in any entrepreneurial venture: a good team of people.

On Monday I had the chance to interview Matt Lauzon, Co-founder and CEO of Paragon Lake, as part of an assignment for my Entrepreneurship class with Prof. Zacharakis. Matt is an overly nice person and an accomplished entrepreneur at just 23 years of age. Amazing story.

His company, Paragon Lake (a startup that is using the latest and greatest web based technology to change the way people buy and sell fine jewelry) just got $5.8 million in VC funding and expanded its executive team. 

Being the busy individual he is, he sat down with me for half an hour and patiently answered to my questions. Think of it as giving back to Babson and, as he pointed out in the interview, “always agreeing to take people out to lunch”. This strategy of constantly reaching out to people and offer them a fraction of your time certainly tops Matt’s list of key success factors. That and having a team of “world-class ass-kickers in what they do”, individuals with “high levels of integrity” that helped him build a culture in his company of which he is extremely proud.

Apart from being an entrepreneurial story worth telling, Matt’s is the classic example of an opportunity in an established industry where not much has changed and is very fragmented (jewelry). Paragon Lake’s ability to put the right technology in the hands of the right people is what took them to where they are now: changing the way an industry does business.

A big thank you to Matt for his time and for giving me this experience. It definitely tops my list of “key entrepreneurial days” in my MBA at Babson.