Everyone arrives early for Reza Satchu’s Friday afternoon seminar. His students sit in assigned seats. No cell phones ring. When Satchu enters, there is instant silence. He launches straight into his lesson, singling out students for rapid-fire questions on this week’s Harvard Business School case study.
“The key to entrepreneurship is putting yourself in situations of discomfort,” he says. “If you’re comfortable, you need to move on. Look for maximum discomfort.”
The 30 undergraduates enrolled in Special Topics in Entrepreneurship are hand-picked from a pool of hundreds. After a term’s worth of guest speakers and case studies, they each hand in a business plan, and the top student wins a $5,000 scholarship endowed by Satchu.
If you’re in economics and looking for discomfort, you couldn’t do much better than this class. It’s been compared to “The Apprentice”–the Globe and Mail called Satchu “Toronto’s answer to Donald Trump,” and “the jerk millionaire professor.” The millionaire bit is indisputable. A Kenyan immigrant raised in Scarborough, Satchu graduated from McGill and went to work on Wall Street for several years before attending the Harvard Business School. After founding and selling several businesses (one for more than $1 billion), Satchu returned to Toronto to run his hedge fund Stellation Asset Management and give back to the community. He isn’t paid for his teaching: he sees it as charitable work.
For the most part, Satchu’s students are grateful—his retake rate is nearly 100 per cent, and many students call the class as the best course at U of T, a life-changing experience. But Satchu’s methods can be brutal.
“It’s very hostile,” says one student. “If you get your answer wrong he tells you very specifically, and earlier in the year it was much worse. He’d be like, ‘You were doing so well and then you gave this terrible answer, what were you thinking?’” Others complain that marks are too low for a course full of top students. A handful have dropped out.
“I’m not a touchy-feely guy,” admits Satchu, “but the only reason I do this is because I actually care about their success.”
“Success” is a word that comes up a lot in class. If you want to be successful, you need to start investing young. If you want to be successful, you need to be willing to take risks. A guest speaker on developing economies references Baron Nathan Rothschild: “The time to invest in countries is when blood is on the street, not when it’s been cleaned up.” After awhile, it all starts to sound a little ruthless, but Satchu insists that the course is not about making money.
“Success is about having a positive impact on your community. Success is about having freedom to do what you want to do,” he says. “Whatever you choose to do, you’re better off doing it well.”
Ultimately, this millionaire professor is looking to build a course that would have helped him as an undergraduate at McGill, where he says he coasted. He worries that Canadian universities still don’t prepare their students to compete with ambitious Americans.
“Kids from Harvard and Princeton and Yale are no smarter, but they have far bigger expectations than most Canadians coming out of undergrad,” he says. “I think knowing where the goal line is and pushing it out even further is half the battle.” If that battle involves asking one student whether he has “come up with any smart ideas” and then staring through an awkward silence, then so be it.
“Business environments are like this in the real world,” says one student. “No one is going to baby you, no one is going to tell you that your idea is good when it’s stupid. It’s such a weird experience, but ultimately it’s the only course that I’ve taken in the entire economics department that I’ve seen as truly useful.”
