When the company first reached out, offering him a job as general manager and CEO, Carlos Rodriguez Laconi MBA’17 wasn’t interested. Sure, he would listen to what they had to say, but he declined the offer. “I was not looking for a job,” he says.
But, the conversation stayed with him. He thought about the company and the opportunity it presented. Specifically, he thought about entrepreneurship through acquisition.
What Is Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition?
Entrepreneurship through acquisition, or ETA for short, is a different flavor of entrepreneurship in which entrepreneurs focus on growing an existing business, rather than launching a new one.
Laconi learned about ETA as a graduate student at Babson. The concept appealed to him. “The type of entrepreneurship I like is stable businesses, not creating them from scratch,” Laconi says. He took any class he could on the topic, and he interned at an accelerator for search funds, a type of fund in which investors back entrepreneurs seeking to acquire a business.