I arrived in Cambridge with an aggressively specific three-part checklist:
- Raise a fund to buy UK businesses in the £1–5 million EBITDA range.
- Befriend every interesting person within a five-mile radius.
- Master artificial intelligence.
Given that Cambridge sits at the heart of “Silicon Fen,” it felt like the perfect place to pull this off. Plus, after my first formal college dinner, surrounded by architecture older than my home country and people speaking in hushed, intelligent tones, I was completely sold.
The Art of Strategic Loitering
From day one, the pace wasn’t just fast, it was a firehose. In my first month, I met more fascinating people than I had in the previous five years combined.
My primary survival strategy quickly became “calculated serendipity.” I realised that missing a rigid networking seminar to loiter at the college bar or crash a random dinner wasn’t slacking, it was high-yield asset management. The sheer density of talent meant that a casual pint with a classmate frequently mutated into a midnight debate on macroeconomics or a startup idea.
Demystifying AI (And Crushing My Ego)
My grand plan to master AI quickly descended into absolute chaos. Alongside some incredibly patient, tech-savvy peers, my evenings became informal sandboxes. We weren’t just reading academic papers, we were breaking code, arguing over workflows, and trying to force AI tools to automate our daily tasks so we could sleep more.
But the hardest thing I had to learn wasn’t prompt engineering, it was humility.
Before Cambridge, I’d spent years leading teams in traditional, top-down corporate hierarchies. Enter the Cambridge Venture Project (CVP). Suddenly, I was dropped into a flat peer group of alpha personalities where I possessed exactly zero formal authority. I couldn’t just give orders. Working through that was uncomfortable, occasionally bruising, and a spectacular masterclass in how to lead when you aren’t actually the boss.
Building a Club and Buying Companies
The absolute highlight of the year was the Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) course. I managed to corner Professor Simon Webster, a legend in the UK search fund world, and secure some brilliant fundraising mentorship from Adam Kulik.
When I realised half the class didn’t even know what a search fund was, a few classmates and I co-founded the Cambridge ETA Club.
What started as a few of us drinking terrible coffee and talking about buying boring businesses exploded into a 100-member monster.
We hosted over 30 events, brought in global investors, and eventually co-hosted a massive conference with London Business School – to be fair they did most of the work.
Unicorn Hunting
While managing the club and actively pitching investors for my own fund, I did my Global Consulting Project with Corgi AI, an insurtech rocket ship. I embedded with them during a hyper-growth sprint and watched, utterly fascinated, as their valuation casually doubled from $630 million to $1.3 billion, and then ballooned to $2.6 billion. It was wild, exhausting, and felt like trying to perform maintenance on a jet engine while flying.
The Verdict
The Cambridge MBA is a beautifully intense blur. Not every experiment worked, some networking paths led straight to dead ends, and I definitely drank too much coffee.
But I came here to raise a fund and learn how to buy companies. I’m leaving having done both, backed by a network of lifelong co-conspirators. I made a lot of really great friends and some of them even became friends with me! I’ll miss Cambridge.
