I had just come back from a holiday when I realised how frustrating travel planning had become. I had spent more time switching between tabs, copying links, and coordinating with friends than actually enjoying the excitement of the trip itself. When the Entrepreneurship Project (EP1) began, I decided to work on something to make travel planning better - smarter, easier, and more social.
I wasn’t sure what shape the solution would take or even what I needed to consider. EP1 changed that completely. The course is structured not just to encourage ideas, but to help you ask the right questions: What problem are you solving? Who are you solving it for? What market forces are at play? For someone like me, creative, curious, but not yet confident, EP1 provided the perfect framework to think rigorously without killing the spark.
The natural extension of this was part two of the Entrepreneurship Project (EP2). It didn’t just pick up where EP1 left off, it deepened it. I was given tools to test my idea’s resilience. It made me zoom out, understand how to build ventures that exist within ecosystems, think about financing routes, partner dynamics, and customer behaviours. The structure of the programme gave me a safe space to keep refining, breaking, and rebuilding. Every session felt like I was shedding a layer of naivety and gaining a new one of insight.
There was one moment that especially stayed with me. We had to do a role play where we were each assigned a founder character with a full backstory, and the task was to agree on an equity split among five people. I did this with a group of close friends and, naively, assumed we’d settle it in minutes. We didn’t. In fact, we got into it. Not unkindly, but intensely. It took an uncomfortably long time to reach a conclusion. What that exercise revealed, beyond the mechanics of equity, was how personal and complex founder relationships are. It gave me real empathy for why so many startups fall apart, because at some point, decisions become more about people than numbers.
I also received honest feedback from real investors as part of the final assessments, and had tutorship sessions with experienced tech investors who didn’t sugarcoat anything and gave actionable advice. All of this proved invaluable as I began taking the idea further. Together with a group of brilliant people from South Africa, Georgia, Kenya, and India, I found the confidence to apply to incubators and entrepreneurship showcases. We even presented at the #StartedInOxford Showcase, among some of the top founders at Oxford, and came away with leads, validation, and new momentum. We now have a solid concept for a new format of travel planning app that directly addresses all the challenges I had faced.
The idea was born from my own travel frustrations, but EP1 and EP2 helped it take its first real steps. The input I received helped me reshape the product, evolve the pitch, and sharpen the business model.
So if you have a fully formed idea, or even just the frustration of a problem you wish someone would fix, EP will help you figure it out. You don’t need to wait until it’s perfect. The Entrepreneurship Project is built to help you explore your idea, stress-test it, and, most importantly, believe in it.
Find out more about the Oxford MBA.
