By Patrick Vernon, author of Venture Capital Strategy: How to Think Like a Venture Capitalist.

How I transformed from a rehabilitated musician to an unorthodox academic.

In the winter of 2002, I had a life-changing experience that ultimately led to an unorthodox career in academia and this book. I had no idea at the time that it was going to be so impactful. I was in the middle of my first year of graduate school pursuing an MBA, a surprising place to find myself considering how I had spent my 20s.

I had moved to Los Angeles just after college to pursue a music career. Within a few years I was touring the west coast with my band, the Zookeepers, eventually performing 500 shows in 8 states (plus one particularly memorable gig in a 12th century castle in Switzerland called Schlooss Thun).

By my early 30s, the band had evolved into a small business with a reluctant sole proprietor: me. In addition to fronting the band, I was the booking agent, manager and producer. Through savings from my day job, I had purchased most of the equipment through which we performed, the van that carried us over 150,000 miles and the basement recording studio where we produced four independently released CDs. I hired the musicians who toured and recorded with me. I created the marketing materials. I did the taxes.

I had become a small businessperson in a hit-driven California industry: entertainment. Unfortunately, after a decade in Los Angeles, I burned out before I ever hit. When I was in my early 30s considering next steps, an old friend suggested business school.

About 18 months later, as a 1st-year MBA student at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, I stumbled across a seemingly innocent little event that would change my life. The Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) was in its fifth year, limping along after the dot-com bubble-burst. Interest in venture capital was waning after the crash, and only a handful of students at UNC signed up for the competition. My team and I did not take it seriously. We pretty much just showed up. That’s when my socks were blown off.

In the competition, students get to be venture capitalists for the day. Real startups come to pitch for funding. Playing the role of the investors, we, the students, had a mock VC fund from which we would invest in one of the startups. We had to choose one of the four.

We had been given four business plans from local startups that were attempting to raise venture capital. My team had (barely) read the plans the night prior and prepared a list of questions for each entrepreneur. It was clear to us which plan was the best. By this time in our MBA program, we had read many cases and completed several “integrated exercises” that incorporated all aspects of the b-school curriculum: finance, marketing, operations, management, etc.

When we arrived at VCIC, we already knew which startup would get our funding. We had applied our newly gained business acumen to tear apart the business plans just as we had torn apart dozens of case studies. And then at the event, we met the founders. Game changer!

It turns out, people matter. You can study all the theory in the world and not be prepared for the hair standing up on the back of your neck because you just don’t trust someone. There is no textbook that will fully explain the myriad variables involved with navigating a complex conversation with another human being, perhaps one who is much smarter than you, or not nearly as smart, or seems to be hiding something, or is oversharing, or is an amazingly compelling salesperson, or stumbles while explaining things…

It was an integrative exercise incorporating disciplines like marketing, finance, and operations, with the addition of real human beings. These were real founders pitching their real startups and doing their best to answer our real questions just as they’d answer to real VCs.

Prior to this event in our business school classes, we had always discussed businesses as “cases,” which were either historical or theoretical. And on paper. They had been part of a teaching module designed to impart a specific lesson, often somewhat contrived, or at the least, conveniently choreographed.

At VCIC, it was a maelstrom of variables by comparison. These were not meticulously written cases that made a clear point. These were current business plans, the real deal, being thrust upon the real world with no predictable outcomes. There were no right answers. The students were immersed into the ambiguities of an entrepreneurial endeavor, sharing in the uncertainty with the founders.

The only people in the room who seemed to understand what was going on were the VCs, the venture capitalists, who were there to judge our performances. They were watching it all as if they’d seen it a hundred times. I thought, they must be onto something.

During my second year of graduate school, I was the president of the entrepreneurship club, and I had one mandate: grow VCIC. When I graduated, I came on staff at UNC Kenan-Flagler to continue that mandate. I had found the learning experience so valuable, and because I could not find any textbooks or writings that explained it, I began creating my own materials and giving guest lectures around UNC on the topics of entrepreneurship and venture capital. By 2006, I was teaching my own VC/startup class and had written a coursepack that was the first iteration of what would become VC Strategy: How to Think Like a Venture Capitalist.

Curious to see where my band played back in the ’90s? See www.thezookeepers.com.