Two years ago this week, I wrote a single line in my journal: being in a non-ideal situation and not empowered to change it.
Sixteen months later, I started the Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology (MBET) program at the Conrad School. I came back to Waterloo for two reasons: to reconnect with an entrepreneurial drive that started here, and to give structure and language to a decade of consulting experience at Pivotal Labs and VMware.
My entrepreneurial roots are in Waterloo. In 2012, I co-founded PalGrid while living at Velocity Residence, where we became a Velocity Venture Fund finalist.
Two years later, I joined the Enterprise Co-op (E Co-op) program under Professor Wayne Chang and built Ball Labs, a tennis-ball pickup robotics venture inspired by my Systems Design Engineering capstone project. Sports robotics has been a consistent thread throughout my career.
That thread resurfaced during MBET Ignition Week when I started talking with my classmate Charles Huxley about golf. He is a former professional caddie and the conversation quickly turned into ideas around robotics and course maintenance. Together, we are now co-founding Divotron, a golf-course divot-repair robotics venture recently accepted into the Velocity Summer Accelerator 2026. Our next step is launching our first golf-course pilot.
After a decade of building products for clients, I wanted to build one I owned.
The MBET curriculum connected naturally to the two halves of my professional life: entrepreneurship through venture-focused capstone work, and consulting through corporate innovation projects and client engagements.
James Cheng, MBET '26
Most MBET classes are built around collaborative, experiential learning supported by case studies. Frameworks I had used instinctively for years suddenly had names, structure, and context.
Rather than replacing practitioner instinct, the program sharpened it. I now find myself identifying patterns and frameworks more intentionally before making decisions.
What surprised me most was the cohort itself. Recent Waterloo graduates sit beside professionals with decades of experience. First-time founders learn alongside serial entrepreneurs managing multiple ventures at once. Engineers, designers, consultants, pharma analysts, and music-industry strategists all bring different perspectives into the classroom. Every framework has to translate sideways across those registers; the cohort does the translating.
The Conrad School also creates space for students to shape the culture themselves. Ira Bowring and I started a peer advisory group called BAD Council (Business Angels and Demons), where classmates take turns pressure-testing each other's ventures, not by a single advisor but by the cohort in rotation. Some of the most valuable learning at MBET happens outside the syllabus, through the systems and communities the cohort builds together.
This term, I am also TAing the Enterprise Co-op program under Professor David Rose — the same program I completed eleven years ago under Professor Wayne Chang. Professor Chang passed away in October 2025 after leading the program for thirteen years. The work itself has not changed; what has changed is my understanding of what that experience can lead to.
If you are a software engineer, product manager, or venture builder thinking about MBET as a way back to Waterloo or into the Kitchener-Waterloo entrepreneurial ecosystem: MBET is a meaningful investment of both time and money, and it will not be the right fit for everyone. But for the right person, the value extends well beyond the classroom. The structured learning delivers what it promises, while the unstructured learning (the relationships, conversations, and cohort-driven experiences) becomes the multiplier.
Two years ago, I wrote that I did not feel empowered to change my situation. Applying to MBET was the first change. Returning to Waterloo reminded me that I could keep making them.
