How we transformed a guest founder session into a live leadership lab - where Columbia MBA students worked on real challenges and delivered ideas the founder hadn't considered.
Columbia Business School's Food Entrepreneurship program is one of the most sought-after courses in their MBA curriculum. The format included guest founder sessions - successful operatorssharing their journey with students. Valuable, but passive. The program team wanted to know if there was another way.
DIG founder Adam Eskin and CMO Jessica Serrano were scheduled to speak. Instead of a talk, we proposed a lab: ninety minutes where students wouldn't hear about scaling a restaurant brand - they'd work on it. Real problems. Real pressure. Real feedback.
The question wasn't "what can students learn from DIG?" It was "what can DIG learn from students?"
The session opens with a small mystery. Each student finds a card on their desk, face down. As Adam and Jessica begin sharing DIG's story, students discover their cards contain specific lenses - elements to track, questions to hold, patterns to notice. Passive listening becomes active observation.
Then the pivot. Students become DIG's innovation team, split into groups tackling two live challenges: a new compact restaurant format, and a ready-to-serve product line. Both real. Both unresolved.
Teams get access to tools designed to compress weeks of strategy work into minutes:
Mid-session, conditions shift. Resources change. New constraints emerge. Teams aren't just strategizing anymore - they're adapting.
The session closes with Adam and Jessica reviewing each team's canvas live. No softening. Direct feedback on what would work, what wouldn't, and why. Students leave knowing exactly where their thinking landed.
The session became the most highly-rated in Columbia's Food Entrepreneurship curriculum - for the second consecutive semester.
But the shift that mattered more was structural. This wasn't a founder sharing war stories. It was founders pressure-testing ideas alongside the next generation of operators. Students got practice. DIG got fresh perspective. Columbia got a model they're now applying to other guest sessions.
The format proved something worth proving: founder sessions don't have to be passive. When the problems are real and the feedback is honest, everyone leaves sharper.
Workshop series bringing creatives, producers, and strategists into tighter collaboration across Wasserman X's event production teams—especially on high-stakes projects.
