There is no doubt in the fact that there are a lot of young female entrepreneurs, leading many startups these days. It is also a lot of fun meeting and interacting with these amazing women. Sometime back I too got an opportunity to meet two amazing female entrepreneurs. The event was organized by the Women@EIT group at KTH. The first entrepreneur was Elsa Bernadotte, COO & Co-Founder at Karma. She shared her journey from working at a company to starting her own startups. Her initial startup was non-technical and it was very interesting to listen about how to select the raw materials, production details etc. She also motivated and encouraged us to believe in us and take the risk to build our own startup. The second entrepreneur was Karoline Beronius,  who is currently working on her social enterprise. She had previously worked in CLC and have known her well. This was a completely different experience as this was the first time listening about a social enterprise. I believe this is a great thing to use one’s experience and knowledge and help people around you. We later got to mingle with the women and they shared their experience. It was a very fun and knowledgeable experience overall.

Last Thursday I had the last class of another course (Business development lab, which I think most of the people in Technology based entrepreneurship are taking as well). During the class, we watched some Dragon’s den pitches. If you don’t know what Dragon’s den is, it’s a TV show where entrepreneurs pitch their idea to potential investor. Since it’s a TV show, it doesn’t necessarily shows what happens in real life, but it teaches some valuable lessons on what to say and what not do say during an investor pitch, especially in anticipation of our final BDL pitch.

Now, when pitching to an investor, we tend to speak too much in an attempt to appear confident and to show that we know what we are talking about, but most of the times that’s not the case, and after some question from the investor the answer is “No”. Hopefully that won’t be the case for us, since we prepared 4 months for this (I’m sorry if the people who are not taking the BDL course cannot relate). But what then? Say we find an investor who is willing to invest in our company, do we blindly say yes? We have to remember that a pitch it’s not an exam, and we are allowed to ask investors question for our own interest, it’s our company we are talking about after all.

So, what are the questions an entrepreneur should ask an investor?

• What’s their investment history in your sector: this should come with no surprise. An investment is not a bank loan, and an investor has the same interest as you have to make your company successful. Choosing an investor who already know your sector can give you some important advantages and insights.
• Do the prefer to lead or to follow deals: finding a lead investor is crucial. A lead investor is simply put the first person who puts money into the deal, and prioritizing leading investor over follower investor can really help your fundrasing process. Now, you may notice that since the first investor who “puts the money on the table” is the leading investor, by definition the first investor you find IS the leading investor, but that’s not the case. A leading investor is more than that, as he is the proof to other investor that your company is worth attention, and getting a first small investment (like follower investor tend to do) can give out the wrong message.
• What’s their investment capacity at the moment of their investment: investor are people as well, and don’t have infinte money (or capital) to invest. Finding out where they stand in their investment cycle can help you figure out how seriously they can consider investing in your company.
• What is their decision making process: again, real life it’s not Dragon’s den, and it might take time to get an answer from an investor. Knowing how they make a decision and evaluate an investment can help you determine how long it will take before the deal is finalized.
• What information do they need before making a final decision: while you should have already give the potential investor all the information you deem necessary, sometimes different investor can look for additional information in order to get more comfortable. Providing this information straightaway can help you find an investor earlier.

This question were adapted from an article I’ve found that i thought it was worth taking notes, but that I sadly did not save. I will update the post if I find it again.

We all know what is the movie want to tell us, but what if we analysis this movie from entrepreneur view?

First of all, He is the only ski jumper in the UK, and also he is the holder of the British world record successfully. As a matter of market, he doesn’t have any competitor in the UK. He is the only “company” control the whole UK market. Media and people pay more attention to him because he is enjoying the joy of participation, which is exactly the Olympic spirit- not for winning but for taking part in.

Secondly, he got support from his mom and coach. His coach is a key factor for his success. He is a big company that supports Eddie’s small company. He will also benefit from Eddie’s success, he will earn his reputation and position back, like a big company return to the market in a different way. That looks like a mutual benefit cooperation in the market. The coach before he met Eddie, he was a dismissed, disqualified Olympic player. He got drunk every day and do the ordinary work. When he saw Eddie, he was impressive by his dream, hard working and sports spirit. I will not discuss his mom because she is Eddie’s mom, she will support her son all the time, you will never meet this kind of company in the market.

Last but not least, Eddie has a wonderful corporate culture. That is the movie wants to tell us- Any tough dream could not survive with insistence. He failed too many times, but he never gives up his Olympic dream. A great corporate culture plays an important part in success. Corporate culture is the soul of the enterprise.

Eddie had a goal since he was a child. The goal was to make it to the winter Olympics. Eddie’s goal was to enter as a skier but he could not make. He was on the verge of quitting  when he realised something and made adjustment to his goal was. His new goal was to compete in ski jumping. Eddie underdog in ski jumping game. Most of the players started training when they were 6 years but Eddie started when he was 22 years old. Those players had more experience when jumping with different distances. But Eddie had a strong determination that one day he is going to be in the Olympics. Determination alone is not enough for him to achieve his dream, but there is another important factor which involves strategic competition.

Why did he chose ski jumping? He recognised that England did not have any athletes in this sport for a long time, and never competed in the Olympic ski jumping.

What we can learn as entrepreneurs from Eddie The Eagle is that we must have a similar mindset as him. We should start with a goal or a solution to a problem and we use different ways and methods to achieve this goal.

Have Strong determination and don’t let the fear of failing and rejection consumes you. Not trying in the first place is a sign of failure.  

Ask for help, Eddie got lots of help and support from his mother both mentally and financially, while his coach taught how to jump. We can think of them as investors and advisers.

 

Some time ago I saw this video where Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, interviewed Reed Hastings, one of Netflix’s founders. I link the video here, it is worth watching.

This video has been the starting point for some consideration about Netflix strategies to became the world’s leading internet television network.

So how did Netflix become Netflix? Long ago, late 90s, leader in the home movie rental services was Blockbuster. On the other hand, there was Netflix, competing on the same field. Netflix was incomprehensible, they said, “we send the DVD home,” and they said also this madness, “you will watch the movie on streaming internet!”. It was unthinkable at the time.
Move forward for 20 years and see Netflix today, making nearly 9 billion revenues a year, it has a myriad of users all around the world.

But how did these gentlemen of Netflix do?

The first important concept is that they are focused on content, which is a strange thing for Silicon Valley (in the past, today providing contents has become normal).
Imagine then the day Netflix offered $100 million for “House of Cards”. People in Silicon Valley were skeptical about it. Instead, Netflix was right and at this time, 2017, its spending for original content is around $6 billion a year.

Second feature of Netflix is definitely perseverance.
At the beginning, 1997, they had foreseen that within 5 years all their distribution would have been streamed, no DVD. They had this vision from the beginning, but in 2002 streaming sold was zero. Then they corrected and said, “In 5 years’ half of our distribution will be streamed”, but they found streaming in 2007 even worse than zero. Finally, they said, “well, then in 5 years’ from now half of our distribution will be streamed “, and in that case the streaming was 60% and it would explode from there.
Especially in the IT industry, the best forecast for the future you can make is that most predictions for the future are false.

Next, they had the courage to launch new things without testing them. As Seth Godin said some years ago:
“A culture of testing
Netflix tests everything. They’re very proud that they A/B test interactions, offerings, pricing, everything. It’s almost enough to get you to believe that rigorous testing is the key to success.
Except they didn’t test the model of renting DVDs by mail for a monthly fee.
And they didn’t test the model of having an innovative corporate culture.
And they didn’t test the idea of betting the company on a switch to online delivery.
The three biggest assets of the company weren’t tested, because they couldn’t be.
Sure, go ahead and test what’s testable. But the real victories come when you have the guts to launch the untestable.”
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/01/a-culture-of-testing.html

Testing is important, but they did not test important things: they have not tested the vision of streaming videos, movies around the world. They did not test the idea that the business model was the one – no advertising, subscription, pay for content (it was a fool to think that stuff years ago). Testing everything is fine, but about really important things have the courage to launch, because the really important ones in most cases you cannot test them.

Netflix’s made a lot of mistakes over the years, but they had the ability to always return to its core. When they tried to attack Blockbuster on its own field they lost. They were good at going back to the core, asking themselves the questions, “what do I do? What are my strengths? I do that. I spend my 6 billion on content and gain from subscriptions, easy.”

Another winning key was probably the culture. They managed to create a new culture of enjoying movies, television shows, binge-watching: that is when you immerse yourself in a week in “House of Cards” all released right away. It is addictive, it is a new culture of fruition of those contents, a culture as well as a different business.
The theme of culture is also summarized by the founder of Box Aaron Levie, when he says that you cannot create a different product unless you first create a different culture. And Netflix did create a culture of innovation.
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/videos/2616/Maintaining-a-Culture-of-Innovation

 

On the 3rd of May I attended the fourth event of the Women @ EIT at the EIT CLC in Kista. When I read the description of the event on facebook I thought that the event would consist of lecture on how to perfect our pitching skills, so I was really surprised when I found out that the “training session” made up 90% of the workshop. The guest speaker was Anjali Virmani Paul, business coach at KTH Innovation, who explained to us how most of the times a pitch is not something staged, since most people find team members, customers and investors in weird places, like toilets or elevators, thus elevator pitches. It’s not hard to see how in an elevator you cannot rely on visual aids, like slides, and you cannot practice an elevator pitch, since it’s not a performance. In an elevator pitch what matter is your ability to make the person you are talking to what your idea is, following this useful points:

• The hook: you have to grab the attention of the person you are pitching your idea to.
• Who are the customers and what are their pains.
• Why you. What makes you different from the competition.
• What you need, wether you need an investment or team members .
• The three next steps you will take to take your startup further.

Now that we knew what to talk about, another important step was to understand that how we talk about our idea is equally important. Considering that a potential investor has to listen to hundreds of pitches every day is hard to stand out, moreover, when you start pitching your idea to someone in an elevator, you don’t really know wether that person is a potential investor, a potential customer, a potential partner or a potential team member. But how can we know when a pitch is effective?

The four criteria we were presented to measure the effectiveness of the pitch were:

• Words: jargon/technicalities vs stories/data.
• Tone: variation in pitch, pace, volume.
• Body language: gestures, eye contact, posture.
• Compelling: uniqueness, attention.

After this introduction we started the training session. Every attendant had 2 minutes to think about the idea he or she wanted to pitch, and to write down some guidelines following the points above. When the 2 minutes expired, we started the pitching session. Each person had 60 seconds to pitch his or her idea, after the pitch Anjali gave some feedback on the overall performance, making clear where we did wrong and what we could have done different to improve the effectiveness. Each person in the audience gave feedbacks as well, writing them on a post it. This feedbacks weren’t on the idea itself, rather on the pitching technique, and wether it was effective or not. The audience was also divided in groups, which changed after every pitch. This group had to give different kind of feedback (positive, negative, from a customer prospective and from an investor prospective).

Now, let’s talk about my pitch. Since the training session was not about getting feedback on the idea itself, I decided to pitch the app I’m building, which involves medical and recreational cannabis, so I knew beforehand it would have been fun to see the reaction. I also was, and still am,  aware that I et nervous when I speak in public, especially when I get to the end and I don’t know how to wrap the pitch up. 

Needless to say, Anjali agreed that what I pitched was risky, and she is against drugs, period. She explained how a pitch like this is risky in a way that it really depends who you are speaking to, it can be a strong yes or a hard no. In this case it was, for her, a hard no, and she suggested that I could have tried a different approach, trying to separate my target customer from the person i’m talking to, since it’s hard for a person against drugs to try and understand what the pain of a person which uses cannabis are, and this can put him at unease. But to my surprise the feedback I got weren’t bad at all, beside the one that noticed I was getting nervous toward the end, which I expected.

After the pitching session, we were asked to tell which of the pitch we remembered, and to write the name, the idea and some quotes of that pitch on a post it and give it to the person who pitched the idea. This was more difficult than expected, as a proof that pitching is really something that has to be perfected if you want to be remembered. Surprisingly (or not), no one remembered mine.

 

During the first period of this semester, I had a course of Design thinking given by Julien Mauroy, at Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship. I would like to share this experience with you because I think it can be really interesting for technology entrepreneurship.

Indeed, this method allows to create a product/service by ensuring that it fulfills needs of the customer and are perfectly adapted to them.

Design thinking is a process to innovate with a close relation with the customer. This process is composed of five steps: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. The power of Design thinking is in the iteration of this process.

I will first explain you each phase of the process and then show why it’s interesting for technology entrepreneurship.

To apply Design thinking you have to work in interdisciplinary team in order to break the walls of the company’s services.

The five steps of the process:

• EMPATHIZE: You have to observe and interview future customers in order to understand and even discover their needs. I said discover because sometimes customers themselves even don’t know what they need. You have to find their needs without the traditional survey, in order “to put people first” (Brown, 2009).

• DEFINE: Then you have to gather all information you have learnt to define clearly the problem. To share information, it’s useful to use storytelling because it helps to feel the customers’ feelings.

• IDEATE: After defining the problem, you have to find lots of idea which could solve this problem. Brainstorming is the key tool to do this. During brainstorming you put all ideas of all members of the team on post-in and you display them on a wall. It allows to build on the idea of others. To be successful, brainstorming needs rules as Tim Brown describes in his book: “the rules are literally written on the walls: Defer judgment. Encourage wild ideas. Stay focused on the topic. The most important of them, I would argue, is “Build on the ideas of others””. Brainstorming will be more efficient than just creating alone because it will provide a wider variety of ideas. At the end of the brainstorming you have then to select one idea.

• PROTOTYPE: You have to prototype your idea. However, the prototype doesn’t have to be the perfect representation of what the product will be at the end. The goal of the prototype is to allow customers to experience your idea in order to provide relevant feedback.

• TEST: You have to test your prototype with real customers and not with employees of the companies. This point is really important to have relevant feedback. During this phase you have to be opened to hear criticisms because, even if it’s difficult, this will help you to improve your product. As Gordon Murray said “You have the idea, but you have to do it, and that’s what cuts the bullshit out.”.

After the test, you have to do the process again in order to improve your product using the feedback of your customers.

Now you know what Design thinking is, I will try to show you that it can be a useful tool for technology entrepreneurship.

First, sometimes with technology, we have a really good invention but it can be difficult to find a good way to exploit it in a product or a service. It is even more difficult to use this invention to create something that customers really needs. Design thinking can help to solve this problem by allowing to co-create with customers. At the end, you have a product and you are sure that it fulfills the customers’ needs and that it’s not just something you think is good for them.

Moreover, Design thinking allows you to prototype earlier your idea and not just at the end of the project when all details are defined. It avoids to spend too much time and money on an idea which are not adapted to your customers.

Design thinking allows to decrease the risk for your company because you are sure that you have a market for your product and this market agrees your choice of conception.

I hope this post will help you, however, it is just a summary of the method, therefore, if you want to learn more about Design thinking, I advise you to read these two books which are really interesting and show relevant examples:

• BROWN Tim. Change by design. Harper Collins, 2009.

• CROSS Nigel. Design thinking, Understanding how designers think and work. Berg, 2011.

You should also watch this TED video: ROY Elise (2015, September). When we design for disability, we all benefit.

Available: https://www.ted.com/talks/elise_roy_when_we_design_for_disability_we_all_benefit?language=en