SUP46 FemTech 2017

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I went to a great event which was hosted by SUP46 last week. The host invited three women guests who work in Tech as well as almost a hundred of women who are interested in Tech to get together. Through the event, the guest introduced their experience as a woman in tech field. There are several points I think were quite inspiring.

  • Networking. One guest said when she worked in a tech company as an assistant. Since she hadn’t get salary for a month, so she had to bring lunchbox. One day, a woman walked by and talked to her that you are new, how about have lunch together. The guest almost threw her lunchbox away and went out ate with this woman. Later in a meeting, the guest found this woman is a manger and in that meeting they were discussing a new manger position. And this woman recommended the guest to take the position. This story listened as a lucky story, but it is also true that we should open to people. The more we talk to people, the more information and chances we get. In this event, I talked to three people. One is an architect who started to learn programming five months ago. Her husband works in a social robot startup called Furhat which started at KTH as well as he has a part time job at Spotify. When I took multimodal course, I saw the same robot before. The teacher in this course is one of the co-founder of Furhat. Somehow the people we talk to will have some connections with you. I even gave her my Email address, maybe it is a good chance to get an internship.
  • Being yourself, not to try to behave like a man. Sometimes, women is regarded as not good as man by some people. This is absolutely wrong. We see women work in every fields and they are doing good. We don’t have to pretend to be man. We can just be ourselves. Only in this way, women can fully show their potential rather than being handcuffed.
  • Investors want to invest on companies which have gender balanced teams. They pointed out that if a team has only man, they will feel very strange why there is no women. Also when a team has women, they are more willing to fund them. Having gender balanced team is good to business.
  • Vinnova introduced early stage startup investment program. In phase one, the selected startup can get up to 300,000 SEK funds without any conditions. If some of you reading my journal and also has a compony needs funds, maybe give a try.

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An exciting Entrepreneurship Marathon

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I attended an entrepreneurship marathon from 24th-26th March with three friends. The event organized by Create Squared and mainly sponsored by Nordea. My team won the second price.

A Swedish guy Alexander Nilehn pitched his idea which develop edible cutleries in Sweden. I believe that this idea is viable and meet the sustainability goal of Sweden. Also the theme of this event was circular economy. If we can replace one time plastic spoons with edible spoons which will definitely reduce the consumption of plastic. So I joined in his team. Actually, we have a very diverse team who come from different countries and have diverse backgrounds which is a good factor for a team. During this event, the most impressional thing is to receive advices from mentors.

One aspect of advices from mentor is how to cooperate with this India company. This India company called Bakeys hired nine women to manufacture the edible spoons in low scale. If we work with this company, can this company scale up and meet the high volume requirements from Sweden or even the whole Europe? We know that this company is trying to develop automatic machines to do batch production. So the question is what is the role of us in this potential business relationship, partner or distributor. If we are only distributor, we care about the production volume and can we get our order on time. If we can become partner, we need to raise more money to help this company scale up as well as sell the product in Sweden. All the above assumptions based on that we can work with this company. What if we couldn’t. 

Things can be become really complicate, you never know what you will encounter in the business world. We as entrepreneurs should not only consider business parts, how to cooperate, how to make profits, how to raise money, how to distribute products, how to work with local companies, how to ship products, but also how the product tastes, what are the ingredients of this product, how long can it lasts, how easy it can be broke. Lots of hows and whats, and so many assumptions need to be prove. This is business world. You can get different information from different people which you may never think about. However, as one mentor said we are the team who really into this business right now, we know much better than other people. We should get as much information as possible, and narrow down make our own decisions.

This was a really good experience. I do like the advices from mentors. And thanks to the idea generator Alexander Nilehn, and team members Haonan Liu, Igor Panic and Shruti Kuber. Thanks to Create Squared who hosted  such a good event.

The event link: http://create-squared.com/

The event Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/createsquaredevent/ (Can see the video here)