Stockholm Makerspace

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STOCKHOLM MAKERSPACE

Some weeks ago we went to a open house at Stockholms Makerspace. For those of you not aware of these communities, a makerspace is a physical location where people gather to share resources, knowledge, work on projects, network and build. The concept emerges from the technology-driven ”maker culture” a.k.a. hackerspace.

We met with Andreas who gave us a tour.  They have their pretty large lab (283m2) at Wallingatan 12, so it’s situated very central. They have built up a pretty impressive collection of tools, a 40W lasercutter, 3D-printer, CNC-router, CNC-lathe, some sewing machines and an assortment of smaller powertools. Perfect for people living in the city in apartments in need of a “garage” for tinkering and using loud machines!

 

vincent

While in there I chatted up Vincent who was debugging his weather station, I briefly presented my idea and got valuable feedback.

My idea was a WIFI-enabled blinds motor/mount, where you exchange one of your existing blind mounts with my unit. The unit comes with adapters to fit most systems on the market (“Tupplur” from IKEA is my main target). The unit will be able to parse your alarm clock in your phone to automatically pull it up in the morning or connect to the IFTTT portal (https://ifttt.com/wtf)

He gave me feedback about my choice of communication. Commercial wireless home automation systems used today are mostly using Zigbee, Nexa or Z-wave. He thought I should look into compability with those systems that are widely used. I have thought about that and think that the learning/interest curve is quite steep  for the cheap systems and too expensive for the easier ones for most people. I am trying to use the WIFI-router most people have in their homes, thus lowering the entry-barrier and hopefully gaining more interest. Although he has a very important point and I am going to research alternative wireless implementations for future reference.

If you become a member, Stockholm Makerspace is available 24/7 for only 300SEK per month.  You are then free to use the equipment (after a small introduction) for our own projects.

You should all go and check out Stockholm Makerspace, it should be a great place for you with a little more technical idea!

// CRR

Most precious things I learned!

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Diversity is the key.

At the first class on 1/9 Serdar tell me this thought when I was about to form a team with some friends from Asia. Then I join Dreamgineering which is the best group in the class! Our group members are from five different countries: Sweden, Spain, Taiwan, United State and Germany. It’s great to work and discuss with them, and I learned a lot from each of them. Because of the different background, we can always come up with something interesting and creative by brainstorming.

You are not selling. You want them to buy!

It’s important to find a pain, especially the pain, discomfort, or dissatisfaction that you have, and solve it. Not to think about “selling, selling, selling” all day. So don’t focus too much on how to make money and focus instead more on solving their needs and pains.

Networking!

We can’t put too much emphasis on the importance of networking. Personal social network is very valuable to people, especially for entrepreneurs. Sometimes it can do things that money can’t. More, it’s skillful to help others get connection, just like last time what Serdar did to let two acquaintances get connected in the Fika. I thinks it’s goof that this course encourage us to meet other people.

The world is big, go explore!

We were encouraged to attend startup activities in Stockholm For these few months, I have been to 4 activities :

1. ”Entrepreneurship on Campus” held by Stockholm Innovation & Growth (STING)

2. Cultue Festival about startup in Vaxholm – NyföretagarCentrum.

3. Stockholm Startup Weekend Bootcamp

4. Entrepreneur Creation in Royal Coin Cabinet

I met different awesome people, learn to brand new thoughts and listen to many different stories. I didn’t notice that the world is such a big and interesting full with amazing people and beautiful things.

And the last thing I want to mention is that the student-teacher interactions in Sweden is very friendly. That really surprises me. As an international student from Taiwan, I know it’s not easy for students and teacher to have such intimate and good interactions. But in this course, we have a teacher who ask us to have coffee or lunch together, answer our questions patiently after and during class, and voluntarily offer time four discussion. Thank you Serdar, a friend-like teacher!

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// Danny Huang

 

#Dreamgineering – we make dreams come true.

Peter Thiel ”Competition is for losers” – Entrepreneurship class @Stanford

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Stanford has currently a “wildly overcrowded” How to Start a Startup course, which in many ways is similar to the one we are about to round off at KTH. Even though we have had good enthusiasm by most students, some seem to have had a tough time loosing up adapting to the more entrepreneurial way of learning and sharing experiences (c.f. engingeering classes). I suppose the temperature lowers the farer you get from the heat/cluster/mecca of entrepreneurship aka. Silicon Valley..

Just as we have had the great opportunity to welcome guest lecturers such as NY-based world-wide brand guru Erich Joachimsthaler and 2014 Tech Woman of the year Karin Nilsdotter, Peter Thiel here talks about the importance of creating monopoly. (hope you all got the Blue Ocean Strategy right on the exam, huh?)

Most things mentioned in his lecture we already know as entrepreneurship students, and you should recognize most key points from the video such as “skeptical of all the Lean Startup methodology”/ compete on price and “You want to go after small markets if you’re a startup, Big piece of a Small Pie”.

A somewhat new way of thinking however, at least for me even though the rationals are logic/obvious, is his coining of last mover advantage- in opposite to the econ 101 notion of first movement advantage. You should aim at being “[…] the last company in a category. Those are the ones that are really valuable.” As examples; Microsoft was the last OS at least for a decade, Google last search engine, Facebook would be valuable if it turns out to be the the last social networking site etc. One way of thinking of this last mover advantage, is that the most of the value of these companies exist in the far future. If you do sort of a DCF analysis of the businesses profit streams, with growth rate much higher than the discount rate- we see that most of the value is in the future- which to some extent  also explains some of the at first sight crazy tech valuations. This would be the same for all emerging internet companies, such as Airbnb and Twitter, where math tells us that ~¾ of the money will come from cash flows in 10 years and beyond. The most common mistake of investors, he points out, is overestimating growth rate and underestimating durability. Durability actually dominates the money equation, and you “simply” need to find/create the survivors! …

If you feel that this KTH Entrepreneurship course ended too quickly, I highly recommend you to follow this link and take part of the ongoing video lectures- updated 2-3 times a week. (One of their guest speakers is Paul Graham, included in our reading list.)

On a last note, and as comment to some of the light complaints. Even the globally recognised course at Stanford/ Silicon Valley, which get overfull every semester, gets comments on youtube such as: “I’m sorry, i think i entered the wrong classroom. it was supposed to be how to start a startup class. This seems to me more of theoretical lecture with no tips and tricks for startups.” with answers such as “It tells you which markets you might have best chances in. Quite relevant if you’re not over the positioning phase yet. And if you did make your choice, it tells you what your threats are and the imperatives you have to follow.” and “This is a very common thing in programming classes, where some students question why don’t they just get into coding instead of talking about methodologies first. First you have to understand the context of the startup world, to be able to start one, not just want to “hack” a startup into success, which as previous lectures have pointed out, it just doesn’t work.“

Surely you can’t satisfy all expectations , but me myself has definately gained relevant insights, network and feedback for my ongoing start up- and I hope most of you have taken the chance and found value in this more pragmatic learning. Please comment if you agree/ disagree on any of this, or write your own blog post and link it.

Have a good one and hope to see you around! 🙂

//Benjamin Wahlberg