Start-Up : Taïg Khris

by ⋅ 2 Comments

taig-khris

Earlier this year, we had the opportunity to meet Taïg Khris on our campus –INSA de Lyon, France- on Februray 2016. Taïg Khris is known because of his sportive carrier, he’s a triple world champion skating. He decided to start a new application called onoff telecom and he came to our campus to present his startup and find new talents among the students to support him. He told us “I am looking for dynamic and curious minds” which are two essential aspects for an entrepreuneur.

 

Where did this idea come from?

Some people have several mobile phones because of their activities (work, personal life, friend …) and they have to carry them all the time or have a phone with 2 SIM card which is the maximum content nowadays.

He thought about something that could give us the means to use several phone numbers in the same phone: “I wanted to distinguish myself by inventing the concept of cloud numbers. The goal is to create multiple phone numbers on one mobile whatsoever, anywhere and anytime. The application generates phone numbers as easily as email addresses. OnOff is the first operator that requires no SIM card.”

 This intervention shows us that no matter what you are doing and whenever you want you can start your own start up and develops your idea.

taig-khris-insa Taïg Khris surrounded by INSA Telecommunications’ student

 If you want to know more about OnOff Telecom follow this link: http://www.onoff.fr/

The Importance of “Being Present”

by ⋅ 3 Comments

The concept of Presence has been playing a big role in my life for the last few years. I first got in touch with it by reading books on meditation. At first glance, this has nothing to do with Entrepreneurship and might sound like a more spiritual idea, but stick with me here.

The word “Presence” basically just means “The state of being at at particular place”. This can apply to both physical as well as mental presence. In this post I will cover three areas, that are all connected to your personal development as an Entrepreneur.

Physical Presence

If you want to achieve something then go to places where people have the same goal. Your body and mind adhere to the laws of physics. They have momentum and will not start to move unless an outside force is applied. So the easiest way to make your mind engaged in an activity is to start moving your body to places where the primary goal is to do the same things you want to do. That way your subconscious will feel two things:

  1. You took the first step in a certain direction. That builds positive momentum.
  2. All the people around are talking about the same thing. So simply by feeling the social pressure your mind will feel more engaged in that certain topic.

This really applies to anything from Start-up Events to the gym. You become the average of the 5 people you hang out with the most. So choose wisely how you spend your time and do your best to network with people that are on the same path as you.

Mental Presence

Being in a certain location with your body is the first step, but if your mind is not on the same team as you, nothing fruitful will come from it.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone who didn’t seem too interested? Maybe they kept checking their phone or something like that? How did that feel? Probably not so good.

This is the mental state most people operate in throughout their lives. The mind wanders and thinks about everything except what’s happening in the present moment. When you talk with someone without fully committing your attention to the conversation the other person will feel it and you will never be able to create a true connection. Keith Ferrazzi sais in his book “Never Eat Alone”:

It is not about how many people you know. It is important to build a connection with them so that you could call them at any time and they pick up the phone with a smile on their face, ready to do you a favor.

With your mind constantly on autopilot and thinking about all sorts of things, your conversation partner will not feel as engaged, compared to if you paid them full attention. Therefore being present to the moment is such an important skill to have and is also why I started meditating a long while ago. It really improves your own experience of the world and also the one others have with you.

Presence also teaches you to be more self-confident and relaxed. A very important trade that can make you unshakable to setbacks and criticism, while still beeing open to feedback. When you are present there is no thought, which means there is no fear. So nothing stops you from going up to any person and introducing yourself. Getting grounded in your own sense of self is very empowering and others will feel it radiating off of you.

Presence in people’s awareness

Which brings me to my last point: Other people’s perception of you. This is extremely important in marketing, as we noticed during our coffee sales. Making people aware of your presence is absolutely key. You could have the best offer in the world, if no one knows about it, they will not buy from you. That’s why companies spend huge amounts of money on advertisement, just to stay in the public awareness. Because disappearing from the minds of the people is deadly for a company.

People feel more comfortable with buying something they already know. It is psychologically proven, that simply having heard of a brand name or product makes people more likely to buy it compared to another product they have not heard of before. Even though they know nothing about the quality of either of them. This is called the familiarity bias.

That would be the reason why Serdar makes us do the blogging and use Twitter and LinkedIn. To teach us to use social media and create our own brand. Because simply having read your name before could make the difference for some HR person to hire you or someone else. And obviously, start-ups also want people who they perceive as active and engaged.

So when you walk through your life today … be present! Go to places that are in alignment with your goals. Bring your mind to the present moment and promote yourself so people know what you have to offer.

Start with why!

by ⋅ 2 Comments

I all invite you to watch this 18 min video where Simon Sinek explains the way innovative companies work. If your time is precious to you I suggest that you put the speed to 2.0 and watch at least until 4.29. If you don’t make it until this time or didn’t get enthusiastic to finish the video please leave a comment and we can meet up for coffee as I am really interested on you point of view on this!

This TED talks is maybe 7 years old but the first time I saw it, 2 years ago, it made a real big impact on the way I think about businesses and still is really accurate about innovation and why big game-changers are successful. Using examples of Apple, Martin Luther King and the Wright brothers you can clearly see that this is a timeless way of thinking.

We should all try to adapt the why we want to make this product, service, value if we believe in our idea. Making money and creating a good product should be a byproduct of our achievement in convince people why we do what we do. I believe this is why people think of entrepreneurs as a “special sort” of people, they are annoyingly persistent and can be right up in you face but most of all they are fizzing with endless energy which is needed to show the world why they do what they do.

I shall not lay, as an engineering student I always try to find the best solution for a given problem or know a way to explain why my idea is the best but I rarely ask myself why I am facing this problem. This is also something I am working on to change as an engineer and realize that if I want to make it as an entrepreneur I must embrace.

I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did 2 years ago and did again as I viewed it again today.

 

Venture Cup – IDEA

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Hey! If you are interested in developing your entrepreneurship idea, getting feedback and on top of that also earning a bit of money, then you might want to check out the link below. It’s also a great way to see ideas from other people and maybe get some inspiration!

Venture Cup – Idea will end November 8th.

“Come join the community! Do you have an idea? Upload it on our platform and get the feedback you need to get started. The crowd and the Venture Cup Jury will decide on the top 20 ideas, who will all win 5 000 SEK.”

Good luck!

http://www.venturecup.se/competition/

NordicJS – not your conventional StartUp-event

by ⋅ 11 Comments

I attended Nordic JS, an event for the JavaScript community, where new and different inputs are shown and spoken about. The goal is to inspire and get inspired by others, but also with the simple goal to bring the community together, a chance not often given to nisch-communities. It was a two-day event, 8-9 September in Münchenbryggeriet in Stockholm. I attended it on the second day for a while, and many speakers where on the schedule.

Except being a conference-like event with speakers, Nordic JS focus a lot on activities. Even though I did not participate in any of them, I think they are worth mentioning, as I like the concept:

  • Techno Ping Pong – they describe it as a night with smoke machines, lasers UV and ping pong.
  • Dinner with strangers – they will pair you up with five other people that you don’t know at a restaurant of their choice.
  • Festen – the after party for the event, and also a celebration of the capital of Sweden with its wonderful techs and startups.
  • Mini Sumo Robo Clash – the name says it all, a sumo robot workshop.

The topics that the speakers brought up were different. Even though I barely know anything about programming and JavaScript it was quite interesting. Here are a few words that could be said about them:

Vitality Friedman spoke about cutting-edge responsive web design. One of the important things he mentioned was the navigation on a page. It all starts with the navigations, and therefore it should be very clear, and also not in any way disturb the scrolling. Of course he talked about phones too, and added an interesting point; most users only use their thumbs, which all developers should have in mind. The scale of logos and slogans was also something he talked about.

Lin Clark talked about”Performance in React”, React being a form of library in JavaScript. Here, the level was a little bit too high for me to get a good grip of it. But on her summarizing slide, there were four thing: (1) keys, (2) shouldComponentUpdate, (3) immutability and (4) using setState() or connect() at lower levels. Maybe some of you JS-people understand these things better!

Per Stenström was a bonus speaker. Just before lunch he had a couple of minutes, where he criticized an article by Tantek Celik which stated that curlable Java content (had to look it up: Content where you can use the cURL command tool to request the URL) can’t be found on the web with search engines. What he did was actually setting up a website himself and at the speech testing the thesis in the article and tried to find it in different search engines. He didn’’t seem too used to speaking in front a large crowd, but it was something different.

pstenstrm
Per Stenström walking off the stage.

Even though JavaScript is not my biggest interest it was nice to see that there were plenty of others who actually were very passionate about it and enjoyed the event a lot. I think it is a great opportunity for like-minded people to get together. We don’t hear a lot about these nisch events, which was one of the reasons I chose this one – to enlighten you all about them, because they deserve it. These people are creating the things we search through all day.

 

Possibly the greatest JavaScript conference. The speakers, city, party and all the small details in between. [1]

– Jakob Öhman — Attendee 2015

What makes a successful startup scene? – Part 1: The Silicon Valley, USA

by ⋅ 7 Comments

Today, entrepreneurship truly is a global phenomenon. In recent decades various hot spots of entrepreneurial activity have emerged all over the globe. While entrepreneurs worldwide certainly share some characteristics, there are also very interesting differences in culture, attitude and motivation for choosing the path of an entrepreneur. In this blog series I want to shed some light on the most innovative and exciting startup ecosystems in the world and identify factors that make them successful and unique.

In this first post the natural choice would be to cover the place which is consistently referred to as the origin and epicenter of startup culture: Silicon Valley, situated on the west coast of the United States and home to former startups like Google, Apple and Facebook. With about 25,000 startups “the Valley” represents the biggest startup ecosystem in the world. [1] Despite its’ size many of its entrepreneurs describe the scene as “one big family”. This already shows the first unique success factor: the founders’ willingness to create one big network and help other startups on the way. This is also known as the “paying forward mentality”.

“My father always told me: Don’t care too much about your grades, just make sure to shake a lot of hands.”

– Don Thorson, Serial Entrepreneur

Another fascinating quality of west coast entrepreneurs is their pragmatism mixed with a willingness to take risks and a fearlessness towards failure. Phrases like “Done is better than perfect.” can be heard everywhere and show a hands-on attitude which is hard to find in other places. Besides, the fact that most startups fail is well known and accepted – failed entrepreneurs are respected for their courage and the experience they have gained along the way. The popular Lean Startup methodology even promotes “failing fast” in order to accelerate the learning process.

Of course factors like having a massive base of Venture Capitalist (well over 10.000 investors), elite education (Stanford University) and an incredible infrastructure of incubators and accelerators certainly cannot be replicated easily. Nevertheless, just adopting the Silicon Valley mentality can probably boost both your personal career as an entrepreneur and the development of your local startup scene at the same time.

“Fear irrelevance more than failure.”

– Pascal Finette, Serial Entrepreneur and Startup Mentor

 

// All blog posts in this series are based on years of involvement in the German startup scene, work on several startup projects, travels to various startup hot spots around the world and related discussions with founders, mentors, business angels and investors.

 

[1] https://angel.co/silicon-valley

Doro discussion – Good to know

by ⋅ 11 Comments

Last lecture there was a discussion about Doro and their possibilities to last as a profitable company, as their product is considered to be for people born in the first half of the 20th century. I would here like to add something I think is relevant to this discussion. In another course, Management Consulting, we were shown a graph over the longevity of big companies today. See the graph below.

graph-long

The trend is clear, a company started today tend to have a shorter longevity (at least as a “Fortune 500” company) compared to companies of yesterday. What this shows us is that being in the top for just 10-15 years is normal these days.

Also, I strongly agree with the argument (which was mentioned in class) that if you know that you can add value for just 1-2 years, that’s enough too.

Connect Breakfast on GRODAN

by ⋅ 1 Comment

Such a great start on the week! This morning I went to an early bird breakfast on Grodan which is a restaurant located down town Stockholm. The time just flew by – greatly because of all the individual stories and experiences that I got to hear about.

What did we do? 

The morning started with mingle and thereafter an introduction round. We were approximately 35 people, which apparently was a bit more than usual. Connect is a non-profit organization who´s objective is to connect entrepreneurs with competence to the available capital on the market. Connect organize these breakfast once every month and every time both new and experienced minglers are joining for personal or/and professional gain.

So what did I learn?

I learned that there exits so many people with knowledge within so many different areas. What strike me the most is the joy of entrepreneurs and their commitment to make something small grow to something bigger. Everyone at the event focused on finding people to help, or looking for others to help them. Now I truly understand the importance of networking.

How did I feel?

After a morning like this I´m very exited to start my own company. It is truly an energy boost to hear about other people leaving their jobs just to do something they believe in. As we discussed in class last week there exists so many ways to convince yourself to NOT do anything about your idea – what is needed is the inspiration of others to gain the courage to change your mind set. As Martin Luther King Jr once said:

”You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step”

A big thanks to Connect for being a platform for connecting people with ideas, capital, knowledge or some other unique contribution. I can recommend Connect´s events since I felt very welcomed and many people wanted to talk to me to get a student perspective pn their ideas. Now I understand how strong of a brand KTH is. It was especially interesting to hear about the new investments on woman entrepreneurship and talk to women within the world of entrepreneurship.

At last I would like to share a opportunity with you all. I talked to a man who is looking for a couple of students from KTH (or another similar school) who has experience within the area of programming and artificial intelligence that would like to help an start up develop an app within the health area. Anyone interested? Write a comment and I will give you his contact information.

#connectsverige.se #networking #Connectbreakfast #studentwithprogrammingskills

5 Golden Rules when Networking

by ⋅ 2 Comments

Connect_Breakfast

The idea to this post appeared during the event “Connects frukost”, which I participated in on the 5th of September 2016. The event is gathering entrepreneurs, investors and advisors for some non-formal networking.

With a background in a non-profit organization, I’ve come upon a number of situations requiring mingling and networking. The survival of the organization was dependent on sponsorship, which mainly originated from business connections made at events.

The mission of most entrepreneur events, with networking as theme, is to combine different competencies and experiences. The exchange should, in some way, be equivalent seen to the value for the participants. My experience is though that the participants can be divided in two main groups: The ones most of the participants wish to speak to, and those who need to take actions to make an impression. As an entrepreneur with an innovation, not yet famous to the critical mass, you probably belong to the second group. Even as highly socially skilled, constantly seeking contact is exhausting. Regardless, networking events are brilliant opportunities to present your idea, make connections, and to practice your elevator pitch.

Today I want to share my personal golden rules when networking:

Golden rule # 1 – Dare to stand alone

It’s undoubtedly uncomfortable to stand alone, seeking contact when everyone else is participating in discussions. But instead of seeking your coworker or putting out your phone, try to wait it out. Sooner or later some are rounding up their conversation, giving you the opportunity to introduce yourself – or for them to approach you.

Golden rule # 2 – Think of what you can give, instead of what you can get

As passionate and driven, it is easy to see what you can get out of new business relations. More experienced networkers can easily spot those who preferably pitch and talk about their own idea for hours, rather than discuss a potential cooperation. Try to adapt an approach focusing on “what’s in it” for the person you are talking to.

Golden rule # 3 – Keep develop your elevator pitch

As any other activity, you get rusty in pitching and networking. The first pitch of the night is never as good as the following. Try to be attentive to the reaction of the other party, when does he get bored, curious, confused? Be dynamic and, when needed, change the content during the event! See it as a brilliant opportunity to “trial and error” your way to an even better pitch!

Golden rule # 4 – Don’t despair

As said before, networking and repetitively trying to sell in your idea could be exhausting. But don’t despair! Keep in mind that if at least one out of the 20, 50 or maybe 100 you talk to leads to new perspective on your idea, cooperation or a business relation, it is totally worth it! Maybe the next person you talk to is the one you really want to meet?

Golden rule # 5 – Write key words on every business card you receive

And the last – but absolutely not the least – golden rule. During or after the networking, depending on its length, make sure to write done some key words on the business cards you received. You think you will remember – but honestly, you won’t (not if you were networking diligent enough J). Topics you discussed, if you were to make contact a certain time at the year, or just something non-business related making it easier for you to take up contact later.

These were my list of (so far) collected golden rules. Maybe you have some to share with me? Let me know in the comments below!