Monthly Archives: April 2017

Warning! This blog-post contains spoilers!

Recently, two of my friends came over to visit me in Stockholm. Since our day of city exploring was spoiled by the harsh April snow, we changed our plans for the evening and decided to hit the cinema. The movie we picked was “The Founder”, which tells the interesting story of the entrepreneur Ray Kroc, who transformed McDonald’s into the most successful fast food operation in the world.

Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc in “The Founder”

It all started in 1955, when Ray Kroc got an order for 8 of his 5-arm multimixer milkshake machines, which he was selling at that time for a living. Wondering who would ever need to simultaneously produce 40 milkshakes, Ray drives to San Bernardino where he meets the brothers Mac and Dick McDonald and their booming restaurant. Amazed by Mac’s “Speedee Service System”, able to make a burger in 30 seconds, Ray offers the brother’s to help them turn their restaurant into a successful franchise. After some negotiations, a contract is signed under the conditions that the McDonald brothers retain full control of every decision made concerning the franchise. From this moment, the movie becomes interesting from an entrepreneurial view as you follow Ray and his Kroc Style of doing business, which is far from pretty.

The first problem Ray faced was that it was hard to keep control over the franchisees and maintain the same levels of quality in the restaurants. To solve this problem, Ray contracted hard working middle-class people as franchisees instead of rich people who didn’t really care about the restaurant. In addition, he provided training and gave a strict set of rules so every burger would taste the same. More restaurants were opened throughout the country, but Ray was barely able to cover all his expenses. This was because of the contract he initially signed, giving him only 1.4% of the revenues of McDonalds. Besides that, it was nearly impossible to change anything in the franchise as the McDonald brothers had to approve it first, and they didn’t like change.

Then Ray meets Harry Sonneborn, who shows Ray that he is actually not in the hamburger selling business, but in the real-estate business. With the help of Harry, Ray starts the Franchise Realty Corporation, which buys the land where a McDonald’s restaurant would be located, and then rent it to the franchisee for a monthly fee. However, Ray is still held back by his contract and decides to buy out the McDonalds brothers and take complete ownership of the restaurant. In 1961, they make a deal for $2.7million, leaving the brothers with $1million each after taxes and, to Ray’s frustration, their first restaurant in San Bernardino. Additionally, the brothers asked for an annual royalty of 1%, confirmed by a handshake. Since they lost ownership of the McDonald’s franchise, Ray forces the brothers to change the name of their restaurant and treats them as competitors: “If I saw a competitor drowning, I’d shove a hose down his throat”. He does this by opening a McDonald’s on the same block, making the brothers go out of business. Besides that, they never received their annual royalties since they could not prove it on paper.

This all fits in the greed driven, Kroc Style of doing business, shown throughout the movie. It portrays a different kind of entrepreneurship, not based on talent or education, but on good old persistence and determination. After watching the movie, I really disliked Ray Kroc and his McDonald’s, but barely a week later I found myself in a McDonalds again, munching on a Big Mac.

On the 22th of April i went to the Start up day in Stockholm. This event has been organized by the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship and it usually hosts students and startups from Sweden, the Nordics and Europe. I had already decided to go before it was presented in class but, then, the presentation made me even more excited.

Basically, this event was composed by speakings all day long about different ideas and successful start-ups. Moreover, during the afternoon there was the possibility to partecipate at workshops and to pitch our ideas.

On details, it started at 11 am with an introduction that explained the importance of this day. Indeed, thanks to its success, this is the 12th year that this event takes place in Stockholm. So, the first questions rose spontaneous: “Why Start up day?” “Why is it so successful?” . The answer is simple: in this day there is the possibility to collect diversity (people from different universities and countries) and learn just by telling and listening to stories.

Since i don’t want to be repetitive and i know that a lot of people were there, i would like to emphasize only what were for me the most useful and interesting parts of this event. In total, i attended three speakings in the morning and two in the afternoon.

Regarding saturday morning, the first speaking, held by Sidney Lai, was about virtual reality, the second one was held by Sofia Appelgren, the founder of Mitt Liv and in the last one Elina Berglund Scherwitz talked about contraceptives and her new app called Natural Cycles. According to me, among these three stories, the second talk was the best one.

Mitt Liv – “My life”

The idea of Sofia to found Mitt Liv in the 2008 was born from an observation of the world we are leaving in. In particular, the topic of this talking was diversity. Indeed, even if we try to deny it, everyone knows that discrimination rules our world and each decision we make is led by prejudice that is related to a lack of education.

Mitt Liv aim, therefore, is to value and not discredit diversity being a bridge between companies and people who are looking for a job as well as provide education in Sweden in order to make people conscious of the world and of the mechanism that govern their behavior.

In particular, two parts of this talk came to my attention. The first one was about a google survey which revealed that 99,9997% of the decisions we make are unconscious and that, when we are meeting new people, only in the first second we already make eleven unconscious decisions. The second one, instead, was a reference to a very popular Steve Jobs quote in which he explained that, to be successful, we don’t need to be smarter, we just need to believe in what we do. Indeed, everything is related to our view of the world.

To summarize what sofia was trying to explain, i could say that nothing for her is simple, especially running a business, but when we know our mechanisms and we take responsibilities on our world everything become simpler.

During the afternoon, i moved from the main stage, when these three talks were set, to another place called “the Cave”. It was a very beautiful place whose name come from its appearance since it seems to be in a real cave. There i listened to two stories: the first was told by Jesper Ericsson, the director of sales and marketing at Biolamina, while the second one was held by Sofia Svanteson, founder of Ocean Observation. Even if these speaking were both interesting, the first one touched a very important topic: the stem cells.

Biolamina 

This speaking immediately attracted my attention since it was built on a real story. Indeed, Jesper Ericsson’s father was diagnosed the Parkinsons disease two year ago and the only way to cure this terrible illness is to replace the ill cells. In this way, Jesper explained us why is now working at Biolamina. This company, indeed, make researches about the stem cells.

Stem cells are the evolution and today are necessary not only for Parkinsons disease but also for many other illnesses that are affecting our society. In particular, Biolamina works to improve the tools used to grow these cells since at the current State-of-Art they are still too bad. The main idea of this company is to build laminins to make the cells feel as at home and make them more homogeneous. However, since to create these cells is necessary aborted fetus, is necessary to find new solutions to take them from everyone. This is what Biolamina is working on.

As a conclusion, Jesper talked more about himself and the importance of sales and marketing also for this field. Indeed, is absolutely necessary to sale the right product (in this case the right cell and medications) to the right patient.

This post only gives a restricted view of this day, but emphasizes its importance for entrepreneurs and university students. I would like to thank this course and Stockholm to give me the possibility to attend such an event and i hope you will find it interesting.

Last Saturday, I went to the Startup day which has been presented in class. The event was organised by the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship. Rasmus Rahm, the executive director of SSES, explained that the goal of this day is to educate with the oldest way of knowledge transfer: stories.  That is why, during all the day, we will be able to participate at different conferences where entrepreneurs will tell us their stories.  I will summarize the 5 stories I heard.

The first story was the story of Sydney Lai, the head of business of Audacy, a space communications service provider. She works in two subjects: space and virtual reality. She explained that both lead us to explore a new universe, that’s why it’s really interesting for her.

She gave us the keys to succeed in building a “space start-up”:

• Theory of constraints: You have to identify the series of tasks and their link. Then to move to one task to another you have to complete the previous one. It allows you to be sure to not forget important tasks.
• Milestones: you have to be transparent with your investors or future customers. Therefore, you should give us the access of what you have already done and what you plan to do after.
• Team: instead of having a structured hierarchy where the CEO is at the top, all members of the team should be equal.

Then, she explained challenges in virtual reality.  There are 3 main challenges:

• Find the investment
• User adoption
• Retention: pain killer Vs Vitamin trad

The conclusion of her story was: “Build things that allow people to explore.”

The second story was the story of Sofia Appelgren, founder of Mitt Liv. Mitt Liv means “My life” and was created in 2008. Mitt Liv is a company which wants to open doors for people with a foreign background by providing them training, mentoring and recruitment.

For her, the most important for a startup is to run a business with strong values, clear ideas and lots of ambition.  Then she speaks about judgement. She is fed up because we judge people for where they come from and not on what they are, that’s why she had the idea of Mitt Liv. For her, we need to know who we are and we need a new way to judge people. She explained that human is programmed to prefer people who share the same value, hobbies, it’s our unconscious.  Most of our decision are taking emotionally.  99,99% of our daily decisions are unconscious, and 11 decisions are made in 1 sec when we meet a new person. Moreover, she explained that we all have prejudices. Therefore, we need to become more open-minded.

Then, how to use all the diversity in a peace environment? What future skills leaders will have to use this diversity? First, they have to be aware of the world around them. Second, they have to be aware of their own prejudices to avoid them.

To conclude, she used a quote from Steve Jobs which explains that when you will understand that people not smarter than you will succeed in doing interesting things or business, then the world around you will change.

The third story was the story of Elina Berglund Scherwitzl, the co-founder of Natural cycles. Natural cycles is an app which provide a contraception without medicine. Indeed, it uses your temperature to show you if there is a risk of pregnancy or not, so you can know it every day. She had this idea because after her wedding, she wanted a natural contraception before having a baby, so they started to work on it with her husband.

She explained that during the development of their app, they had problems with the regulation, but they continue to work on it. Finally they have been certified the only contraceptive app.

The conclusion of this story was: “If you fail, be tenacious it’s the most important thing.”

The 4th story was the story of Nikolaj Koster, who works in Spiri Drive. The goal of this start-up is to build a powerful mobility solution. For them, the future for the mobility is described as:

• A service
• Shared
• Electric
• Self driving

Problems they want to solve are:

• Emissions of transport
• Utilization, nowadays most of car used are not fully used (lots of seat are unused)
• Parking
• Congestion
• Accidents

Solutions they provide: share an electric self driving car. They want to gather people who are going in the same direction.

The last story was the story of Niklas Laning, the founder of Daily bits of. He has created lots of start-ups and learnt a lot about them. Therefore he gave us the 3 main dysfunctions that a start-up should avoid:

• Making it about ego, because it leads to a bad communication and a lack of trust, so the start-up will not survive. It also attracts wrong people who just want to become the leader instead of people who really want to work for the start-up.
• No talk no walk when it comes to diversity. Diversity is difficult  to manage so it’s easy to avoid it? However, you should exploit it because it can lead to increase productivity and creativity.
• Making it about long hours. You should avoid to spend all your time for your start-up, it’s important to do something else too.

Link of the event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1635420090096271/

During the Easter Holiday some of my friends came to visit me in Stockholm and, talking about this course i am attending in KTH, it came to my attention that two of them created a start-up two months ago. Its name is NECSTonatNECST.

First of all, i have to say that this start-up was born as a university project. Indeed, Luca and Claudio are attending their third year of the bachelor in computer engineering at Politecnico of Milan and they are working with NECST lab (Novel, Emerging Computing System Technologies Laboratory). For clarity, this lab comprises a spread number of researches on advanced topics in computing systems ranging from architectural characteristics, to hardware-software co-design methodologies, to security and dependability issues of complex system architectures. This is where their project starts from.

Now that you know the context the two guys are working in, let’s talk about their idea.

In this project computers are used for the financial purposes. In fact, with it Luca and Claudio try to solve the pricing problem of financial options. Specifically, options are contracts that grant the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell an underlying asset at a set price on or before a certain date and nowadays are one of the most used financial derivates. The idea was born since, even if options are so common, the pricing process is not that simple because it requires an accurate and quick pricing tool to be successful and so the “perfect” model doesn’t exist yet.

Getting into details of the project, in order to describe options value oscillations as a function of time, in the most appropriate mathematical way, is necessary to use stochastic volatility models. At the current State-of-Art, the Heston model is the best one to describe the market behavior. It is a stochastic volatility model which assumes that the volatility of the asset is not constant, nor even deterministic, but follows a random process and, since it is really complex, it needs Monte Carlo simulations to be implemented. Monte Carlo methods are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. These simulations are generally implemented on a FPGA ( field-programmable gate array ) that, thanks to is parallel nature, can be used to reduce the time consumption to run these simulations. Therefore, the idea consists in developing a framework based on a central CPU which coordinates a cluster of FPGAs in order to combine the flexibility of the CPU and the efficiency of FPGAs. In this way, the CPU computes the Monte Carlo algorithm while FPGAs price different options and manage the computational load and, thus, it is possible to overcome the high running time and the low energy efficiency level of the current State of the Art.

I am glad they talked with me about their idea because i found it interesting and a useful innovation. I really hope that they will have success in the future.

I believe this project will be for you as interesting as it has been for me.

If you want to know more about the project, follow Luca and Claudio on the socials:

https://www.facebook.com/NECSTonatNECST/?fref=ts

https://twitter.com/NECSTonatNECST

And if you want to know more about NECST lab: http://necst.it/about

I love comics.

Let’s be honest, your first impression when you read that was either “What a geek.” or “How does that even matter? The course is about entrepreneurship!” If it was the former, yes, I am. If it was the latter, allow me to elaborate, and share the story of a comic book publishing company that not only provided readers an alternative to the “Big Two” (Marvel Comics and DC Comics), they pretty much reinvented the comic book publishing game, and perhaps the industry itself.

The year 1992 was important for comics. Tim Burton’s Batman had kicked the door in for big-budget comic book adaptations while DC Comics was still riding the wave that the success of titles such as The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen had brought. On the other side of the fence, Marvel Comics’ stock was booming in the six short months since they’d gone public. They were, unquestionably, the bigger player in the market. Soon however, their momentum was cut short. Frustrated with their editorial policies, seven young creators left Marvel Comics to start their own publishing house, Image Comics.

Let me emphasis the impact of this exodus. Three of these seven creators were Todd McFarlane, whose Spider-Man #1 had sold about three million copies; Rob Liefeld, whose X-Force #1 had sold five million copies; and Jim Lee, whose X-Men #1 is, if memory serves me right, still the highest selling comic-book of all time. These were people behind the biggest comic books of the time, and were at the top of their game.

Of course, as with any “start-up”, there were initial challenges that the founders had to address if they were to survive in a competing market. Although there is a lot to dwell into if I were to discuss what made Image Comics different than the others, I would like to focus on their chief draw: creator rights.

We discussed in class about how uniqueness in entrepreneurship is not defined as much by how unique the idea behind the business is as it is defined by how unique the execution, or rather, the implementation of that idea is. Image Comics is also publishing comics as is Marvel Comics or DC Comics. Moreover, if I were to ask you to name a Marvel Comics book or a DC Comics book, I’m pretty sure most of you could name at least one for each. So how is it that Image Comics have dominated the New York Times Best Sellers list in for the last few years?

The answer is simple. Image Comics gives creators full control of their comic books — in every aspect, from creative to financial. Not only does this avoid ugly creator disputes (a prominent example being the one with Watchmen, where the creators claim the company “swindled” them out of publishing rights of their creation), it also allows for development and acceptance of radiant new ideas that go beyond the world of spandex superheroes like Batman or Spider-Man and intellectual properties such as Archie.

Image Comics’ business model is straightforward. Do you have an idea for comic book? Simply head over to their site, follow the instructions and submit your pitch. Image takes a small flat fee off the books published and in their own words, “since Image Comics, Inc. owns no intellectual properties, you can be assured—accepted or not—that your property will remain yours.” The rest, such as details like the division of profits among the creators, must be decided by the creators themselves.

I’ve been reading comic books for as long as I can remember. You begin by following creations with enthusiastic passion. You’ll read Captain America month in month out but will soon realise that perhaps more than what makes Captain America Captain America is not as much as the character but the creators that give him the voice and the look. You’ll then follow the creators with same vigour and move on to their other stuff that goes beyond what you were accustomed to read. The world of Criminal, The Fade Out, Fatale, Scene of Crime, and so many more.

Image Comics are celebrating their 25^th anniversary this year. Not too shabby for company started by seven young creators who had faith in their stories and simply wanted to own their work.

Recently I came across a group of female entrepreneurs and found their story very inspiring and decided to write about them. These female entrepreneurs are from Sarai Nuruddin, a small village situated in the northern part of India. The group mainly consists of around 15 women who make and sell baskets. Apart from them from time to time other women in the village also contribute in their free time. The baskets are made of waste plastic (usually cut from carry bags and straw that are usually discarded as waste).

Their journey started when few women in the village would make baskets from leftover or discarded plastic, as they are available for free and would use it for day-to-day storage purposes. Soon more and more women started working together to make these baskets. They found a need for their product in the village and then started taking orders from people in and around the village. They were spotted by Amrita Serve a project that works towards the development of villages and sustainable development. Amrita Serve also helps these women to promote their work and reach out to more people. The major attractions of the product are that they do not require any industrial setup, does not produce any wastes, utilizes discarded plastic to make new product and ofcourse look beautiful. Here are some pictures of the women making and selling their product.

Currently they are working on an order for Australia!

– my experience organising Create Squared

Reading so many of my classmates blogging about Create Squared makes me extremely happy and makes the work of the past 5 months really worth it! Unlike for my classmates Create Squared for me wasn’t a one weekend long entrepreneurship marathon but a project I have been working on organising since November. I could probably go on and on about what I learned from this experience and what challenges I faced but rather I would like to point 4 + 1 main reasons why I believe everyone should aim to organise this type of event at least once, ideally from scratch. Create Squared was something that the team of 9 people organising it put together bits by bits: it wasn’t part of a hackathon series, it was not based on a framework and guidelines created by a successful organisation – it was the result of students envisioning a weekend of challenge and co-creation.

1. Experiencing how to fake it until you make it (and to keep calm when everything seems to fall apart)

Personally, since I moved to Sweden 8 months ago I have attended 50+ different startup/entrepreneurship or coding events. And as much as students like free food and swag and these can serve as motivators for one to attend such events what I have gained is knowledge, experience and an incredible network of inspiring and talented people in Stockholm. I am extremely grateful for this city being so open and supportive especially when it comes to the tech scene. SUP46, Pink Programming Sundays, Netlight’s CodePub, KTH Innovation and Excitera are just some of the few communities that have helped me become part of this ecosystem. Because of this, being able to be part of organising an event that brought together 70 ambitious students from Sweden and provided them with a platform to create amazing projects made me feel like I could give back at least a little bit to the community

5. my + 1 for international students – make friends outside the university

In a new country it is always easy to get stuck in the bubble of the community you are already part of – in our case the university (KTH/EIT) and it can be hard to meet people and develop friendships outside this circle. Getting involved with projects that help you burst this bubble I think is a great way to get started! At least I can say it for myself – I met people I would have never met otherwise why working on something meaningful and also having fun.

Dora Palfi

doraepalfi@gmail.com

Last week me and Sofia went to the lecture “The business model is dead” with Terrence Brown at Playhouse Theater in the center of Stockholm. There we met several of our classmates, including Mohit who wrote the previous blog post. As we believe that he summarized the content of the lecture well, we decided to focus on another aspect in this post, namely the networking aspect of going to similar events.

In the row in front of where we sat, there were two guys who started a conversation with us. One was from the Hyper Island University and the other was in the organizing team for Startup Weekend Stockholm. They told us that usually the same people attended Estrad’s events, and that they recognized a lot of people in the room, both from Hyper Island, KTH and SSES.

After having talked to them for a while, they asked “Should we connect?”. One of them came from Rome and had contacts in Trento where Sofia will be moving and told her that he can introduce her to them if she wanted to get involved with entrepreneurial activities outside of school. We realized that in order to get the right contacts one needs to be active in the right place. Attending to these kinds of events, can help you to connect to the people that will be essential when having your own startup.

The lecture was also very informative and we got to learn about why business plans nowadays are replaced by business models, and the pros and cons of this replacement. Some parts of the lecture we recognized from previous classes with Terrence, whereas other parts were more specific for this topic and gave us insights about how to effectively use a business model.

He also mentioned that “a fool with a tool is still a fool” referring to that in order to use the tools given one has to know how to use them. Oftentimes as students, it can be difficult to see the value of learning theoretical knowledge, but if this part is correctly interpreted it is clear that theoretical knowledge indeed is important to learn to be able to master the practical tools later on.  

The Estrad lectures are provided by the Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research Institute and you can read more about them here: http://www.esbri.se/. Free lectures are given now and then, and we see this as a great opportunity to gain more entrepreneurial knowledge, have a great fika and expand your professional network. Certainly, this was not our last time attending Esbri’s lecture.
// Fanny Chan and Sofia Johansson