Daily Archives: October 5, 2017

This week, i went to a very intersting start-up event and i wanted to share with you my experience and my learnings.

 

This event was called “How to succeed” and it was organized by “HeyWork”, a new startup that developed a marketplace that connects people who need somewhere to work with hosts that grants access to their homes during office hours. The founder of HeyWork “Joachim Wernersson” performed the first pitch of the night. He explained how he came up with this idea when he decided to become solo-entrepreneur one year ago and when he was feeling very lonely. Being alone was difficult and there was no social place where he could go , work and meet people.No coworking space was available at an affordable price and he came up with the idea of an airbnb for work during daytime. You can go and check their user-friendly website : https://heywork.se/

The second pitch was performed by Aleksandar Goga, one of the founder of ServiceFinder(https://ServiceFinder.se) which helps thousands of consumers find the right supplier for anything at anytime. It was motivational and engaging speech. He told us about all the difficulties and challenges he met during his life as an entrepreneur . For example after 3 years of hard work on his startup, he lost all the data because his backup system was not working well. He also said that when you are creating a new startup, every first try you make is often wrong and you have to try again, make mistakes and learn.
He strongly believes that pressure makes diamonds. He had debts, relationship problems, was lying to his relatives, but kept focus on his work and on his dream.
According to him, there are 3 important steps that can always work for anything you want to achieve in your life :
– Have a clear vision vision of what you want to do and start being crazy about it
– Set clear goals : take a piece of paper and a pen and write them down. Don’t forget to update them many times.
– Work harder then ever. Hard work is the key to achieve success.

The third pitch was performed by Hugo Galvenius, an Analytical consultant for Google. His speech was very interesting because he shared with us many tools that Google offers and that can be really useful for people developing a new startup. He showed us how to use the following tools:

–For anyone developing or working in a Startup: https://startup.google.com/ (service and support for new startups)

–For insight and analytics, there is Google Trends: https://trends.google.es/trends/ (in order to search trends around the world)

–To market your product, you can use Adwords : https://adwords.google.com/home/

–To implement machine learning : Cloud Machine Learning APIs available on https://console.cloud.google.com/start

The last pitch was performed by Joachim, the CEO of Heywork and he focused on the importance of having the right people around you. According to him there are 5 important things to take in consideration in order to have the right people around you : Learn, Critique,Benchmark, Momentum, Encourage.
He ended his speech by saying that the low points in a startup are just unbelievably low and that’s why you always have to stay focus on your goals and keep motivated especially during the hardest times.

All these speeches were very interesting and inspiring. I learned a lot and i am looking forward to the next start-up event i will go to.

Thanks for reading.

Anouar Mabrouki

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Why am I writing this?
I am writing this post, because I think this topic is interesting for people that are reading blog posts at intopreneur.com. It is especially interesting for people that like data, programming and modelling in relation to policy/strategy making. What I will describe is also interesting for start-ups that want to specialize in this area, because it is a real niche.

Some background
I am a Master of Science student at the Delft University of Technology, faculty Technology, Policy & Management. My master is called Engineering and Policy Analysis and focuses on Modelling & Simulation and Policy & Politics. What I will describe in this blog post are things that I have learned during the first year of my master.

A summary of the main idea
The building blocks are Data, Programming, Modelling & Simulation and Results presentation. You can see the building blocks in figure 1.
You start with a large amount of data, by means of programming you clean and prepare the data. The prepared data will be used as input for your mathematical model. You simulate your model and you get results. Now it is important that you present your results nicely, so that decision makers will take over your recommendations. With this process you can turn data into information and influence decision making.

A comprehensive explanation of the main idea
If you are still interested, then please keep on reading. Because in this part I will go more in depth about this topic. The total process is described in figure 2. I will walk you through the figure, so that you understand what is happening. The whole process, which I described above comes down to what is shown in figure 2. This is called “Data Driven Hybrid Modelling & Simulation”.

• System data –> In our world we are generating more and more data. This can be real time data or static data. The problem is that most of this data is not turned into information. With the process I describe here, the data becomes useful.
• Programming 1 –> The generated data is most likely messy and cannot be used directly for modelling. The data first need to be analysed, cleaned and prepared. This can be done by means of programming. In essence you create a new data set, which is called usable data. The analyst then can decide which of the usable data will be used as input for the modelling and simulation part.
• (Exploratory) Modelling & Simulation –> The usable data is prepared and can be used for modelling. However, what do I mean with modelling? With modelling, you recreate a part of a system. For example, the European freight infrastructure or the spread of infectious diseases. With simulation you simulate your model and you try to detect what might happen over time. In essence you can explore the future. The three main modelling branches are: System Dynamics (aggregated modelling), Discrete Event Simulation (dis-aggregated modelling) and Agent Based Modelling (dis-aggregated modelling). Until today these branches are operating individually. However, there is a need for Hybrid Modelling, in essence combining all these techniques. This is something that will emerge in the coming years.
• Programming 2 –> Now you have your results from the models you build. The output data need to be organised and stored in a database.
• Model data –> You went from system data to model data, or actually real information that can be used for decision making.
• Reporting –> This is maybe the most important part, because if you cannot report and present your results nicely to decision makers, they will not be convinced about your recommendations.

In the end your recommendations as policy/strategy analyst should enrich and improve the decision making process. Nowadays, managers and policy makers base a lot of decisions on qualitative reasoning, which is good up until a certain point. By adding the quantitative component, which I described in this blog post, it is likely to assume that decision making becomes better and this leads to sustainable strategies and policies.

Why have I told you this?
The process as described in figure 2 is not yet reality. There is still a lot of work required to make this happen. However, there is a strong need in the business field for informed decision making, based on quantitative methods. I think talented people, with good analytical skills can set-up a profitable start-up in this business area. If you are interested, you can contact me and I can bring you in contact with the department of Technology, Policy and Management from the Delft University of Technology.

Thank you for reading!

Regards,
Menno Koens

Trello is one of my favorite online project management tools. I use it for my daily tasks, organizing school projects and at work. SUP46, Start-up people of Sweden, hosted an event in Stockholm were Justin Gallagher, VP of Product, shared Trello’s success story, tricks, and tips for Trello users and various user stories.

But what is Trello exactly?

Trello describes their application as an easy, free, flexible, and visual way to manage projects and organize anything, trusted by millions of people from all over the world.

Originally, Trello was developed at Fog Creek Software. Fog Creek has developed applications like FogBugz, Stack Overflow, and Glitch. At Fog Creek, there are regular Creek Weeks, where the people at the company explore potential products for the future. A prototype of Trello was created to solve high-level planning issues inspired by Kanban, Scrum and multiple numbers of sticky notes. In January 2011 the idea was pitched. Shortly later,  a full-time development of the application began.

In the summer of 2012, Trello had reached 500.000 members and launched the Trello Android app. In July 2014, Trello became Trello, Inc., and spins off from Fog Creek. At that period Trello had over 4.75 million users. In May 2015, Trello decided to go international for Brazil, Germany, and Spain by offering Trello in multiple languages. In early 2017, Trello was acquired by Atlassian and today, Trello has more than 25 million users all over the world. Trello’s today’s goal is to create value for 100 million of users.

Justin made a point on what the Trello team had learned over these six past years. What makes teams successful in achieving its goal?

The first thing Justin mentioned is that the key to team success is empathy. It is important for a company like Trello to be effective working in teams where their goal is to create an efficient project management tool for individuals and teams. He pointed out a Google research, Project Aristotle, that gathered several of Google’s best and brightest to help the organization codify the secrets to team effectiveness. Google assumed that if they gathered the best people in the field, it would sum up to create the perfect team. Google’s people analytics manager, Julia Rozovsky, then stated: “We were dead wrong.”

Google’s result in Project Aristotle supports Justin’s statement on team success. Google found a research by psychologists and sociologist that focused on the term that is known as “group norms.” When teams gather there are these unwritten rules that make teams function as they do. These standards are the team’s traditions and behavior when they work together. These group norms can be openly acknowledged or unspoken by the team.

As described in this article in The New York Times, it wasn’t until Google started considering some intangibles that things began to fall into place. The results of these team norms are often robust. The teams at Trello spend a good time creating those team norms and empathy.

The second thing Justin talked about is how important communications are. Today, most of Trello’s employees work remotely. In the beginning, all the staff worked at the same place, in their central office in New York. But then one employee wanted to move to be closer to his family. The Trello team did not want to lose this employee, so they started to test the option to work remotely. More people joined the team remotely. Part of the company was therefore located in New York while other members were all over the world. Having productive meetings were half of the people are in a conference room and the other half is on a video call is not an easy thing to maintain. Trello, therefore, decided that all of their communications should be remote. Although three members of a planned meeting are at the office, they all attend the meeting remotely. When Trello is hiring new people, they do it remotely to test how people function in a remote working environment. But still, the primary challenge in this remote communication is that not all connections are equal due to a different technology.

Lastly, Justin talked about that collaboration tools are a social place. They create social value for the teams and active workplace environment. Dogfooding is also a phrase that Trello uses. “Eating your own dog food” or “dogfooding” means that developers use their software that they develop to work out bugs and generate new solutions. Trello uses, therefore, their application for their project management to create Trello. It is easier to see the flaws and how they would create better value for their users by using it as their management tool. Examples of other tools that Trello uses are for example Strive for the chat, appear.in for video calls and zoom for larger group calls.  

In the end, Justin explained that there is no correct way to use Trello. The goal is to have it simple and easy to learn. The user should use the application to customize a personal Trello board and use in whatever way he or she wants.

There are a million ways to use Trello. If you have not already tried Trello, I recommend you check it out!

 

– Thorhildur Thorleiksdottir

 

Gerrard street is a company which sells headphones, but the buying process is a bit different then you are used to. Instead of buying the headphone, you have to pay a monthly fee. The first step is to order the headphone online and it will be delivered at your home. If your headphone get any damage, for example a cable which is broken, you can send the headphone back and they will replace the item which has been broken down. This way the customer buys the an expensive good headphone for €7,50 per month (instead of €250) and if your headphone does not work, Gerrard street will fix your phone without extra costs. It is more like leasing your headphone, like Spotify or Netflix. If you do not want the headphone anymore, you can send it back to Gerrard street and they will recycle the materials for new headphones.

I thought this concept was very interesting because it will save a lot of spilled materials. The company will fix and recycle your headphone, instead of you throwing the headphone away because it does not work or you want a new one. The fact that this does not cost anything extra will motivate the customers to reuse their headphone. Besides, this leasing method is the way Gerrard street collects investors. Gerrard street just had their second Kickstarter campaign for their wireless headphone.

 

For more information: https://gerrardst.nl/faq/#1460300489107-30f3dbe6-110f

 

Hello everyone!

I’ve tried a podcast app from a Swedish startup called Acast. Their idea is to be more comprehensive than its competitors by making an app that works for both listeners, podcast creators and advertisers.

I listen a lot to podcasts and uses an app for android that is sufficient but not the best app I’ve used. I’ve find it hard to find a good podcast app for android, and therefore I was very excited to try this new one out. There are two main things that are different when I compare them with other android apps I’ve used before. Firstly, the design looks better and it is very appealing to look at. Secondly, the app suggests podcasts to you that are related to the ones you already listen to. You can also see which podcasts are trending or what people nearby are listening to. One last thing is that it is easy to use on several platforms, which I’ve had not experienced with other applications I’ve tried.

The negative aspects of Acast is that it did not have all the podcasts I am listening to now, which was disappointing. Also, you cannot fast forward a few seconds without unlocking your phone, which is a feature I really appreciate with my current podcast app.

So to summarize, I think that Acast has a great potential to become a really good podcast app, for listeners at least. It would be interesting to hear from advertisers and podcast creators how they think, to see if they succeed to do a more comprehensive app. To improve, they should expand their content and make it possible to fast forward and rewind without going into the app itself.

/Timmy Rosendal