Author Archives: Timbuzink

We finished the exam on friday, the last finishing touches are done on the venture project report and the last blogpostes are posted. The course comes to it’s end. So now it is time to look back on the course and what I have learned from it.

To start with, it was a very different course type than I’m used to, because I’m normally busy with Chemical formulas, calculations and trying to understand everything. The Entrepreneurship course was more discussions, see the different points of view on the topic and meet people from different working fields and hear their story. I really liked that  it was different, because that was one of the reasons why I chose for this course. I wanted to do somethig different during my time abroad and explore different study fields. I was especialy interested in Economic and Management courses, because when I was busy with my study choice a couple of years ago, I realy doubted about doing something in that field. Eventualy I chose to go to the beta site and study Chemical Engineering.

It was fun to learn a lot about Entrepreneurship and every aspect of it. What are the common characteristics of a Entrepreneur, what are good thing for your Business Model, multiple ways of prototyping, how to get financing, etc. I didn’t knew anything about it and know I’m able to say I know luckely some basics.

The most interesting and maybe the most important thing I have learned from this course, is that being an Entrepreneur is not something for me. This sounds maybe stupid, because I wrote that I liked to course a lot and that it gave me an insight in the entrepreneurial world. But knowning what you don’t want to do is also very valuable. First Entrepreneuship was an exciting and new world for me. A world which gives you to opportunity to start something on your own, become succesfull and enrich the world with your ideas and products. But reading all the articles about it and especially hear the stories from entrepreneurs themself, I saw the entrepreneurial world also in another light. Frequently asked questions as: “Did you every thought about starting your own business?”, “Do you come up with ideas for problems but do you often don’t persue them?”, “Do you want to be your own boss?”, “Are you willing to take a leap of faith and risk everything to try to reach your ultimate goal?”, etc, I frequently answered with NO. An Entrepreneur however would answer most of the questions with YES. I see myself rather work at a big company, work hard and try to clime up the career ladder, than that I risk everything and start my own company. Maybe this will change in a couple of years, who knows!

Finally, I want to say that I enjoyed the lectures and the way Serdar gave the lectures. A lot of guest speakers, some were better than others, but generally they were good speakers. Serdar gave the lectures with a lot of enthousiasme and was interested in the students. I can understand why some students maybe disliked the way of how the course was given, because sometimes it was a bit hard to figure out what to do when and where to find what. It was always written somewhere and eventually you could find it and otherwise you could ask Serdar. I also liked that we had to go to start-up events, otherwise I would probably not have went to them and I really liked to events and learned a lot of them.

I want to thank everyone for a nice course, all the groups discussions and some new insights!

Regards,

Tim Buzink

Tonight I was with a couple of classmates at the STHML Tech Meet up event. It was at the Hilton Hotel in Slussen and when we arrived there we noticed how crowded it was. The whole auditorium was filled and we had to stand at the site. It started with a short overview of this months biggest investments in Stockholm start-ups and a couple of the start-ups which got the biggest investments came on stage and talked a bit.

After that the subject changed to the refugee problem and how the tech society could help in this problem. Someone of Industrifonden (a VC investment company) came on the stage and hosted this topic together with the two main hosters. There were talkes from a refugee herself and two companies with had an idea for the refugee problem. The first one, was the company which develops the app “Welcome”. This will be an app in which information about Sweden and everything else a refugee needs to know is combined with a tool in which refugees can ask questions to Swedish people and in which Swedish people can post events. This app has the main idea to connect the refugees with the Swedish people and help them to fit in the society. The second company was Refugee tec. This company is going to organise a Hacketon with the refugee problem as its subject.

Then the investors of the Middle East and Asia came on the stage for a discussion. The investors were: Dany Farha (BECO Capital, Dubai), Richard Chen (Ceyuan Ventures, China), Ali H. Karabey (212 Venture, Istanbul) and Numan Numan (212 Venture, Istanbul). It was nice to hear the difference between the start-up world over there and here in Western Europe.

Last, there were two start-up pitches. The first one was from Gymgo. It was a bit strange, because he was cut of after he just spoke three sentences and he was than burned by the investors. It was a bit sad for the guy which was standing in front of whole croud and was ready to pitch his idea. After that he tried to keep on going strong, but the investors keep making fun of him. In my opinion it wasn’t really fair, but maybe this is how it goes in the Venture Capital world. The second pitch was from Zeifie, the security app which Pernilla Rydmark from IIS also told about. This pitch got some good feedback from the investors.

Hey everyone,

Yesterday evening I went to the SUB46 Happy Hour meeting. This was an after work drink organised by SUB46 in their office. It was a really fun event to go to, because there were a lot of people, the drinks and crips were free the whole night, there was a nice DJ and I met some interesting people. The nice thing about this event was, that it was easy to get in contact with new people. Everyone was just enjoying his/her drink and chatting with people. Almost everyone which I encountered was in for a talk and told me some stories about their company or their work experience. Below, I will describe some companies which I talked to yesterday evening:

FLAG

My first conversation was with the co-founder of FLAG. FLAG is a company which will be launched next January and is going to offer a totally free service by which you can upload your pictures in their app and they will print and ship the photo’s to you. They are going to make use of a lasercutter – printer so that you can get your photo’s in every possible shape and that now quality will be lost. You can upload your Instagram photo’s together with every filter you choice, they will print it for you. You can even fill in someone else their adress, so that the photo’s are sent to their homes. In this way, you can for instance sent photo’s to your parents while you are on vacation. I was then wondering how they are going to pay for the laser cutter – printer, the printpaper, the inkt and the shipping of all these photo’s. The Business model is that it will be a new form of paper adds. Everything will be free of charge, but they will print a advertisement on the back of every picture. They can modify the type of advertisement to the information they get from you, because when you upload your pictures, you automatically sent your GPS coordinates, info about yourself, etc with it. The margin in paper adds is way higher than with online adds and in this way he was hopping to make a succesfull company.

BINGOLABS

I also talked to one of the three co-founders of Bingolabs. He was developing an app for the elderly care. Nowadays everything in the elderly care has to be written down in logbooks or on whiteboards. This information will after that disappear in a folder on a bookshelf and almost never used again. He was developing an app in which all the information could be written down. In this way all the information was easily to revise. But, more importantly, relatives are in this way able to keep track of the care of their grandmother, mother, grandfather etc. So they can see that he/she goes outside ones a day, gets washed, eats all his/her meals, etc. This is something what people would want to have, especially with the recent scandals in the elderly care in Sweden.

The funny thing was that he was just graduated from the KTH and the reason why he was able to launch his own company, was by the help of the different kinds of KTH programms which are there to help startups.

BEATLY 

Futhermore, I talked to Viktor Strömberg, Co-founder and Key account manager of Beatly. Beatly is a company which is specialised in online marketing and especially in using social media to get attention for your merchandise. Their office is located in the office of SUB46.

Concluding, it was a really nice evening to get to know new people in a nice informal way and I would definitely go again.

Regards,

Tim Buzink

Todays lecture started by a talk of Haider Ghaleb, CEO of Sandbox. It was a bit different than the talks before, because he talked to us via skype. Skype is a good solution to talk to people which are far away, because you can still see them. Unfortunately Haider Ghaleb was not able to initiate a video connection. Nevertheless it was still great that he made some time for us, during the, I think, stressfull days before such a big event. Despite, the sometimes misunderstandings and silinces due to Skype, we got to know something more about Sandbox and the EXPO innovation challenge.

After that we talked about Business models and that we sometimes have to change our business model to become succesful. I really liked to examples, because most of the stories behind well known companies I didn’t know and it opened my eyes. Some examples were Dell, Nescafé and the fruit delivery service. The last one, the fruit delivery service, reminded me of a start up in the Netherlands what is now is probably going to be an unicorn. Namely the company HelloFresh.

HelloFresh delivers healthy foodbockes. There are many companies which deliver food or other supermarkt items to people’s home, but where HelloFresh differs from the other companies, is that they respond on the laziness of people. People don’t like to come up with ideas what to eat every day, so they cook most of the times the same recipe. HelloFresh comes with different recipes and sendt them in boxes with all the ingredients to the people. So people don’t have to go to the supermarkt anymore and don’t have to think about what they are going to eat. I found this a nice example of a company which does something else in their business model than other excisting companies.

https://www.hellofresh.com/

Today we had a nice group work assignment during the lecture. The discussions regarding the situations which could occure when you are starting up a business were fun to do. Maybe for the next time a somewhat complexer company as an example can be usefull, because problems with a orange juice car can relative easily be solved. But nevertheless, the outcome of the discussions were good and learnfull.

After that we had to built the highest tower out of one piece of paper. That assignment was really fun, because our proces described a possible start-up perfectly. At the start we already saw that we were not going to make it with a length of two papers, because everyone was trying that. We decided to go for all or nothing, so we tried to make a tower with a length of three papers. We didn’t succeed and our tower collapsed. You also see this very often with start-ups. People try to be the very best, but just a few succeed in that and the other start-ups fail.

Hey everyone,

I found the talk about 3D printing this morning verry interesting and therefore I searched a bit on the internet. As we all know I think, 3D printing has been a hot topic the last years. So there is lots of information to find about this topic by just typing 3D printing into google. But I prefer a good presentation above reading an article. Therefore I searched if there were any TED talks about 3D printing. I really like TED talks, because they deal with modern topics and the topics are presented brief and enthusiastic. So when you are interesting in a certain kind of topic or study field, it’s definitely worth it to search if there are any TED talks about it. I liked the TED talks about 3D printing and I wanted to share these talks with you. I just choose four out of many, so for more videos just search on Youtube.

Hey everyone,

In the lecture we talked about the lean startup concept. I wanted to know some more about this concept so I searched a little bit on the internet. Then I found this book which describes it really good and the author is seen as one of the developers of this method for developing business. The book is called, ‘The Lean Startup’ and is written by Eric Ries.

In his book he divides the process in to three major parts:

1. Vision
2. Steer
3. Accelarate

In the Vision part Eric Ries defines what in his opion is an entrepreneur and what a start-up is. He also describes the validated learning process and why scientific experimentation is important for that process.

In the Steer part the Lean Startup method is described in detail. He talkes about the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop, how to build a a minimum viable product to test, a new accounting system to mesure your progress and a method to decide whether to pivot or preserve.

The last part, Accelarate, describes techniques how Lean start-ups can speed through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.

I haven’t read the whole book myself jet, but I would definitely recommend this book to everyone which wants to know more about Lean-Startups.

Regards,

Tim Buzink

Hey everyone,

I was thinking about a good idea for my elevator pitch when I encountered this problem. How can you now how big your niche is and if the niche is big enough to support your idea and make it succesful? Because you have to find a problem in your daily life which you can solve with your solution. But what if you are an exception or that it is just a problem in your own country? I think it’s sometimes hard to know if you will have enough customers, because in the case that there are a few people with the same problem in every country, you have enough customers, but how will you get to all those different people around the world?

I’m curious what you think about this and if you are also struggeling with it. I hope to hear your opinions.

Regards,

Tim Buzink

Hey everyone,

Durring the last lecture we talked about how to make things simpler, how to add less details. This made me thinking about that and I realised that I saw something a while ago which had something to do with that. There is company which is called Phonebloks. It’s founded by a Dutch guy which did his thesis about it. He found it really strange that we just throw away our mobilephone or computer when some little part is broken and that the electronic waste keeps on growing. He invited a mobilephone which is made out of blocks. So that when one thing breaks or gets old, you can just replace it and keep on using the same phone. That the phone is made out of blocks also means that you can adjust it to your needs. So when you want to keep it simple you take a bigger battery for instance and keep out other functions. The principle is clearly explained in this video:

But he realised, he couldn’t do it on his own. So he searched for other companies which could help him in developing his ideas. He found multiple companies which are working on it or want to make different parts for the mobile. Phonebloks is going to try and connect all the companies.

I found it really interesting how he managed to get so much media attention and I liked his clear and informative videos. I hope you like it too.

Regards,

Tim Buzink