Author Archives: Nadiaben

When I started this course I hadn’t got any idea of what we were going to do even if I had the overview of the course on the KTH website.

I came to this course because I wanted to know more about entrepreneurship and to know how to deal with a new idea from the beginning until its released to the market.

Contrary to the other courses the most of the work was done outside the meetings class and we had to organize and work in teams. That was a great experience because I was in a group with people from 5 different countries and during the project we learned from each others. I already had a great experience as a project leader in a team of 8 engineering students during 7 months. We were working with a real client and we had to deliver a product at the end of the project. I used to be the project leader in almost all my groups projects and this time I had the opportunity to test another role and see how it goes when I am not leading and how the others are leading the group. And I can say that it is really useful for my next projects.

I also learned that we have to go outside our comfort zone, as Serdar said “go out and talk to people”.

I don’t use to go to events and it was a great pleasure to see how useful it is. We can talk with the others and exchange our ideas without any judgements. We can help them by giving them feedbacks and they can help us building our idea.

The guests we had during our classes is something to keep for next year even if it’s not the same course it’s always interesting to learn about their career.

The last but not the least, I never wrote any blog post and I was reluctant at the idea to write one during this course. But writing a blog post after an event helped me review what I actually learned during this event and after almost each event I wrote a blog post J

 

---

---

 

Today I finally met Lana (I hope it’s the right spellingJ) and she is very nice. Safia and I volunteered to help in an event we were going to: FemTech event.

We wanted to see how the events were planned at SUP46 since there were a lot of them recently. So we helped fixing food and with the registration. In fact, 170 people signed for this event and we had to check if they were registered to ensure them a sitting position.

What was this event about?

During the FemTech event we had the pleasure to hear 3 women working in tech with different backgrounds. Having different backgrounds gave us different perspectives of working in the tech business. In the panel we had:

• Frida Emillson, Co-founder and CMO at worflavor
• Victoria Bastide, CTO at Lifesum
• Jane Walerud, Founder & Investor at Warelud Ventures.

In this event there were also engineers, start ups and students and it was a great opportunity to exchange with them about what they are doing, how they got there…

I like these kinds of event were you can go and talk with everyone. Usually you don’t have to go and talk to people; they came to to you and talk.

The particularity of the Femtech event is that there were just womens –except 2 boys :P-. Two women were talking to me and they told me that they were glad to be only between women because sometimes in mixed event men are sometimes unprofessional…I think it’s because they are pretty and when you look at them you don’t want to talk about “work” (joke :P).

---

It’s not the last event at SUP46, so if you never went there, go there J I am sure you will like it.

Wednesday I went to an event called “Doing Good Better: An event with Will MacAskill”. Nearly 190 people attended this event quite interesting.

 

 

Will MacAskill is an Associate Professor in philosophy at Lincoln college in Oxford.

He cofounded two non-profits: “80 000 hours” –which provides research and advice on how to make a difference through your career-, and “Giving what you can” –encouraging people to commit to give at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities-.

These organisations helped to spark the effective altruism.

During his talk he tried to explain us how to make the most difference with the time and money at hand.

He shows us some social programs –like the Play pump, or Scared straight which is a program for juvenile delinquency in which they give a tour in prison to show how the life is hard in there….but this program is actually leading to more crimes, rapes …than before- that deviated from their main goal.

After that he explained us a simple way to help people all around the world without much effort, for example using his non-profit organization “Giving what you can”.

You can read more on his book Doing Good Better – Effective altruism and How you can Make a Difference-.

Yesterday, Safia Tahar Aissa and I attended the Slush preparation. Event hold in SUP46.

What is Slush?

Slush is a world-renowned event gathering start-ups, investors, media but also companies such as Google, Samsung, Facebook… who are looking around for new companies to buy.

Slush is facilitating meetings between start-ups and investors. In this event there are a lot of different investors and as they told us “Spend the time as efficiently as you can” meaning that start-ups should focus on investors they really want.

 

Last year, CareMonkey – an Australian start up who has a risk management system that automatically keeps medical and emergency data up to date and makes it instantly available on mobile devices- won the Slush 100 pitching competition and received a price of 650.000€ – big prize for this kind of event J-.
This year, Slush is going to be held in Helsinki on November 30 and the firs of December don’t miss that!

 

Why we went to the Slush preparation event?

Even if, at first we didn’t plan to attend Slush event, we went to the preparation phase to meet some entrepreneurs and we did get the opportunity to meet some of them and discuss their ideas and their plans.

One of their ideas was: an application that helps reduce bullying and cyber violence in the student life (Speak Up!). In this application every student could post something –anonymously or not- about an incident including the location and a photo if one has been taken and comment about what they saw.

Nowadays, people are afraid to go to talk to someone if they are facing problems or if someone in their circle is facing one and I think this application could incite them to help control all these kind of bullying or violence.

We discussed about the future of this application (develop it in the work world, as well and deploy it all over the world). This discussion was very interesting and helps us to see what the next steps were after the idea.

The entrepreneurs were all open-minded, glad to share their ideas and ready to listen to our ideas and our feedbacks.

I am looking forward to go to other event like this one. Let me know if you hear about something like that 🙂

Find more about slush: www.slush.org

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.

 Taïg Khris surrounded by INSA Telecommunications’ student

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