On 22nd November, I went to this innovation event called Lean Tribe Gathering 41st with my friend and teem member Miss. Jori Witte. It is an event held by #SUP 46, where they provide competitive advantage to startup people and their members through its world-class ecosystem of investors, partmers and advisors.
It was a very cool event with 4 lectures given by three successful startup persons and one manager from the famous Swedish game company called the King (who developed “Candy Crash”). People who attended that event were mostly business people who are running their own companies/ startups and people who work for companies instead of students. So we were quite “young” for that event. But still, we learned a lot from it and find it really exciting and interesting.
The first lecture was from Jonas Hombert, talking about a mindset for quick failure and slow success. He mentioned that when we are facing with a failure, it just means that we are trying new things. It’s not about any permanent disappointing stage where we can never get our feet back again. And people may run into failure very often (especially in startup field), but they can still be successful person one day. He also thinks it’s important to be flexible as a startup. To know when are we doing things right and when are we doing right things, and to change swiftly between them is important.
The second lecture was given by Cecilia Borg with her startup called Looklet. They managed to expand the company from 25 persons to 78 persons within 8 month. And she shared her experience during this expanding without pain. According to Cecilia, one of the most important point here is to understand that the engineers don’t want to assume responsibility. The company has to make sure that people can and feel comfortable consuming responsibility so that everyone can cooperate with desire and joy. She also talked about the values of her company, which are trust and respect, transparency and collaboration. And their agile methods are: aligned goals, daily standups and keeping teams co-located, which all aim to help their team members work actively and finally lead to the success of the whole company.
The third lecture was given by Yassal Sundman, from the King, as I mentioned above. She talked about how do they use A/ B testing for their product and decide for the best solutions. The three key points for their decision making process are: 1. Figure out what to build and how to build. 2. Figure out challenges and how much of a feature it will be. 3. Learn fast. The interesting thing here is how they decide which idea is better. They do not use the normal ways like “the oldest win” or “the boss told me…”. Instead, they start with hypothesis and define their testable alternatives. Then they conduct the A/ B testing of all the alternatives, and make a decision for it. I think this is a really interesting way to decide because new and young ideas will not be buried this way. It is also faster and help the team understand what are they building and the risks.
The last lecture is from Erik Frisk. He is currently running a startup called Touch & Tell and doing it pretty well. He shared his understanding of “leaps of faith”. By saying leaps of faith, he means the very risky action taken place when one does not know what out comes will it bring, but still believe in the best for it. He’s holding the idea that sometimes we will feel uncertainity and have doubt in what we are doing, the leaps of faith does not eliminate the uncertainity for us, but it force us to face with these uncertainities and see how brilliant we can do out of them.
After the lectures, we had some discussions regarding to the questions about lectures in flexible groups. I find this even remarkably inspiring because here I saw all these young people starting to realize their dreams, and by sharing their experiences to each other, they help and inspire each other to do better. It makes me see the faith in startup people and applaud for their braveness.