Ishan Gupta

Ishan became an entrepreneur at the age of 21 while he was a sophomore engineering student at a college in India. Realizing that his fellow students might benefit from more engineering, education, and information to help them advance in their professions, that sparked the concept for Ishan's first startup as a sophomore engineering student. He had always had a passion for education, so he returned to India, after Stanford, and founded Edukart, which grew to become one of India's most significant education marketplaces.

Following that, Ishan worked for Paytm, a large fintech platform in India, before returning to education in 2017 as India Udacity's managing director/Senior Director of Student Operations for two and a half years. His responsibilities include maintaining the student's experience after the student becomes an active student with them, providing mentor services, review services, support, and other activities that were important to Udacity in terms of developing students internationally.

UDACITY

Ishan's firm was essentially a direct-to-consumer operation. Udacity operates in the consumer, enterprise, and government markets. According to Ishan, the major capacities of India Udacity vs the US are different, and this matters to consumers. From the standpoint of Udacity, Ishan has always believed in servicing individuals who want to learn technologies. Users all across the world have identical wants; it's simply that their capacity to pay varies. Certain things are internationally significant, although localizations may be necessary in different regions of the world.

FACEBOOK

Facebook provided an opportunity to Ishan in 2007, and for the record, Google and Facebook were the most anticipated firms in India at the time. Thus, he took it and was hired as a Facebook Growth Manager for India. It was a short venture but an intriguing one for Ishan, not to mention he was the first hire back in India. Facebook was still in its infancy at the time, but it had a thousand employees and 4 million members in India. Eventually, Facebook decided to open another office in India, another Stanford Business School alumni took over as managing director and built it up with a stronger entrepreneurial culture.

EDUKART

Edukart began in 2012, with a board of directors comprised of Ishan's Stanford pals and one of his Indian friends. Ishan had ongoing support from Stanford classmates and Indian entrepreneurs, particularly one of his mentors who founded Paytm, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, who was also a consistent supporter. Edukart had been sponsored in its trip by a combination of Indian and real estate investors.

As per Ishan, in Edukart's crucial moments of breakthrough, the points where he didn't achieve what he wanted to be was where he gained a lot more than the places where he did. When Edukart was developing an education marketplace, the structure was patterned by the main universities that are developing components for online programs and putting them together on the same platform. Edukart enables individuals to compare and contrast programs before enrolling in the appropriate program, and as Ishan notes, the great victory was originally getting more than a hundred different online education players in India to be onboarded on the platform.

People feel compelled to utilize the platform where programs can be extensively compared, which is a good thing because Edukart has the supply side in place and is developing a marketplace. Students began to arrive, comparing programs and attempting to choose the best program for themselves, and as they considered the purchase, it was critical that the students get accurate information. For Ishan, the high point in his entrepreneurial experience was when Edukart and the marketplace were both considered supply-validated, and when students began to find value in it.

On Facing Challenges

Ishan has had a challenging start in life that has helped him get to where he is now. It all began with a pair of close friends who worked for an educational organization and provided training to technologies and ethical hacking. Ishan and his co-founders began to think differently about the firm while operating it as a student while he was in his sophomore year. He understood that the path he intended to take was no longer attainable, thus he had to make the difficult decision to leave the organization. Ishan was 22-23 at the time, and he had decided to quit something he had started after putting in a lot of effort. It wasn't easy at the time, but according to Ishan, one of the most crucial lessons to learn as an entrepreneur is that one may develop it, but also have the right to leave at any time. It's either all in or all out; you can't do something half-heartedly.

THE MOTIVE OF ACCESS

"Provide some sort of access to something that is meaningful to people." -Ishan Gupta

Ishan is motivated to pursue his mission on allowing others ACCESS. Ishan's first education firm, Udacity, was founded with the goal of providing individuals with access to high-quality education and the opportunity to use it to advance in their jobs. Ishan worked for Facebook and Paytm, both of which were in the business of granting access. As he mentions, Facebook is flexible to providing information access. It has a platform that assists individuals in India to provide them with access to the rest of the globe in a variety of ways, such as interacting with friends and peers around the world. Ishan states that working at Paytm also meant providing individuals with financial services that may help them improve their life. That, according to Ishan, is a recurring motive. Almost ten years of his 15-year career have been spent in teaching, and he is currently pursuing that long-term aim while being open to the option of doing something new. It needs to be about people obtaining access to something significant and useful to them, as Ishan points out. That is what motivates him, and he has been proudly constant in his approach to teaching.

The distinction in the Silicon Valley approach

Other nations confront specific challenges when it comes to launching companies, and Ishan believes this is true. Silicon Valley, according to Ishan, excels at using a product-driven strategy. In certain aspects, the product-led strategy speeds up the establishment of firms or skills. Because there are so many more individuals accessible, a lot of developing positions, which we can all approve, are about attempting to onboard the issues and solve them. Another benefit is that it will teach you how to create a high-quality product and how to grow enterprises in a human-centered approach. According to him, the benefits and drawbacks vary depending on the industry. Being at a Silicon Valley firm, controlling the office, and then going to the United States prompted Ishan to value the previous 3-4 years of the Silicon Valley approach more than the other student works at Stanford.

The main distinction in the Silicon Valley approach, according to Ishan, is the very product-led approach, which means creating the best product possible, and continuing to create it. To him, the method he observed in India was more about developing a layer of people around a product who would execute it, and strong operational teams who could move the product forward. The distinctions between the two techniques, notably, is that each has advantages and disadvantages. A strong firm, according to Ishan, has a good product and strong operations that propel the product forward.

Building the operations team

Ishan's advice for getting a board member is, to be honest about your weaknesses and what you need the board to check on you for. The board members' responsibility, according to Ishan, is to examine how the firm becomes the appropriate sort of company or one that is investor-friendly. Ishan recommends bringing on board folks that compliment your skill set on the skill side. It's the same thing when it comes to forming a team, whether it's aboard, a squad, or leadership.

Ishan finds inspiration in Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the creator of Paytm in India, who has always been a tremendous mentor to him. Vijay also happens to have developed a powerful firm and one of the major financial platforms in India. Working closely with him gave Ishan a great deal, and he served on Ishan's board of Edukart for more than 5 years as a trusted adviser. Ishan acknowledges that he still has Stanford mentors who have also become pals and comrades, a clever group of individuals whom he exemplifies as reliable people who can teach you something.

Insights from Ishan Gupta

"You need to be at the right place, at the right time, but you also need the right mindset to execute something."

"Be with people who can hold you accountable for what you stand for and what you should stand for, push back at the right times, and help you keep going."

"A lot of people will stop showing up. They’re there for some time and not when the times are tough. But you have to be there every day, working, showing up and doing the business."

Startup mindsets:

“Start with having a really honest conversation with yourself, ARE YOU READY TO DO IT? Because it’s going to be hard, it’s going to be tough."

"What are your weaknesses? Find a co-founder fast to fill up for all those weaknesses because it’s a long, tough journey as an entrepreneur. Find your mentors, because I believe in the power of mentorship."

"The final advice is to put some sort of timeframe on it. You need to have some sort of check-in timelines to whatever works for you and I think that’s important."

Books and resources:

Ishan swears by OKRs when it comes to books, especially at Udacity. According to him, the sooner you start using OKRs, the better. Ishan recommends John Doerr's Measure What Matters: OKRs: The Simple Idea That Drives 10x Growth, which was published in 2017. OKRs, according to Ishan, are never too little for a firm to use since they add discipline to the process of establishing a company.

Jordan Sun

Jordan Sun is the chief innovation officer for the city of San Jose, California. He had a history in finance, public service, was a diplomat, an army officer, and worked in healthcare before joining the city.

Jordan's objective is to focus on the beginning of the process: the initial access point in which part of that is by design. Since, as one of the few surviving cities in America with a weak mayor system, the role is primarily focused on influencing via policy, while also serving as the city's spokesman and a point of contact for residents.

Jordan began his army career as an entry officer. When he took a step back, he realized he had never thought or intended to join the city government. He was a director of development at Siemens, as well as the founder and CEO of a Siemens-owned digital health startup. He was invited to deploy to Afghanistan as the Chief Operating Officer of a technology team that was divided up largely to concentrate on products linked to combatting ISIS and Taliban assaults.

Jordan has always believed in giving back to the country as a Christian American in exchange for the benefits that have been provided to his family, particularly in areas linked to safety and security for future political execution. His grandpa, who fought imperialism in WWII, and his father, who moved from Taiwan and served in the US Army as an infantry officer, drew him to public duty.

His first steps in the military were entrenched in his character. He eventually explored working in finance but realized he could do a lot more exciting things. Jordan had the chance to serve as a diplomat and an army officer in Taiwan, Japan, and twice in Afghanistan. It was his desire to return home to use the expertise and knowledge he had gained over the years to fight for change within the walls of the country this time. Finally, Jordan believes that there is something he can do to help people and that there are many things that are troubling them that would be really important to him.

The Collaboration with the Government

From Jordan's perspective, they look at matters that need to be concentrated on, as well as certain things that are a priority for the mayor and should be made a priority for the inhabitants as soon as possible. There is a definite distinction in terms of bandwidth, competence, and skillets, as well as hours of authority, such as procurement vs no procurement. So, when people want to work with them, it's either through forms of pilots, technological means, or down the procurement road to attempt to figure out how to legally navigate. The third option is philanthropy, and the fourth is all about collaborations that get a lot more innovative.

Finding out that they are a good channel for startups in terms of financial inclusion chances in the fintech area, starting mental health prospects, or even in cyberspace, opens a fantastic medium to put startups through a betting process. They have a project canvas that focuses more on understanding the issue statement, the resident time test, the solution statement, the mayor's interest, and any prospective municipal partners, rather than on desirability. The viability function is based on who their partners are and what incredible betting steps solution they have. Then they do a competitive analysis and landscape before recommending a partner to the mayor, who will proclaim the best partner to work with internally.

Jordan likes the notion of how people describe the eight pillars of innovation when it comes to high-level innovation. In addition, their digital inclusion has been tremendous, and they have terrific cooperation with the city manager's office, which he is pleased with. This is a collaborative endeavor between the city and industry partners, particularly telecommunications.

They've done three things: firstly, the city has launched an AT&T membership program with mobile Wi-Fi hotspots, totaling roughly 15800 hotspots in neighborhoods. The majority of them have gone to 3000 pupils and will continue to go to other locals. They've started community Wi-Fi programs, with the goal of connecting over 300,000 people to the internet at home by the end of 2022. The third initiative is a first-of-its-kind public-private collaboration digital inclusion fund. Telcos basically benefit financially from the government speeding up their small cell, 5G network construction, and deployment processes. Because that permanent process was hastened, those cyber gains were produced, and the money flowed back into the community to address issues like digital redlining and ensuring that individuals had access to connection equipment.

People now want three things: first, a team or a partner who can provide some basic digital services and advise you on where you want to develop or design. Second, a team or a partner who can provide some basic digital services and advice on where to develop or design, which is at least one level of analyst capabilities as one needs to start thinking about the data. The third is some level of privacy, and someone to be responsible for that privacy. That will be critical in the future in terms of all the technologies that are being injected into communities and embraced, particularly with cities migrating their cloud, and who is responsible for that.

Innovation

In terms of government innovation, Jordan considers it a blessing to have entered this world at a moment when people recognize that technology is the future, and the future is now. Whether it's on the corporate side of operating and expanding your business or on the delivery side of providing c-services to your residents, COVID-19 relies heavily on technology these days.

According to Jordan, the term "innovation" has become synonymous with "going digital" in the previous ten years. Everyone, regardless of whether they are focused on B2B, B2G, or B2C, now has to be online as part of an integrated service as an organization. In terms of media and technology, Jordan's organization has defined three goals. Hundreds of thousands of people are affected by the digital purchase that must be undertaken. They are focusing on converting the city into a data-driven city and creating and piloting a city-wide data strategy as a second priority.

Furthermore, assuring that the required privacy and framework are established and implemented to adapt to future technologies as well as address concerns like equity inclusion. The third step is to look at how technology might help citizens, particularly during a time of recovery, and to start trials there, as well as to look at the landscape of developing technologies and how the city should prepare. They're also looking into blockchain right now to see how they can prepare and if it's a realistic strategy.

The Challenges of Innovation

Jordan's intriguing problem in terms of innovation is determining priorities, particularly in a resource-limited setting with confined funds, constrained employees, and a lack of manpower. Many individuals in government are armed with enough jargon and fundamental ideas to suggest that the issue can be solved by building it up, or that there is a technology that can fix it. The challenge is to check these individuals and convince them that they must first comprehend the situation.

Tension is constantly present, Jordan claims. He recalls being a chain leader in charge of 40 men when he was 22 and working alongside women in diverse jobs, which to him, was new, having people turning to him for direction, leadership, and even mentorship. He rapidly realized the importance of systems, procedures, providing direction and vision, and the beauty of American culture, in the American way of doing things, is that people are incredibly entrepreneurial. They take charge, which is a feature of the culture as a whole. With tech giants in its vicinity and a distinct wealth discrepancy, Jordan feels San Jose is a unique environment where diversity can thrive. He envisions taking this attitude and assisting other communities in doing the same, particularly in terms of technological integration.

Inventive Mentality for Future Innovations

According to Jordan, having an inventive mentality would contribute significantly. It's important to strike a balance between consensus-driven and crest-response action. People on the other side of the political divide have come up with amazing methods to use all the government's capabilities to bring things under control, and so is happening on the other side of the border. What's needed is a method to have a playbook that pulls in the relevant stakeholders and a way to swiftly follow and set up something to adapt to future pricing without jeopardizing equity participation. Like commercial real estate, older prices aren't going away.

The objective in terms of innovation and technology is to be responsive. There are several low-hanging fruits in terms of what technology can do to enhance the overall city experience. There's a chance to achieve some degree of enterprise outstanding experiences in terms of uptime and workflow simplification, and Jordan wants to test that theory. He discusses utilizing the phrase 'Smart Cities' after further thought. To him, the city of the future is vast, and it runs the government in such a unique and strong manner. He wants to see elected officials using dashboards, having real-time analytics that is also predictive, and using that data to drive policy decisions. That would include city operators having very transparent and rigorous reporting metrics that they can work off of, similar to what we already see in the industry.

Jordan Sun:

“Where there is a will, there is a way... go big or go home... believe in yourself when others don’t. You might be facing systemic pressures but if you believe in yourself, then one’s rooting for you, even if it’s just yourself. Pick the right fights. Some places are not worth picking, and so being very conscientious of what you gain through this issue that you fight for is important if you are the right person to fight for that.”

“I would say be kinder to yourself if I were to talk to myself when I was 20... Part of growing up, the culture, is you’re taught to eat bitterness. It’s a natural rite of passage to success... Sometimes I just realize you just need to go a bit easy on yourself, be kinder to yourself, be more forgiving and also, speak up and confront things like discrimination especially against people of color, or for things that are sometimes outside your control.”

Recommended Books & Resources:

The Square and the Tower - Niall Ferguson

The world that trade created - Kenneth Pomeranz

The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Phenomenon of Man - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Kelly Lei

Kelly began her career as an aerospace engineer with a background in computer science, before moving on to the sustainability side, where she established the basis while working for Raytheon, the world's largest aerospace corporation. Kelly was in a leadership development program, networking with Fortune 100 CEOs. She began investing in real estate after that and she's amassed an impressive real estate portfolio, especially in Florida, over the years. She is a strong supporter of the F.I.R.E. movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early). Not only that, but she also gives back to her school as the Math Department Head. She progresses from aerospace engineer to investor to Math competition instructor, drawing on both her technical and investing abilities as she expands into the venture capital and coaching worlds. Kelly likewise works with Delivering Happiness, performing a lot of operations management at Raytheon and assisting them with operations. She frequently plays two roles, and she divides her time between program management and sustainability management.

Kelly went into coaching following her joy, bearing in mind that if she was going to fail, she wanted to enjoy the process. She began coaching after moving to Miami with her family to work with her former high school math coach since she used to compete in math and it was something she wanted to pursue. Kelly enjoyed helping people and empowering them as she did with the kids she coached in the first year Math competition who got first place and that which has been commended by her high school Math teacher’s wife telling her that she’s one of the top talented math teachers that she’s seen. Afterward, Kelly took a coaching class and she was encouraged by one of her friends telling her to consider becoming a coach and coach adults and she went for it.

Kelly has had a great desire to create her own business since the beginning. She didn't understand she was matching her mission and culture with the organization until she came across Delivering Happiness. Kelly said that she had no clue what she wanted to accomplish with her life, but that for once she wanted to do things for the love of it.

According to her, going into engineering was the simplest part, but it was also the most difficult thing she had to accomplish. The fact is, she found long-term stability with Raytheon. Kelly wants to make a great change and be one of those positive differences, so she created her own company. Kelly is also forming a collaborative organization with the goal of investing in startups and real estate. These are subjects she is interested in learning more about. Kelly is searching for investors to join her team, and they will only disclose offers that they are interested in, and they want to promote all the entrepreneurs they invest in. Fintech and climate technology are the current key areas for their team as of now.

Kelly's backstory

Kelly still recognizes herself as a work in progress, and she continues to look up to individuals she aspires to be like. She traces back her startup mindset to many things. To begin, she considers how growing up as an immigrant has benefited her. During the Cultural Revolution, her parents were immigrants and refugees from China to Macau. They were sewing garments at home, and her mother sold them on the street; all of those clothes would then be taken away because she didn't have a license to sell, but she eventually accumulated enough money.

Her parents began to establish their manufacturing firm in China, and she was forced to stay at home alone with her younger brother, who, along with her, was taught to be self-sufficient from an early age. Even when they were accepted in the United States, it took them a long time to come because they refused to pay for a plane ticket. It was a mess, but they eventually made it to the United States, as Kelly had demanded the sake of her schooling. They didn't establish another business after that for a variety of reasons, one of which being that they were in their 40s when they arrived in the United States. But, because her parents assisted her uncle and aunt in finding opportunities in China through their syndicate deals, this formed a bridge for Kelly to explore the venture capital realm, handling syndicate, and real estate. They pooled funds and produced value, so they didn't have to invest anything, but they did give Kelly's parents back their portion of the profit.

Delivering Happiness

Delivering Happiness originated as a book written by Tony Hseih, the CEO of Zappos and a VC who invested in the company. Kelly came upon the firm while coaching and was searching through a list of organizations she intended to contact when the word 'Delivering Happiness' just showed up. Kelly pondered reading the book after being encouraged by her cousin, who was also a tech pioneer and recognized similarities in his experience, but Tony Hseih went through it on a much larger scale. We're all here to find our life's purpose and passion, and that's what delivering happiness is all about, as per Kelly. 'Delivering Happiness,' based on a book, became a worldwide sensation roughly ten years ago. It's available in 26 different languages throughout the world, and they've just returned to the top of the bestselling list.

Following the publication of the book, they did a lot more research on positive psychology and workplace happiness, and they used this framework to help companies all over the world with employee engagement, company purpose development, team purpose development, leadership alignment, and a variety of other things. Because Delivering Happiness is a coaching and consulting firm, the podcast aims to inspire, which is their value belief number six: "to be inspired and to inspire."

Several frameworks are utilized in delivering happiness. They'd talk about the science of happiness and how it connects to corporate organizational performance and the building of team culture. 'Me, We, Community' is one of the frameworks: you find out your purpose and passion, then relate it to WE, which is your team, and finally to your community.

Many individuals confuse happiness with pleasure. Pleasure, as Kelly depicts it, is more EXTERNAL. Then PASSION at the next level, where we let things flow in a certain place and time and don't mind continuing to do what we've been doing all along. The next level is PURPOSE where's a thin line between your mission and something larger than yourself.

Delivering Happiness assists businesses by focusing on the top executives initially. They normally accomplish something unique, but they also have leadership alignment, since if the executives aren't on board with the company's mission, it will affect everything else. Delivering Happiness offers a variety of services, including keynote speaking (which is the motivating element), as well as stand-alone services such as virtual workshops. It used to be all-in-person, but because of COVID, they were able to design and implement it globally without having to fly. Apart from training, they also provide LONG-TERM COACHING and CONSULTING for businesses to help them establish their whole culture plan. As Delivering Happiness focuses on culture, they measure it through particular behaviors. Many businesses have values and missions, but Delivering Happiness explains what they imply. V2B (Value to Behavior) is a DH activity in which they measure a certain behavior.

Diving through the Venture Capital sector

Kelly is attempting to get into the venture capital sector by forming a firm with a few buddies. They're seeking about 20 people to invest in. Kelly joined many networks and events before getting the full grasp about the VC business since she is a credit investor. Earl recommended for her to read a venture deal or do the class as she learned more about the VC business jargon, which was highly beneficial to Kelly since while understanding how funding works is straightforward, executing the real thing and determining how much things should be valued is considerably more complicated.

Another thing she discovers is that it is a relationship-based sector, and in some ways, it resembles real estate investing. Kelly wants to explore opportunities in VC in an established fund to apply for an investment partner position, but she's also thinking of founding her own company and finding her own LPs, and investing that way. She wanted to undertake a more established fund because she wanted to build a network, grow a network, and understand what major organizations do.

Strengthening Relationships despite COVID-19

According to Kelly, creating relationships during the COVID time is much simpler, but it is more difficult for internal teams to stay and build a culture for a large team. Being in the office and getting on those little moments of trust-building, knowing that person, and seeing them is one thing, but building new relationships because everyone is stuck at home is another. Kelly points out that on a positive note, people are way more open to talking because they're alone and want connection anyway. Kelly was also participating in a team-building and growth exercise since, in some ways, team-building exercises are similar to one-time events. However, trust and teamwork take time to develop.

Kelly recalls working with teams she's never seen before in the corporate sector, and what's challenging is fitting in a bit of purposeful effort in between talks just like what they do at Delivering Happiness during a PEC exercise (it's a guided activity, similar to certain coaching questions). Following those standards earns you a lot of trust in the process and helps you make that particular call more efficient that's extremely helpful with the entire project or program that you're running because people get to know each other a lot better and value each other. PEC is much like a listening exercise in which you divide people into groups and give them coaching questions and very specific instructions to ask one another, or like an excel spreadsheet in which you ask a series of questions that people can fill out and then evaluate who heard something insightful or who gave them a new insight.

Insights from Kelly

“Branding is what you say you do. Strategy is the plan of what you want to do. Culture is what you really do.” There are a lot of ways to scale or grow a company but if you don’t consider your culture, your preference, and what you normally do, this is not going to work, so when you implement strategy, you have to consider your company’s culture.

“It doesn’t matter if you're working for a company or you’re starting your own thing, the important thing is you’re finding meaning with your work.”

“You can’t buy freedom and options but it’s definitely not a bad thing to have, obviously.”

"You can do anything you want. All you need is your mindset... learn from people who have done it before, and then if you can’t do it... find other people that can and will work with you. It's so simple but it’s not easy.”

“...there’s only so many hours in a day as well as so many days in a year. Do the things that you like most... Know that it’s okay, that it’s not the best but that’s your one thing.”

Kelly's message to her younger self:

“You’re ready at the level that you’re supposed to be. Everything’s okay. You can slow down... you can do anything you want so no need to figure out what are you supposed to do... figure out what you want to do first, who you wanna be first, and then once you figure that out, all that other stuff will figure itself out.”

“I would say, listen to your wisdom from within because you already know what you want and then galvanize your purposes and just be good on yourself. I think that’s the startup mindset. We’re no longer leading people, we’re leading movements. Not serving yourself, you’re serving people, you’re creating movements.” - Kelly Lei

Recommended Books & Resources:

Delivering Happiness - Tony Hseih

Ramphis Castro

Ramphis is a founding partner of ScienceVest, a Manhattan-based early-stage venture fund that invests in healthcare-related sci-fi tech startups. Ramphis is one of Earl's closest pals and is on the same goal as him in terms of using technology and science to transform the world. Ramphis and Earl have known each other for a long time, having worked together on an impact platform called Alliance17 in various iterations.

Ramphis was born in Guayama, Puerto Rico. Entrepreneurship was imprinted in his upbringing, and it was from there that his entire career began. His parents began introducing him to the concept of creating something out of nothing and fixing someone's problem in a non-traditional way when he was young. Since then, it's been practice for what Ramphis would do later in life, and it's there that the mindset and attitude toward work and problem-solving in the service of others emerged.

Ramphis was the first Spanish-speaking facilitator for Startup Weekend in 2010-2011, helping the program scale and grow, and discover more coordinators in Latin America, the Caribbean, and beyond. He undertook the same for Founder Institute, evolving and designing his program with the help of colleagues and making the best efforts work for the ecosystem they're in.

BUILDING THE COMPANY

Ramphis began his career as an engineer, gaining expertise and understanding in science along the way. He got interested in studying engineering and began his career at Microsoft. Startups or how to build companies was new to him that time. But, after seeing how products are built at Microsoft, he decided to bring his engineering knowledge home and returned to Puerto Rico, where he began to solve problems in various sectors and gradually learned better ways to venerate wealth by solving problems, acquiring, and learning more about what startups were and how to build them. His actual startup did not begin until he was in his early twenties.

Ramphis had worked in Microsoft's product development team. There were fewer product tech companies in Puerto Rico, but there were more service-oriented enterprises overall. Ramphis was influenced by his expertise advising for large-scale firms and doing so across the area for larger industries or larger companies when he decided to establish a business.

Ramphis provides that tiny scale where he started and went for their very first customer, with experience integrating enterprise resource planning at ecosystems, startup systems, and building bespoke analytics for various firms. They had a situation where hospital managers couldn't figure out how to keep track of what was going on, manage their budget, and have a positive relationship with insurance companies since the data was one-sided. Ramphis eventually solved the problem by creating a product that made it simple for hospital administrators to grasp the system.

In 2005-2006, they concentrated on establishing a healthcare analytics firm and devising a method for selecting aggregate data from what was happening while monitoring the hospital's accommodation system. The firm took off from there, although Ramphis admits to making errors on the business side, particularly with the partnership.

Many things have changed in that regard since then, but according to Ramphis, the ecosystem, the concept of mentors, angel investors, VCs, and individuals assisting you for no other reason than to pay it forward has not. There was no one around to assist him while he created his IT firm, and this has become one of the company's challenges. Even now, there exist business assistance programs, but they are primarily for established enterprises, not for development.

Seeing firsthand how almost everything everyone said and did was based on what they felt they needed to develop the firm triggered Ramphis' motivation to get involved in ecosystem-building activities. Ramphis created his firm, which was profitable from start product and market, fixing difficulties, and it was a lesson learned, based on his first experience of witnessing the system that does not apply to developing an innovation-driven company outside of the big tech centers.

The birth of ScienceVest

After his second digital business, Ramphis concentrated on the next step, which was to identify the systemic and global access to the finance division. When he was considering where he might provide value and what he could devote and work on for the next 10-40 years, all the pieces fell into place and aligned, and he came up with the concept of ScienceVest. Ramphis sought to tackle an issue through ScienceVest, which was the financing deficit for science. Building an innovation-driven company is difficult in general in terms of technicalities such as having some property, working not just for AI, but computational biology, synthetic biology, trying to explain that to a VC who doesn't have the technical capacity to understand, solving for a problem that investors haven't experienced themselves, global issues on health and access to help ecosystems, all of this combining causes the funding gap for science to be extreme.

ScienceVest began as a way to close the funding gap in science by instilling more confidence in the rest of the investor ecosystem around the core technology, bringing this market to life, and plotting the market for companies to make it easier to raise and access additional capital from a variety of other sources. They went through the YC-Fellowship program primarily to gather input from the ecosystem about the challenges that arose in 2014-2015, in the hopes of sharing with everyone how deal-making and deal dynamics were going to be private and not public. For all of the reasons that the group addressed inside the venture, allowing them to get permission for the concept to go in and make investments. They've since made commitments in enterprises across Canada and the United States. ScienceVest aimed to address these difficulties and serve as a resource for businesses.

The pandemic, according to Ramphis, has hastened what they were already doing since they've been investing remotely since then because the capacity to develop trust is a new skill set that investors must master. According to Ramphis, if you want to invest outside the hubs, for entrepreneurs everywhere, the default should be that if you're going to be in the service of entrepreneurs, they should come to you. The pandemic scenario, in ScienceVest's opinion, was not a shift at all, but rather improved what they do and how they do it since more investors are learning and altering their risk perceptions.

Right now, there's a lot of interest in climate tech, remote investment, and tech investing, and it's all about raising their profile and gaining further support from other LPs and investors across the world who want to contribute capital at scale to tackle these problems. ScienceVest also aspires to create a long-term black route for science and to be able to appreciate capital in a way that allows it to be implemented effectively to sustain entrepreneurs in the aspects that they require, not just under the venture capital model, but rather under the builder capitalist model of entrepreneurs building companies rather than the mindset of building a company to flip or for the money.

VC-LP, Entrepreneurship, Fundraising Insights from Ramphis

Puerto Rico went from having no money in the bank in 2015 to receiving over $100 million in venture capital investment from investors in New York, Silicon Valley, and other parts of the world. There is presently a thriving developing ecosystem of hundreds, if not thousands, of entrepreneurs operating out of Puerto Rico, including not just Puerto Rican firms but also businesses from 67 different countries. There are many hurdles to starting a company outside the typical tech centers, but the entrepreneurship, level-caliber, and size of talent are clearly here and have now been demonstrated.

Ramphis goes on to say that VCs still have a lot of issues. He was exposed to VCs since they were more pattern-matching on previous investments than looking into the prospective opportunities. According to Ramphis, a real illustration is the Chinese and Southeast Asian investment ecosystems emerging from under Silicon Valley's noses. Silicon Valley's whole investment environment is rivaled. Deals existed, but investors were blind to them, and they are now present in every major ecosystem on the planet. Ramphis participated in the Kauffman Fellows Y Combinator's program, and had several ties with people in many ecosystems across the world with whom he could collaborate, support, and assist everyone. That worldwide ecosystem support took a long time to create, but it was strong enough at that point to attract not just programs like Parallel 18, but also other investors who wanted to see for themselves. The transactions and the entrepreneurs are self-evident.

On the Fundraising Side

As a generalization, Ramphis claims that at the stages where the majority of entrepreneurs are working throughout most developing ecosystems, the difference between the sort of investor who can raise a fund or be a member of a fund, and what the entrepreneurs experience at that level is too wide. Because they have never developed firms of that sort or under such circumstances, several typically absentminded private equity-type professionals are attempting to replicate the type of investment they do in their local, regional ecosystems, or even in big centers. The experience gap is too wide, and there isn't enough convergence between business and finance cultures for investors to make the leap. As a result, the only way for them to commit is to see before they believe, since they can't believe if they can't see because they haven't performed it themselves.

According to Ramphis, the LP was involved in the fundraising effort, and the act of being a GP soliciting a fund is underappreciated. According to him, the contrast in the nature of the connection with money makes raising for a fund numerous orders of magnitude more difficult than raising for a startup. Investors in Ramphis' fund, like investors in any fund, have a 10-year relationship commitment, and the rewards on those dollars aren't always comparable to investing in a company. According to Ramphis, when you invest in a company as an entrepreneur, you're making a promise about the future and the riches you'll build and acquire. Everyone has a portfolio attitude, and you'll only need one of your 10-30 assets to repay your full investment. On one side of the world, it's clearly understood that the dynamic between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists is evident, but LPs have distinct demands.

Distinct LPs have different equity requirements, time spans, stakeholder dynamics, and decision-making parameters. There are other additional aspects, as well as geographic and market-related problems, so there is no way to determine this ahead of time when raising a fund. From the LP side, it's much more opaque, with the dynamic being a lot difficult unless you share a lot of networks in the industry and then plan around displaying the investors you played and how they work. Even yet, the dynamic is vastly different from that of a standard venture-entrepreneur partnership.

The VC-LP connection, according to Ramphis, is significantly more difficult since entrepreneurs have greater influence over the path forward, whereas an operator can construct a firm. Your consumer tries what you do, so your attitude is very clear in the service of fixing a problem for your customers, and as long as you're doing a fantastic job in that area, the other parts will work it out on their own. There's not a lot of control that you have with that relationship when you're an operator, as opposed to just being a VC from a principle or an out list, or even a partner without the tasks from the LP relationships and fundraising side. You can have the track record, you can make the investments, you can showcase the types of companies that you've invested in, and you've given time, but you don't have a way to force or to muddle the relationship.

It's a lot more complicated from the perspective of different LPs, and there's a lot less information on each one, compared to the relatively simple entrepreneur experience of building a company, whereas long as you're solving a problem in a unique way and your customers are compensating you for it, it's very difficult to argue with the data. Investors may simply determine whether or not it is a good fit for them and move on. If you're performing for your consumers as you desire, you have a lot more alternatives as an entrepreneur.

There is no such thing as a simple fundraising effort. There's a lot of background and expectations to consider. It's not like that for all the different sorts of businesses you hear about when it comes to raising money. There are so many first-time funds, first-time managers, and first-time theses, and it's all part of a vicious cycle to get to the next position that's systematically extremely tough to overcome, and at the end of the day, it's trust in the middle that's lacking.

Ramphis' Startup Mindsets

Ramphis focuses on the topic of "what problem are you tackling, why are you doing this, and why should others care?" from the standpoint of a company. At the end of the day, it's all about focusing on an issue that needs to be solved, helping the people you're serving, and following your convictions and mission.

Ramphis believes that in order to establish a globally scalable firm that addresses some of humanity's most pressing issues that touch billions of people, you need investors that understand the situation and are willing to help you as much as possible. Being in the service of entrepreneurs in this way is a significant motivator for Ramphis since it's the most impactful way to invest in them, assist them, and link them with the proper people, resources, and investors to bring them to where they're intended to be.

Ramphis also recommends learning by doing. Make a list of the problems you want to tackle and why you want to solve them. Consider who has the problem rather than the problem itself, and who are you serving? Keep your focus on the issue, learn by doing, and solve the difficulty for whoever it is.

Ramphis' message to his younger self:

“… trust more in yourself… “what makes you different is what makes you powerful”. That was hard for me to believe even now. It’s still a part of the process of acknowledging where I come from, what I learned in that process, and how I grew from those lessons learned… …just go and focus on the ones that also believe, and don’t waste time on the ones that don’t."

"… think about who sees value in what you’re doing, and then solve a problem for them… Try to focus on the areas within yourself that drive you to do something because you have to do it… just go and get it done. Explore that and don’t be afraid to see what answer comes back from that process, just dig into that, write it down even if it’s just for yourself.”

Don’t waste time on people and efforts where you think that by showing, you’d convince them.

Try to focus on the areas within yourself that drive you to do something because you have to do it, and that’s typically where you just find yourself, over a weekend, tinkering on some particular project.

-Ramphis Castro, ScienceVest General Partner

Tingwei Huang

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: January 29, 2021

Tingwei Huang is presently employed with Amazon Web Services and has a long track record of innovating in huge businesses. She and Earl have known one another for over two decades. They met at Cornell Graduate School. Tingwei is one of the leaders in the convergence of semiconductor technology, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. She's an "intrapreneur" who specializes in developing new goods and enterprises in hyper-dynamic marketplaces involving complex technology. In the cloud data center area, she has introduced a number of first-generation unique hardware and software technologies. She has recently concentrated on Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning.

Tingwei received her MBA from INS EAD in 2010 during the economic meltdown, which was one of the factors that prompted her to pursue the degree. Tingwei has formerly worked as an engineer at a semiconductor chip design company. She ventured to see how the corporate world functioned during the financial crisis, so she went to INS EAD, a global business school with campuses in France and Singapore. She also wanted to understand how firms worked outside the United States. Tingwei had a fantastic time and met a lot of interesting individuals from all over the world, which helped her launch her career as a startup business manager at a huge corporation.

She joined Intel as part of their Leadership Acceleration Rotation Program after receiving her MBA. She was allowed to test out several job roles at the organization during that program, with a concentration on Sales and Marketing. Not only that, but she also spent time with Intel Capital, Intel's venture capital arm, functioning as an investor, interviewing and speaking with startups, and investing in them. Tingwei realized after that experience that she is more of an entrepreneur than an investor, as she enjoys establishing businesses and teams far more than investing and "taking advantage" of entrepreneurs. As a result, she dropped out of the rotation program to work for Intel in a startup business unit, where she would develop and launch a new product line.

Tingwei credits her development mentality to her father, who is 75 years old and still working as an entrepreneur. Back in Taiwan, he risked his established profession as an Engineering Consultant in his late 30s-40s to join internet companies in the 1990s to construct internet infrastructures. The Internet was a success because the internet became a large thing, but what he had instilled in Tingwei from a young age was the happiness of working for oneself and being able to generate employment for others, which offers a different degree of joy than working for other people. He urged Tingwei to build her own firm and be entrepreneurial, and because of the risk categories, Tingwei ended up conducting entrepreneurial pursuits in huge corporations.

Intel

Tingwei observes how large organizations, such as Intel, handle innovation and technology in completely different ways. When it comes to new goods or businesses, Intel talks about the sort of product, hundreds of millions of dollars in capital expenditure, and the upfront budget commitment that they must put in and prepare for. There were procedures for authorizing specific projects or gaining entry to each level that was far more severe. There were a lot more reviews, a lot more T's and I's to cross, and a lot more planning upfront; a lot more portfolio forth-thinking, portfolio planning, balancing projects, and comparing various projects to see whether they want to invest in them.

At Intel, at least in the business segment where Tingwei used to work, there is always a lengthy list of numerous projects just on queue that are either underway or planned to begin. There are several criteria to assess in order to evaluate all the projects, and then there are numerous models and conversations to choose which project will move ahead or be funded in the next round. As Tingwei points out, it's a far more thorough procedure.

Amazon

She saw a new type of mindset when she went to Amazon. Tingwei explains that Amazon is a massive startup that instills a successful startup attitude in its employees, which they refer to as a "Day 1" mindset. They interview and hire people in this manner, looking for those that are customer-focused and have a "Day 1" perspective. They train those individuals and operate in the same manner. Because Amazon is a location that supports innovation, anyone can go there and create documents about ideas, suggest them, and ultimately receive a review, and if it's something that people believe Amazon believes in, they'll go ahead and implement it.

When Amazon decides to start anything, it has a lot of convictions to see it through, even if it shows signs of not being a successful enterprise. The Fire phone is one among the cases – that Bezos wants to highlight or out mention previously. It was not a success, but the team's experience and knowledge contributed to the later success of Fire TV, additional Fire devices, tablet devices, and even today's most popular smart speaker, Alexa devices. According to Tingwei, failure tolerance is not just accepting failure but also learning from it in order to contribute to future triumphs.

Intrapreneur vs Entrepreneur

Between being an entrepreneur and an "intrapreneur," Tingwei admits to being extremely practical in this debate and proposes that you consider your risk portfolio in your life, as it is, after all, a lifestyle choice. Tingwei, on the other hand, was always drawn to entrepreneurial initiatives and dreamed about creating her own business and making it huge. Her entrepreneur spouse, who already takes a lot of chances, is one of the reasons she opted to do it at a major firm. With that, she was able to flex her entrepreneurial muscles while remaining secure within the confines of a large corporation.

The magnitude of a project's success is something else she enjoys about being an intrapreneur, especially with large companies like Intel and Amazon, which are looking forward to having a hundred-million-dollar or a billion-dollar business in a few years. So, whatever individuals jumpstart could have the potential to touch everyone in the world, especially in Tingwei's field of cloud computing and artificial intelligence, which is very prevalent.

According to Tingwei, it's quite rewarding to be able to say or tell her children that whatever technology she's working on is powering the robots you see, the self-driving vehicles we'll see on the roads, the Disney Plus and TV shows you watch on your video, and so on. Tingwei links it back to her original aim as an engineer, which was to see what she invented and worked on at a large corporation used by others. She had a far better chance of seeing the items she created and developed being seen by others.

Investments

When it comes to investing, Tingwei advises that when working for a corporation, you should seek for startups that will complement the company's main business while also considering the financial benefits. The first tick, or must-have, is that it must be a good investment opportunity, and the second is that it must be a startup that complements the business divisions in some manner.

At Intel, they frequently take leads from the business units. According to Tingwei, the difference between a merging acquisition and a regular investment in a startup is razor-thin. M&A considerations and equity investments are often extremely different, yet they are both conceivable. There may be an M&A target, but because the large corporation is unsure, they begin with an equity investment. For example, at this point, additional proof is needed to determine whether this is a good technology or whether you have consumer attractiveness prior to the purchase. Intel may begin by acquiring an equity investment in a firm and investing in it so that they may assist the company show their technology to the next level, and then when the technology is more mature and the timing is appropriate, Intel may go ahead and purchase the company. Most of the time, though, Intel does not need to contact you. It's more likely that the entrepreneur will have to declare that they're also ready to sell. Intel also doesn't conduct equity investments as an angel out of M&A, since it happens to be that way on a very rare occasion.

Cloud Computing

Tingwei adds that cloud computing initiatives entail outsourcing as she introduces us to AI and cloud computing. Prior to cloud computing, each employee of a company had to set up their own IT department, IT branch, and data center. With the growth of cloud computing, you might transfer that work to other firms, such as certain web services, or microsoft or google cloud, which are the largest ones, and therefore make your IT operation more effective by outsourcing to other organizations. For a startup, providing an IT infrastructure that is always on, secure, and dependable was a tremendous problem. The majority of your mobile apps, especially the most important ones, are now hosted on a cloud infrastructure, such as Zoom. If Zoom were housed on a private infrastructure, the site would not fall down when the outbreak hit and assumptions of its usage suddenly increased. There's no way it could extend the abrupt rise long enough to create the infrastructure, let alone survive the surge in demand. So, the advantage of offloading or partially offloading these IT processes to a public cloud infrastructure is that you can take advantage of the flexibility, elasticity, and you only pay for what you utilize in the cloud.

Insights from Tingwei

One of her favorite aspects of being an intrapreneur is the freedom and increased ownership compared to other jobs in large corporations. She is granted further liberty to try new things, which comes with a high risk; she is given more freedom to try doing things differently and not necessarily continuing to adopt the plan of how things are typically done in the company, which allowed Tingwei to exercise her creativity while still being protected by the big company's safety net. If the project fails, she has the flexibility to go on to the next one and perform a better job, so that others will recognize her talents and track records and hire her for another new project. Tingwei was able to perform many projects at Intel time after time because of this. Some were really successful, while others utterly failed, but people know her abilities and are eager to hire her for future projects. The disadvantage is that you won't have an equity position in the product you're working on, and you won't be able to earn the hundreds of times or thousands of times that actual entrepreneurs would.

Tingwei's Startup Mindset

"Customer obsession" is the most vital aspect of the startup mindset. This is significant for startups, whether they are part of a larger corporation or operating independently, because the most essential thing is to ensure that they are on the right path and have metrics to show investors and upper management which ventures to continue to invest in. It's crucial to be able to listen to consumers who are prepared to take a chance and adapt early on, and to understand their pain points so you can adjust the product and iterate quickly to mitigate the problem. Even if clients provide criticism that contradicts your initial idea, be open-minded, eager to listen, and willing to adjust for the sake of the customer. Constantly considering ways to enhance goods to make the customer experience more easy, fluid, and cost-effective helps clients save money. Customer obsession is unquestionably crucial.

A message to her 20year-old self:

“Life is long. At 20 years old, some people may have a particular idea of what you would become, or what you want to do and I would say, think of yourself as a product and iterate it. Things will come along the way, opportunities will come along the way, the environments will change, whether its economic environments or technology environments. You will meet different people and you will learn things that would change your belief. And, when things happen that doesn’t go the original ways that you would like it to be or you’d like it to go, then you have to pivot and find a different way out, and that may be the best things that will ever happen to you, and that may open different doors to new opportunities that you never thought about. It’s good to have a vision and an idea of what you want to become at 20 years old, but also it’s very important thinking of yourself as a product or as yourself as a startup. "

"Stay open to the signal of what the world is telling you and using those signals to constantly reinvent yourself and tweak your directions. Each person will, at the end of the day, become a very distinct shell and have a very distinct path. You don’t need to compare yourself with other people, you are your one kind of distinct product.”

Recommended Books & Resources:

Dale Carnegie - How to Win Friends and Influence People

Amazon’s Leadership Principles - Talks from Jeff Bezos

Maia Tekle

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: January 29, 2021

Maia Tekle, COO of Dispatch Goods, is our guest for this episode, and she takes us to the environmental space of business, sharing the roots of the company's establishment, how their industry operates and who they serve, the concerns that the firm is aiming at tackling, and the company's future aspirations. Maia Tekle also discusses the business consequences of the pandemic, as well as her own startup mindsets that inspired her to overcome adversity.

Dispatch Goods, a startup that collaborates with restaurants and consumers to give reusable container alternatives for takeaway and delivery meals, is headed by Maia Tekle. As Maia points out, she has spent the most of her career working for huge corporations with a lot of structure and rules to follow. Being named COO has been such an incredible eye-opening experience for her that she considers it a really significant and great title to hold. Maia also talks about her early roots as a dishwashing machine operator and became a delivery driver and obtaining all the hands - on work that goes into creating a logistics firm.

Dispatch Goods

Maia met her co-founder, Lindsey Hoell, in the middle of last year while participating in the Sustainable Ocean Alliance Accelerator, which included entrepreneurs working to tackle challenges harming our oceans, notably single-use food containers for restaurants, meal delivery, and take out. With a rise in consumption, the great majority of those containers end up in landfills, with many more ending up in the oceans. Lindsey is a surfer who saw a lot of rubbish washing up on beaches in Hawaii, where she resided, and also in the Bay Area. Maia, who has always been an environmentalist, was working at a food delivery company when she met Lindsey. Seeing the overwhelming amount of single-use containers, she set out to create a new system with the purpose of making reusability easy and accessible to restaurants and consumers, allowing them to make better environmental choices.

Since then, the firm has had numerous inbounds from restaurants, who are referring them to their restaurant friends. Many of their inbounds come through website interactions, and they check to see whether the consumer is in the San Francisco region, which is their starting point. Dispatch Goods intends to grow into the remainder of the Bay Area as soon as possible, ideally till the East Bay, Peninsula, South Bay, and beyond. If the consumer lives in the service region, Dispatch Goods begins onboarding them. Dispatch Goods began a test of takeaway on its pilot week, giving the restaurant with clean, sanitized containers, and they modified their website to include a dispatch reusable option, where consumers may choose whether to place their meals in the reusable or single-use containers.

Dispatch Goods strives in a method as simple as Kerbside recycling: the consumer places their recycling in a bag provided by Dispatch Goods, places it on their street, and Dispatch Goods collects it on their pickup date, which is every two weeks. As per Maia, many businesses would like to employ reusable containers, but the challenge is getting those containers back to them, and so Dispatch Goods aims to establish reverse logistics. Right now, they're starting with their own containers, but they also have plans to collect on a variety of other companies, bringing a lot of positive intent in terms of reusability. When it comes to reusability, restaurants don't have many options, thus Dispatch Goods attempts to make it as simple and economical for them to participate in as possible, as well as to raise awareness.

Because Dispatch Goods' items are constructed of stainless steel and silicon, and the jars are made of glass, buying food on plastic would be a low standard. Dispatch Goods began among the downtown lunch crowd, and many of their customers preferred the Dispatch Goods experience to the single-use experience, which boosted the brand. The customer must pay a price to avail the service, which right now is at a one-time price of $1.50 per meal, which includes the picking up of the containers from the customers' home. There is also a subscription option that provides access to limitless containers regardless of how many are used. As Dispatch Goods expands, they hope that more people will sign up for the membership and that as the pandemic ends, they will be expanded to more areas such as grocery stores, offices, and community centers where people can drop off their packages.

Dispatch Goods is presently enrolled in the Berkeley Skydeck accelerator program, which, according to Maia, has been a "one-of-a-kind" experience due to its remote nature. Some built-in friendship, according to Maia, doesn't exactly present from a distance, but a lot of the programming is quite planned, and Dispatch Goods has been able to attend and engage more than they may have been if it were in person. Because most of Dispatch Goods' time is committed to live logistics, they were able to step in online much more easily than if they were out delivering driving.

Against the Pandemic

Dispatch Goods was catering to the downtown lunch crowd when COVID-19 struck, and they had to pivot swiftly by conducting extensive research to ensure they knew the transferability across pandemic dangers as well as where people have been opened and interested in reusability. Dispatch Goods saw this as an opportunity and pooled all of their data and interviews to discover that customers who desire reusability want it now more than ever as they're seen their waste pile up at home. It is no longer dispersed over several areas, but is instead primarily concentrated at their home. Dispatch Goods has now shifted to a direct-to-consumer strategy, which they hope will take off and be successful based on demand.

Dispatch Goods intends to integrate with some major competitors, such as meal delivery services. As Maia says, "we have to crawl before we walk, walk before we run," ensuring that their reverse logistics are precise and polished as additional factors are taken into account. Dispatch Goods has now debuted with pick-ups so that individuals may order and pick up from the restaurant, with the intention of eventually incorporating with one or more third-party delivery businesses. Dispatch Goods is restaurant agnostic, so any restaurant that wishes to collaborate with them is welcome to do so.

Stepping up to the Future

Maia is inspired to establish a 4th bin system, a full circular system in which many firms and individuals are pleased to be reusable team members. She anticipates that in five years, the firm will have expanded to several countries and will have fully operational circular logistics working with restaurants, as well as growing beyond restaurants to any industry that needs a reusability solution.

Maia highlights Yelp as a team with similar environmental aims to theirs, and they were searching for ways to lower their carbon impact. A large portion of their lunchtime rate was single-use items, making them a wonderful fit for their downtown model where 14 stories inside one building multiplied by however many people are on each level equals a lot of trash, which they were able to reduce easily into reusability. They displayed their health badge at the numerous eateries on their block, and the businesses were pleased to join because they were also aware of the problem.

When given the choice, a large majority of individuals would select the alternative that is best for the environment. If it's just as easy to choose single-use versus reusable, people will choose reusable because it's better for the environment, and that's what Dispatch Goods' goal is: to remove any additional work for the consumer while acknowledging that consumer behavior exists and that changing consumer behavior is a huge challenge in and of itself. Dispatch Goods wants to introduce them to a new option, and the more establishments they sign up, the more successful it will be since more consumers will be exposed to it.

Insights from Maia Tekle

“In so many parts of my life and some big decisions that I’ve made, it’s always about trusting your gut.”

Maia had a couple other employment offers that were considerably more steady when she decided to join Lindsey at the start of the year. She had worked for large corporations and would have proceeded on a different route if she hadn't felt a stronghold, she wanted to believe in her own instincts and decisions. She prefers to suppress her feelings, but she trusts her instincts, and that which has led her to where she is today. According to Maia, the opportunity presented itself, and she needed to be a part of the solution.

“You also have to feel really strongly about the mission and your goals, that drives you to the late nights and the grit work and the really tough Nos. You really have to feel that strongly in what you’re doing.”

“To have a strong sense of self is really important, and then not tying that sense of self to your cause or your company.”

When we hear Nos or unfavorable criticism, we shouldn't take it personally, as Maia says. Maia has been able to maintain a level head and go on as a result of her capacity to separate those two. She also claims that it comes with a great support system, including helpful friends and a wonderful family. Maia considers herself lucky in that she has people in her camp who are supportive and who listen to criticism while also understanding where it comes from. It's critical to ensure that you'll be able to respond thoughtfully to it.

“Being in the environmental space, being in the sustainability space, there’s so many people that want us to succeed and that has been a different perspective that I wasn’t expecting. People want to solve this and they’re excited that we are trying to solve this big problem, and I think that’s a bit different being in that space too.”

According to Maia, technological advancements have leveled the playing field in a variety of ways, providing more individuals access to and exposure to things that they would not have had access to before. As per Maia, there is a lot to be said about broadening the reach and accessibility of technology to a broader range of individuals, and a lot of knowledge and learning is now more readily available through internet sources.

Maia's Startup Mindset

“If you’re thinking about wanting to do something and you feel it in your gut, and you feel really strong towards something, just go for it. Life is short. There’s enough going on. We need more people that are feeling really strongly and passionately about what they’re doing. Take the risk and hopefully it will pay up and if it doesn’t, you at least try and put yourself out there. I’m coming from a privileged place where I had the ability to take that risk but if there are steps that you can take in between, do it, explore it or you can talk to people that are in this place and feel inspired to join a group or a meetup or whatever. There are different avenues to go down on or even explore it at the very least.”

A message to her 20-year-old self:

“If I were to speak candidly with my 20-year-old self, I would tell her to challenge the status quo more. I would give the advice to seek out more people with different perspectives and different paths to illuminate that there isn’t just one path to success, and especially for a woman of color, that can look very different from a lot of the people I was getting advice from at a young age. I would encourage her to explore more career development, it was hard because that was around 2008-2009, where if you got a job, you have to hold on to it for dear life because the economy had crashed. But I do think it’s something that I discovered later in my path that speaking to people with diverse backgrounds in terms of career development, that's had a monumental influence on me positively and I would encourage anyone right now to talk to people that have had different career paths because it would show you what’s possible.”

Raphael "Ping" Rivero

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: January 24, 2021

Ping is currently the first hire Growth/Performance marketer at LendingHome focused on driving acquisition through paid media and partnerships. He is one of the top growth marketers according to Earl. He joined one of the startups in IdeaSpace, the startup accelerator that Earl founded in the Philippines. He’s been part of starting a social group meeting Filipino Technologists record basis called the Filipino Tech Fridays with Earl and just recently actually co-founded the virtual accelerator that connects Silicon Valley and emerging markets - Cognity Labs, artificial intelligence, and data-driven startup.

Ping is a software engineer, term marketer. He majored in Information Systems in college and intended to work as a software developer. He became interested in the startup industry throughout his years 2 and 3 of college. Earl first appeared at a discussion about startups at La Salle, where he learned about the startup industry. He did an internship at IdeaSpace, which Earl co-founded, where he worked on IT matters. When Ping was looking for his first job, he applied for and was hired for a growth manager position with Taxumo, similar to TurboTax but is located in the Philippines and helps freelancers, business owners, and professionals pay their taxes online, where he worked on growth marketing and gained the maximum exposure.

After a year, he decided to take the risk of going abroad again, and he ultimately landed a Marketing job, this time in performance marketing, with an eCommerce firm named Fanatics for roughly 5 months. As a result, Ping returns to the startup industry, eventually working as a growth leader for a company named Gabi. His job entailed growth hacking, growth marketing, and product marketing, among other things. He was the business's first growth marketing recruit at the time, laying the groundwork for the company and closing its USD before he departed. He's now working as a performance team manager for a startup called LendingHome, where he talks a lot about acquisition marketing and getting new customers for the company, and, as Earl mentioned, he also co-founded Cognity Labs, a startup incubator that aims to connect Silicon Valley with emerging markets.

Getting into the Startup Scene

Ping was seeking for motivation to become a better software engineer during his second year of college when he came across this documentary called The Startup Kids. This film focused on young entrepreneurs, primarily software engineers, who went into business for themselves. Drew Houston, the creator of Dropbox, Brian Wong, the inventor of Kiip, and Eric Wahlforss, the founder of SoundCloud, were all present. Ping's interest in having a computer background and subsequently learning the business side of things was ignited by the documentary, which prompted him to enter the startup sector, moving his focus from software engineering to business.

When Ping had a number of problems that he wanted to tackle with technology, he recognized the chance for tech giants to grow. One of his biggest concerns was standing in line at the LTO to obtain a license. Banks and their support are inefficient, according to Ping, but this could be improved if individuals use technology. That approach hinged solely around him noticing obstacles in daily routines and interactions that, if broken down, might be mechanized and made more efficient. According to Ping, this perspective evolved until he began looking for firms in the Philippines that were addressing this issue. That's when he came upon Ideaspace!

Earl, who happens to be a Filipino, was in Silicon Valley, so Ping cold-emailed him and left a note introducing himself with the intention of applying as an intern. He didn't ask for anything in exchange, just some assistance in becoming exposed to the entire world of businesses in Silicon Valley and trying to find his match. Earl was the first person to introduce him to the full startup scene in Silicon Valley, which is vastly different from the Philippines, and this proved to be the first fitting. While conducting his apprenticeship with Earl, he was also worked side jobs, such as driving for Instacart, doing Postmates, and everything else he could think of to supplement his income. It was a difficult voyage, but one that was also rewarding, as per Ping.

Ping decided to become a marketer since he was interested in the business side of things. He learned about growth hacking and recognized that marketing is getting increasingly technological. With a technical background, he recognized a chance to combine his technical and commercial interests, and he attempted to self-learn by watching videos on YouTube and reading blogs.

Insights from Ping

"Marketing strategy should be determined by the company."

Ping believes that the marketing strategy should be determined by the company. The first thing to think about is different channels: each firm has its own channel, which varies depending on the sort of company or service that you're attempting to advertise.

"Be deliberate about what you're going to test when it comes to marketing."

Ping admits that one of his previous flaws was getting too caught up in growth hacking. Trying to build it on a corporation that didn't apply to him was a mistake. Ping's advice to a small business is to be deliberate about what you're going to test when it comes to marketing. For a SaaS firm, for one, start by creating content or instructional information about what your service is, what issues you're attempting to solve with it, and how the product is tackling those problems from an educational standpoint. Running advertising necessitates explaining your service's message as well as the reason for testing or experimenting on a certain channel.

"People don't purchase what you do; they buy why you do it."

The first piece of advice Ping gives is to begin by asking oneself "why." With this mentality, Ping was able to promote certain products and applications by first understanding the audience and target consumers. You'll have someplace to go down on what precisely would be the most attractive or what will address the concern that they're having that will force them to sign up for your service or try out your service based on their pinpoints, their motivation. Begin by asking why, and then try to figure out what difficulty you're trying to fix.

Basal Content/Educational Content

Ping emphasizes the necessity of basic material or instructional content while discussing how to expand Cognity Labs. Startups do not utilize advertisements; instead, they provide a lot of instructional information, such as how to pitch your business or how to find investors, as well as podcasts and a startup school section. Rather of just putting out an ad, attempt to push out information and do more instructional things.

"Find a balance and be intentional with what channels you want to stress out."

Ping supports paid advertising if you have a receptive site and want to learn quickly in the continuing debate between paying for growth and product-market fit. One of the most significant advantages of paid advertising is the ability to generate rapid traffic and visitors to your website. People get addicted to paid advertising as a result of growing visible numbers, yet this isn't always sustainable because paid advertising eventually leads to insurance management. As a result, establishing a balance on how to acquire more cheaply while avoiding paying for advertisements is required. To balance things out, you may run the engines on your app, issue invites, conduct SEOs, or write content. Ping recommends establishing a balance and being deliberate about the channels you want to stress out when it comes to marketing. Just because a rival is using paid advertising doesn't imply you should as well.

Ping's Startup Mindset

Love for Problem-Solving & Starting from Scratch

Ping's entrepreneurial mindset encompasses a variety of traits, including a passion for problem-solving and the desire to start from the ground up. His father, who was also a techie who studied engineering in the Philippines, was the source of these views. He was also interested in business and launched his own, as well as working for other electronic firms as a sales manager and a country manager. Ping's father, who has an engineering degree, instilled in him a passion for problem-solving and beginning from scratch. He was once given a position in the United States that would have allowed them to relocate before Ping was born. But, he instead chose to start from the ground up a branch of a large electronics firm in the Philippines. Observing dad and observing how he worked had a tremendous impact on Ping's studies and schoolwork up until he started his profession.

Advice from Ping

“There are two things I would recommend or I would suggest. One, try to network as early as you can. When I was in college, I was one of an introvert, I would say. I didn’t like going to networks and events because I didn’t like small talk. This time, when I moved to the States, I think that’s one of the biggest things that I had to learn, which is connecting with people and developing relationships. As early as you can, try to meet people and try to develop and build relationships with them.

Second, something that I’m realizing and reflecting upon now is, have an infinite game. This is something that I’ve learned from Simon Sinek. The typical mindset for a younger me is to get this job at this company and get this amount of salary, get a nice house, or whatever, and that was the finite game. If you come to think of it, when you achieve those, what’s next? You don’t know as much. So the infinite game that I’m thinking of and I’ve developed as well right now is helping people solve their problems through tech and helping them reach those products as easy as they can. Connecting the dots, I think the medium that I can use there is through marketing and eventually so, for me to continue that infinite game, I’m starting to expand my skills, going to VC to probably invest it in startups that actually help people’s concerns and also do consulting advising. That’s one thing. Have an infinite game, develop an infinite game.”

Recommended Books & Resources:

Two books that became Ping’s biggest sources were Growth Hacking Marketing by Ryan Holiday, which is the best primer for someone to go into growth marketing and Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis.

Another thing that Ping usually goes to is growth influencers such as Andrew Chen, ex-growth marketer of Uber, whom Ping learned a lot from about the fundamentals of growth and the advanced stuff on growth as well. He also had the VC perspective on growth, which has been very helpful for Ping as well in his last company.

Ping also follows Casey Winters, chief product officer of Eventbrite, where Ping got a lot of foundation on how to retain customers. Furthermore, there’s Brian Balfour, founder of Reforge, also the VP of growth of HubSpot, one of the leaders of growth. Lastly, Ping suggests self-learning on YouTube, which he says is the best e-learning platform that’s free for everyone.

Ravi Kurani

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: January 20, 2021

Ravi Kurani, Sutro's Founder and President, introduces us to Sutro's objective of giving clean water to people all over the globe, deconstructs the notion of funding, explains why "Hardware is hard," and takes us back to the events in his life that encouraged him to have that grit attitude.

Ravi Kurani is a graduate of UCR's Mechanical Engineering program and the founder of Sutro, a company that serves backyard pool owners in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Texas, and Florida. He got his first work as a research assistant at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which cleared the path for Sutro's mechanical component.Ravi was born in India and raised in an immigrant family. Ravi acquired the willpower required to develop a franchise, build a business in the United States, and grow it from zero to a hundred from his father, who owns a business in the United States. During his undergraduate years, he began to travel extensively in order to explore the globe. He worked in India after completing a job in Brazil. Sutro's technical side stems from his Mechanical Engineering degree at UC Riverside. Ravi was fascinated by fluid mechanics and aeronautical systems, and his first employment at NASA was as a research assistant at JPL.

Ravi was heavily impacted by his father's opening of a franchise of pool and spa supply businesses in Southern California, which led to their emergence into the swimming pool industry. Ravi began working at the pool business during his high school summers, watching his father wake up every day at 5 a.m. to get things up and running, specifically the service visits to clean the pools, change the filters, and change the pumps. He runs the business with his father from an early age, learning about the technical side of things like what sort of chlorine to put in the pool, what type of acid to buy, and doing chemical tests in the back, all the way down to selling 3,000-5,000-dollar heavy equipment sets. Ravi pinpoints where he acquired the tenacity to get started after witnessing and working with his father in the industry.

SUTRO

Sutro is an automatic water chemistry monitor for pools and spas that detects the cleanliness of swimming pool water. Pool or spa owners may use Sutro to test and monitor their water, ensuring that it is clean, using a robot that floats inside the pool and is connected to a mobile app for both Android and iOS. The app tells you what kind of pool treatment you need, as well as how to measure water chemistry and restore it. Sutro's ambitions extend beyond swimming pools to include a broader range of sectors and industries, such as agriculture, food and beverage, and janitorial cleanliness. "Anywhere water touches the world, that's where we want to be."

This all started while he was working in India with Village Capital on the due diligence process for a test fund they were launching. Ravi became involved in the diligence process while individuals were developing water filtering technologies. They were attempting to repair water using a jackhammer strategy in which they attempted to apply a one-size-fits-all solution. Ravi began researching "sensing," attempting to comprehend what the difficulties with water were and, in essence, honing in on specific concerns and uncovering issues through water filtration, chemical challenges, and problem-solving. That's where Sutro got its start: by essentially building up the sensor.

Sutro’s prototype was built in India and was sold to the government. Bolt, which was then the Bolt Hardware Fund based in Boston, was one of Sutro's earliest investors. They spent six months in Boston, first putting up the technology and then opening the San Francisco office with Axel Bichara, one of Bolt's two partners at the time. Out of the finest nine facilities in San Francisco, Sutro was one of the first firms for the Bolt Fund.

Sutro, according to recent reports, has just been launched, and it manages everything from negotiating with the Chinese contract manufacturer to determining quality assurance and quality control methods. The Sutro robot contains about 350 distinct components, all of which must be examined in some way. There are key bits in the microfluidic chip utilized in chemistry that are critical components of the robot, and that microfluidic chip must be thoroughly verified. Everything, even down to the plastic casing on the exterior, must be tested to a particular percentage and must be documented properly.

The most memorable event for Ravi was watching the team complete the project. What was exciting was witnessing the team of electrical engineers and software developers make judgments on color schemes and design rules, as well as performing their roles, from a concept to an actual product. As Ravi puts it, "you can put pen to paper, write the book, hold the book in your hand," but "the most fulfilling part is when you give the book to someone else to read and they finish flipping that final page and find it to be a very fantastic read." Sutro's definition of validation is selling a product to a client, obtaining it from China via San Francisco, delivering it to an end-user, having them put it in their water, and finding it useful, gratifying, and beneficial.

Investments, Co-founders & Team, Fundraising

Working with friends was the safest approach for Ravi to find co-founders. According to him, the 9-5 job consumes the majority of your work-life percentage if you have 12 hours in a day, and this exceeds while working for a startup, which is theoretically from 6 am to 9 pm. If you're going to spend more time with someone, make sure it's someone you're comfortable with. There will be a lot more complications if you have the friendship behind you when dealing with business, money, and fundraising, but stepping into all of that with someone new may be much more challenging.

As a potential investor, fundraising necessitates being aware of every type of approach in your firm. Raising funds entails more than just talking to investors and other such activities. Your investors are your stakeholders, you are a stakeholder in your own firm, your staff are corporate stakeholders, and your consumers are your stakeholders. When each of your stakeholders considers your company in the context of a certain transaction, they will have expectations. They anticipate to be in an environment that will nourish them. They expect to be able to come to work and feel at ease while still being challenged in what they're doing. In terms of fundraising, that is the employee stakeholder mindset.

For the investors, know your stakeholder and figure out their relationship with your business. Building this oriented structure of an interaction-centered company with all the stakeholders, you start to understand that the investors are not one thing for they will help you for equity. The question is about increasing shareholder value and investor value. Ideas must make sense, must be fundable, and over the span of time, can increase exponentially to hit investor returns. It's best to look at and study any investor's fund raised, what they want to invest in, whether they’re at the beginning or end of the fund as funds are raised usually in 10-year cycles. If they’re at the beginning of the fund, they’re probably taking on new investments. If they’re at the end, they may have capital reserved for businesses they’ve already invested in. All of these factors will take place as the core demographic about whose interested in investing in your business.

Getting the firm bought, according to Ravi, was all part of the journey. There's a lot that goes into acquiring a business. A person or group that buys you out is also included. When you consider your business objectives, you must consider them alongside your workers, customers, and the future of what you want to achieve for your firm. You must evaluate and think about them in the same way that you consider and think about your company's future.

Hardware is Hard

Hardware is hard. The typical Silicon Valley venture capital industry focuses on software businesses that develop apps, machine learning, data science, and software solutions that are largely focused on screen interface. Hardware is difficult because you have to construct something else on top of the object that sits on the screen, and it's also performing two things at once. If hardware fails, many operations must be performed, including obtaining replacement components, building it, delivering it to the consumer, and having them reinstall it. When it comes to software, it takes time and effort to make code modifications that can be applied across the board. Software vs. hardware scalability is a distinct topic. Also, your product will not appeal to everyone. There are suitable days, early enthusiast customers, and initial users who will buy and create your goods with you in the early phases. That's a far cry from what you'll receive a year or more down the road if you've built a solid firm.

Building a firm or a startup is difficult. It'll be delivered in layers of complexity. It's all difficult because, at the end of the day, you have a concept and are attempting to sell it to someone. A product may not be very excellent, and consumers may not want to buy it, forcing the company to continue to expand and improve the product, which is difficult.

Running a startup is difficult since the main purpose is to gain flexibility: flexibility to raise more funding, flexibility to hire more people to work on a specific product, and flexibility to consumers and markets. As your firm grows in complexity and requires more flexibility, it's critical to examine financing, if the business will continue without that buyer, and whether the employees will be well-cared for and whether they care about investors. All of these questions must be answered in order to be acknowledged. You are a fiduciary as a business owner. You have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder profit. You must gather them on a board and make the best decisions possible.

Ravi Kurani's Startup Mindset:

“It’s grit that we’re determined by, and by grit I mean perseverance. Just don’t give up because there’s going to be an option if you look hard enough. Seeing my dad go from one pool store to 30 pool stores in Southern California takes that grit. Seeing it and living within it makes you start to emulate it, and it’s a gradual process.”

A message to his 20-year-old self:

“I would tell him to not sweat the small things because, in the beginning, you’re always worried about everything all the time in a 100% capacity. The second thing I’ll tell him is that I’m from the future and we’re okay, so just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Recommended Books and Resources:

Ravi shares the book that inspired him which is Harry Potter and sees that for 2 reasons: the first is because JK Rowling is an amazing storyteller and looking back to being a founder and working within a startup, it’s all about storytelling.

"Humans are creatures that love stories and so if you can understand and capture the art of storytelling, you can probably best impress your employees, you can work with your customers, investors, and stakeholders." - Ravi Kurani

The 2nd piece is that it’s a really interesting story. According to Ravi, the story of Harry and the stuff that he had to go through, JK Rowling has done an incredible job of explaining that and that inspired him.

Ron Ro

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: February 3, 2021

Earl and Ron used to work together at Cisco around ten years ago in the emerging technologies team, where Cisco incubates firms, and Ron was a product manager in one of their units. Ron, previously a Techstars mentor, planned to establish a business a few years later. He co-founded Awair, a firm that focuses on offering healthy buildings and indoor spaces, whether for living or working, using a data-driven solution approach. Awair began his trip in 2013 and has been on it for over seven years.

AWAIR

The firm's official name was Bitfinder Inc., which Ron and his co-founder Kevin established as a company before deciding to call it "Awair." They used to start constructing 3D printers together when they first met, which they were delighted to promote. Ron recalls a book called Makers, which talked about the future of manufacturing and how technologies like 3D printing and progress will make it all more consumer-friendly. Both were enthralled by the book and, in particular, by the prospect of 3D printing.

Ron was the Product Manager at Cisco's smart buildings business, where he studied the needs of managing these buildings from the experiences of the people within. By having data on key components such as interior quality and environmental components, they started with residential items for houses and have now expanded to include commercial products for businesses, schools, and hospitals.

Ron expresses his own perspective by telling a story about both Kevin and his family. Ron now has three children, the first of whom, Ella, was born with severe eczema. Kevin's children suffered severe asthma. To maintain the environment safe and healthy for them, both must use a lot of humidifiers and purifiers. Some data had to be acquired and prompt action taken because an air purifier and a humidifier would not solve everything. The mentality was to first understand the surroundings and the problem in order to find the best answers. They began assembling a few sensors for temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, and PM2.5 as quickly as possible, with the goal of first figuring out how to make sense of their surroundings, and that's what they finally accomplished.

Awair's objective was to develop and promote sufficient environments. They'll be found in all built-in surroundings, including homes and buildings, where sensors must be placed all around the place. They discovered a need to assist in the management and control of these facilities from the standpoint of people's health and safety, not only energy efficiency. They've been talking a lot about net-zero green buildings, which are really essential for the environment, as well as what it takes to operate these buildings in terms of health and safety. People are becoming more aware of and comprehending the problem as a result of recent coronavirus outbreaks, which means there is still a lot of work to be done on Awair's enhancements and updates.

Accelerators & Team Culture

Awair is a part of two accelerators: one is Techstars, and the other is R/GA Accelerator, a New York-based digital accelerator. R/GA and Techstars collaborate on IoT products and especially IoT startups who were part of a New York-based IoT program. They then had the opportunities to join StartX in Palo Alto, which started later than Techstars. The accelerators were quite beneficial to Ron, since the entire program was extremely rigorous in terms of teaching him how to sell and deal with early clients. One must be disciplined in terms of products and how to operate with them. The initial connection made with investors, belt leaders, and influencers gives a sense of urgency, speed, and comprehension of the dialogue being conducted.

For Ron, the team comes first. He feels that bringing in bright people is important, and that if you can develop a trustworthy network, you'll have something to fall back on whether you're in a new firm or not. This also pertains to the company's culture. Ron is most proud of his current team, which he co-founded with Kevin and has developed a culture around. When you come into their team, Ron confidently claims, you'll see the diversity.

Challenges of AWAIR

COVID-19 undoubtedly brought attention, resulting in an increase in visitors to Awair's website. Commercial clients are preparing for reentry and will be confronted with new standards in terms of cleanliness, ventilation, and differing capacities in these spaces, as well as how air quality is handled and monitored across these areas. There are a lot of demands on those parts, as well as the consumer's, because there must be a lot of awareness, health, and safety in an indoor setting.

Awair does not promise to detect COVID-19, but it does measure vital things like carbon dioxide. It is crucial for ventilation and a key component of understanding how you're ventilating, obtaining fresh air from outside, and distributing it throughout the area. For any infections or viruses, temperature and humidity have a significant role. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security just published research on how viral degradation is affected by humidity and temperature. It's critical to know what's going on in your environment and what you need to do about it. All you need to know is how a mitigator perceives your area.

Funding & Manufacturing sector

According to Ron, hardware is difficult due to a few factors. The first is that it is reliant on the manufacturing process. Because the production process isn't totally owned in terms of supply chain, production, and logistics, it's frequently established with partners. As a startup, you don't have as much leverage with suppliers, factories, and schedules as you have with software, which is very easy to develop in the mobile environment, and then there's eCommerce. It's all about people, according to Ron, in order to reduce as much risk as possible in the beginning. It'll be critical for any hardware business to surround the founding team with a lot of professionals who are partners you can trust, who operate the firm through the uncertainties and lack of influence you have around the supply chain.

According to Ron, every fundraising procedure is difficult. Regardless of what you see and read on the internet, every entrepreneur has experienced a variety of highs and lows during the fundraising process. Because traction is such an important part of the business, determining how much you have will be difficult. You must comprehend how you present your idea to others, as well as the dynamics of conversing with investors who will have a variety of queries, motives, and interests. That is why, as much as practical, getting introduced to the head of investors will save you time since you will now be able to grasp what the other party is interested in through the person who introduced you. Have your trusted mechanism in place to ensure that you aren't being introduced to a random investor.

Ron Ro's Startup Mindsets:

“If you have something whether it's an idea or a feeling to start something like a company, go do it”

-Ron Ro, CEO of AWAIR

“So, the connection that you build in the beginning, very early in your company really builds you the sense of urgency, the pace, understanding of the conversations you're having with investors, belt leaders, and influencers. It really helped me in a lot of ways, putting that urgency in the structured mindset from the beginning.”

“It’s important to understand what’s going on in your place and what you need to do about it.”

"First, you have to have a perspective on what is the problem, how to solve that problem, and who it is being solved for. In order to solve the problem, more data needs to be gathered around and understand what's happening around us to know how we could get to the right solution. If you have something, whether it's an idea or a feeling to start something like a company, go do it."

"Perseverance and be resilient because you’re going to get so many Nos, you’re going to get knocked down, you’re going to get skeptics that just destroy your hopes. There are so many people that could destroy your thoughts and people that will push you to think that this idea is a joke then it will never work and you give up when customers love you, customers can't stop talking about your technology and product and how it helped them. There are so many ups and downs, but it all comes down to 'Are you going to plow through it? Can you block the noise? Can you go through the whole process without being too conscious about what people might think of you?'".

A message to his 20-year-old self

“What I would have done in my 20s would be proactively looking for people who have already done the same business, whether it being in startups or different jobs. Look for people who have similar or different backgrounds that you have and see what they say and how they actually ended up there. With startups, make sure to get connected to potential investors, understanding their mindset on why they invested in startup companies, what they like about it, and go talk to startup founders who actually have for some reason closed down their companies. Or talk to folks that are in the thick of things or going through it like me. I’m struggling every day and I’m trying to make it work but what I’d say is talk to folks that have done it well and it takes effort, energy, perseverance because they’re going to say no. That’s the only way you’re going to hear from them. Persevere because they're going to say no to you. Be smart about what you’re going to ask. That’s what I would tell my 20yo self or my younger self: to be more proactive and reach out for help or ask for advice.”

Recommended Books & Resources:

Makers by Chris Anderson

Ron recommends this book about the future of manufacturing that’s going to be all consumerized through technology like 3D printing and then make a move. Ron and his co-founder Kevin were inspired and passionate about the book and encouraged them with 3D printing even more.

Unashamed by Lecrae (the hip-hop artist)

It talks about how he had to go through some crazy ups and downs, and essentially the book is telling you’re going to have your own story. Be comfortable with your own story because everybody should have different stories, but we all live in this era of reading and getting access to what people have done and how they have done it. If we all become more comfortable with our own story and how it’s developed and how it’s going to be developed, we’re going to be able to be more creative with our own solutions and not just look for the solution that the world might be giving you.

Anil Narasimha

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: February 12, 2021

Anil Narasimha is the CEO and Founder of Mekonos, a cutting-edge biotech company. He earned his Ph.D. in Biology from UC San Diego, where he worked in Dr. Steve Dowdy's lab. He performed his postdoctoral studies at Dr. Michael Snyder's group at Stanford University.

Anil met a lot of great individuals who are on various paths, particularly in a postgraduate situation. In fact, some of Anil's peers went on to become professors after completing their postdocs, and it was one of the options he considered. Others were utilizing that postdoc as a stepping stone to a larger corporation, such as Illumina, which he was interested in at one point. Then there's this third set of folks who uncovered and offered ideas to him during his postdoctoral or graduate school years, and he wanted to pursue them in the context of launching a business. The last of those three appeared the most interesting to Anil, and it happened gradually. Many individuals were able to create businesses and become successful, and the influence that these businesses had on society was something he was particularly interested in. It only made sense to make that leap after seeing the success there and being in an atmosphere that was conducive to it.

Anil's Postdoc & Biotech Journey

Anil has been interested in biology since he was in high school. He majored in Molecular Cell Biology at Berkeley and then worked in an undergraduate lab with Dr Gary Firestone, who is now a professor there, on cancer research. Anil considered going to medical school because of the research aspect, but instead opted to pursue his Ph.D. in graduate school.

He pursued fundamental scientific research and worked at UC San Diego after receiving his Ph.D., where he published a paper and conducted some excellent basic science research. They clarified a lot of mechanisms in fundamental cell biology, but the results of their effort took years, so he completed a postdoc with Michael Snyder at Stanford, where he focused on personalized medicine and next-generation sequencing technology. They had a cooperation with Illumina, and he returned to the university in San Diego for his postdoc to work on the right-next-to-the-front-door of these new individualized medications, treatments, as well as other things.

Anil had little idea what he wanted to do after his postdoc, but then he met an adviser who is on the cusp of new technologies and enterprises, and he caught the entrepreneurial bug from there and decided to create a firm.

The Influence

Anil attributes his success to two persons who encouraged and guided him down this route. The first is his older brother, who also studied biology. He pursued a career in pharmacology, which differed from Anil's molecular biology. He went to Stanford for undergrad, and Anil recounts his research in Stanford and showing him some of the work he was doing, which Anil found fascinating.

The second individual is Anil's high school biology instructor, from whom he took AP Chemistry. His method of teaching biology was captivating because he wasn't simply a textbook person; he went above and beyond. Biotechnology was becoming increasingly popular in high school, so they went on a field trip to a biotech firm that was working on mitochondrial gene sequencing. It was Anil's first venture into a real biotech firm, where people were doing operations like gel electrophoresis, running gels, and doing PCRs, all of which Anil had never done before. Anil remembers the field trip clearly because it inspired them to ask, "Can you apply some of what we've studied in real-world examples?" 'This piqued his attention even more.'

According to Anil, biology currently has a stigma for being all about memorization, and it's taught that way not only in high school but also in college, however the beauty of biology comes in its application. Certain things can help you better grasp the universe, but they require your natural curiosity, especially for biological ideas, as well as how you're taught these things. For fact, three separate professors taught Anil's introductory biology class (BIO1A) in Gary Firestone's lab since the curriculum was arranged that way, and Dr. Gary was the lecturer that Anil could connect to. Even though it was basic biology, the method he taught made an impression. Even though Anil was an undergraduate student, he made room in his lab for him.

MEKONOS

Mekonos seeks to provide a universal platform for ex vivo (outside the body) delivery of chemicals or keloids into cells. As a basic outline, the platform gives access to a variety of applications, but the core use is in the personalized medicine space, especially cell-engine treatments that use your immune system or your system itself to fight off or perhaps cure a condition you have.

They bring a number of unique qualities to the table, with the goal of creating a platform for universal delivery of any type of molecule into any type of cell. MEMS, or Microelectromechanical Systems, is how Mekonos does this. In light of this, Anil explains that every smartphone contains a MEMS chip, which performs sensing functions when the phone is rotated from vertical to horizontal mode. The power of silicon is used by Mekonos to develop the essence of the platform's goals. They prefer to conceptualize of their platform as a mix of three unique elements: one, a silicon chip with MEMS technology; two, a software platform; and three, a hardware platform. Two, Microfluidic technology was used to create a new chip. Three, a circus chemistry patent to tie everything together and give a sense of what the platform is all about.

Mekonos launched various incubation programs to aid with consumer discovery when they started performing market research. Once they worked it out, they had to find out how to get even more particular in this customized medicine sector, where effective delivery of molecules is much more crucial than the new typical small molecule antibody treatments. After they figured out the engineering side of things, they had to figure out what the application would be. They were in Stanford talking to biology experts about possible applications and ended up in a huge conference about more efficient transport of chemicals into cells using an engineering solution that might be a game-changer in the field. They were officially incorporated in 2017.

Mekonos went on to test a variety of programs to determine what kind of influence they may have. They participated in the NSF I-Corps program, and their cohort was based in Boston. Anil says that as a first-time entrepreneur learning how to be an entrepreneur, your platform will be more about determining requirements vs desires, defining consumer categories, conducting customer research and investigation, and gathering additional data points. They believed they were onto something, so they formally launched the firm.

In their earlier tests at Stanford, Mekonos didn't have a product, but certain components of the product were utilized on living cells that they believe might lead to anything. When you combine that with some simple comparison tests with the existing technology that every lab employs, the results appeared to be superior. They're obtaining better results than a genuine and established other existing product, even with a non-optimized system with a few component mismatches here and there. They hired the proper people to create the product and devised a business pipeline and strategy from there, but the initial set of studies in a Stanford laboratory pushed them into action.

Mekonos is now gaining BD traction, with a handful of pilots underway with some major farmlike organizations. As they continue to improve the product, it allows them to show off their expertise. GMP compliance is required to enter the manufacturing industry, and Mekonos isn't quite there yet. All of their current client interactions are in the RMD sector, with the goal of discovering or speeding up these discoveries. It may be sophisticated and difficult at times, and one of their goals as they grow and develop is to get their feet immersed in the environment.

Mekonos raised a seed round in June 2018, followed by a seed 2 round a few months later. Mekonos is a part of the Novartis biome, which is an incubator that provides excellent access to office space in the city's market, namely Montgomery Street, where they have an office. But, more crucially, they will be able to labor for free at the Novartis Institute of Biomedical Research (NIBR). All of Mekonos' biological lab work takes place there.

The Challenges of Mekonos

Access to facilities has been tough due to COVID, but Mekonos didn't have any issues there anymore. Mekonos works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley to fabricate nanoneedles, develop small scale chips, and manufacture them, so not having access to a lab, especially as a company that requires access to both biological and engineering labs, was obviously a major issue for them. But what they ended up doing was growing and bringing people in, and focusing on the things that helped build the company's culture and focus on non-lab things like their IP portfolio getting more organized just as a company, and utilizing proper protocols for note-taking, keeping everyone on task, and creating Gantt charts for milestones and goals.

Mekonos had an excellent perspective when it came to defining objectives, milestones, and estimating how long it would take. They were taken aback by the fact that there were no lab facilities for technological breakthroughs, but Mark Webb, Mekonos' head of engineering, has done an outstanding job of ensuring that the trajectory hasn't shifted substantially. They did lose a couple of months because there was no other option, but they hit the ground running and didn't waste any time getting back up to speed because they did everything they could to ensure that when the lab facilities did open, they hit the ground running and didn't waste as much time as they could've.

Mekonos finds it tough to live in a virtual environment, not seeing each other every day, and always thinking of methods to ensure the business culture is maintained. It's difficult to be in different areas or regions with a biotech firm, or simply any company. Getting everyone in the same room might be difficult at times, but as part of the company's executive team, Anil is continuously cognizant of this and attempts to find solutions for Mekonos in this manner.

"You can't force culture."

- Anil Narasimha, CEO of Mekonos

"You can’t force culture. It has to naturally come about, but hopefully, you instill some of the values that you care about into a company environment that naturally brings it out."

A message to his younger self:

“If I was asking my 19 or 20-year-old self ‘would you have started a company in biotech’, my answer would probably have been NO. I guess my advice is to constantly lookout for opportunities that excite you, and those opportunities might not be the first things that you'd think of or the first kind of notion that you have. Back then, I sometimes judge the book by its cover, sometimes meaning, so if I didn’t really like something, I forget it and I’m going to move on, but it’s important to do some research, to do some diligence and understand what the opportunity entails and then have an informed answer of whether you want to pursue that or not and I think that is the important advice I would’ve given myself because I was a little rash back then, making haste decisions, maybe not for the better. At least think about it, work the problem, look at it at multiple angles, and then make an informed decision.”

Recommended Books & Resources:

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup - John Carreyrou

When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi

Christina Lopes

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: February 12, 2021

Christina Lopes is the CEO and founder of FidoCure, a company that intends to help dogs with cancer. She is a young Global Leader from Brazil who is a member of the World Economic Forum. Christina considers herself a crasher in the biology space. She's been working on various global health initiatives since she started, with a focus on women's reproductive health. She's served on the Western Hemisphere's board of planned parenthood and at the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women, where she fought to get certain items included in the body of work and other issues.

Fidocure is intertwined with her life in the sense that they see servicing the dog as the closest friend as well as helping the community. She intends to help people who are oppressed and voiceless on her journey, and she communicates this aim and purpose to her team. Some days are difficult, and they're working to comprehend the cancer journey, the data points, and the use of actual data and technology. They look at the lives of all cancer patients, they look at the dog, and they look at this in a way that can be applied to people as well.

Entrepreneurial Roots

Christina was born in Brazil during the dictatorship era, at a period of economic hardship. In the 1980s, there was hyperinflation of a thousand percent every month for individuals who had a lot of uncertainty. The country was in a hazardous position at the time, and it was dubbed a failed state. She immigrated to the United States with her single mother, settling in an apartment in Newton, Massachusetts, where she recalls being the poorest in the neighborhood. Christina was enraged by this black-and-white existence since she hailed from a family with excellent educational ideals yet was destitute, and she despised it.

Her instructor once had to give them $100 in order for them to eat. She needed to find an alternate affordable education for college, but her high school counselor informed her about scholarships, which she didn't fully grasp, so she went to UMass Boston, which gave $1900 each semester. She admits she wasn't doing well in school and assumed she'd end up working at Starbucks because it was hard for her to go. There was no flashy recruitment, no job fair, but she had a professor who assisted her with her presentation and she was accepted into the honors program.

Because English is the best undergrad for law school, Christina considered enrolling. The humanities assisted her in reconciling some of the binary oppositions that the world is not a particularly rational goal. She believes we need a framework like the one provided by the humanities to have the largeness of spirit in you to put forth those things at the same time. Christina sees her difficulties as a grasp and hunger that others may or may not have, but it also gave her a great deal of compassion, which is why she chose to do volunteer work and become a parent.

Christina remembers being introverted as a child and being average in school, but her father, a quantum physicist who attended MIT, had a Silicon Valley-character who gave her "limitless thinking." Her father met JFK and saw Martin Luther King in the United States, which she claims was the spark for her limitless thinking.

FIDOCURE

Christina is passionate about things that are beneficial to the world, humanity, and life, as well as everything that falls under those areas. Some of them lack a story or a movement, and Christina aspires to be the movement's originator in this case. The issue is present, as Christina points out, but it wasn't the focus of the headline. Christina aims to shift their perspective of the dog from a subject into a patient. There’s a trend in the world of dogs, from being a best friend to a family member. FidoCure wants to be there to bring the best for them, make it accessible, and collect the data.

Ben Lewis, Fidocure's co-founder, is a veterinarian who saw the need of combating this not-so-obvious disease. Ben came up with the initial idea for animal medicine in the first version of the company, where the data is useful but part of it doesn't apply to people. However, unlike in the human sector, animal patients in the veterinary area lack resources and equipment, as well as development. Ben attempted to resolve these commercial concerns with the goal of allowing these animals to have access to cutting-edge technologies as patients.

Fidocure's objective is to eradicate cancer, which is the leading cause of death in dogs. There isn't much information, proof, or research on this topic, therefore Fidocure aims to change that. Fidocure is both a movement and a corporation with a cause, and what they offer to the table is an entire 21st-century tool set geared toward precision medicine and individualized treatment. The concept and oncology as a whole are based on a dog's perspective, which is similar to that of humans, with the exception that cancer is different in both cases. There's a need to know what's causing that cancer at a molecular, deep, and general level, and FidoCure can help. They figure it out for step one, sharing results or analysis with the vet and pet parents, and eventually, enabling a slew of 21st-century pigment alternatives that have been proved for people and are now making their way back to dogs.

Because cancer is complex, there are no assurances as to how it begins. Genetics, the environment, diet, and the immune system can all play a role. Many key elements are being examined in the space for dogs, notably since they were inbred and, as a result, genetically bred in cancer. Because some breeds have heightened accuracy, FidoCure is attempting to delve deeper into what's driving cancer and then assist the physician and the entire care team in a more exact, focused manner.

Fidocure aspires to reach multiple best-case situations in five years. In pediatric oncology, one is turning around the simultaneous HIV AIDS and certain tumor kinds in humans from death sentence to survival. They create a scientific learning area while collecting millions of data points about what happens during a cancer journey, and they want to have an impact that connects with humans on both sides of the leash. They want to study the similarities and differences between dogs and people and then have access to technologies that will help them understand and perceive things more quickly because canines have a shorter lifespan than humans.

Funding & Support

FidoCure has only recently entered the fundraising realm, having only been in the program for a few weeks. Fidocure recently secured significant funds from some of the world's greatest investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Lerer Hippeau, Amit's firm Tau Ventures, and others. The issue of what the purpose is, the many elements that organize your thoughts. And then, all the obstacles that appeared, as well as the forum to surface the blocks while surrounded by great individuals, are the initial parts of that. Christina made the decision to walk and believe, and asserts that it also depends on your partner. Partners are intimately familiar with the founder's journey and are the closest to creating a blueprint for a trip that has yet to take a step.

Christina, as a founder, claims that the Y Combinator for FidoCure was always evolving and had a great impact. Christina was uneasy when she discovered an amazing network of like-minded people, as she takes into consideration their perspectives. FidoCure is part of a group of people that wanted to take a digital approach to some of the world's most pressing issues, which Christina finds unique. According to Christina, a highly tech approach to solving cancer in dogs and translating it back to people is extremely crazy, but they received a lot of support when they arrived at FidoCure as a crucial product. Because one challenge with businesses is that it's such a world of possibilities, YC helped have that clarity of thinking of what is the most crucial critical next step so that the rest of the steps follow.

Christina claims that YC has been the perfect environment for her to focus. She had a very similar experience at the World Economic Forum's young global leaders' group at Douglas, and she says YC was very comparable to her in terms of the community with that spirit coming together to address major challenges.

"You will get knocked down, but it’s the standing up that’s the key thing."

-Christina Lopez, FidoCure

Christina highlights GRIT as her startup mindset. The question is where you get the grit from, the resilience, and so for that one needs to have resources. Those may be internal resources where one finds strength so when one shuts down, they still wake up and get back on their feet. You probably need those that are with you and you need a community to help you and that’s critical. Understand your vulnerability that you have to nurture how you handle things because you will get knocked down, but it’s the standing up that’s the key thing.

A message to her younger self:

“At 20 years old, I probably was thinking I might just work at Starbucks, and that might be my life. The world was sitting pretty far and unattainable and maybe even more as a woman, probably at that point, I had that a bit more. When I do think of my parents, my mother, and my father, they did give me special tools. At that time, I couldn’t see it, but they really did and they really had evolved thinking in ways, very international, very global, and that gives you a largeness of mind. You have like a canvas so, I would have said: ‘hey Christina, look at where you’re coming from. Not just the hardships but what is unique, unusual, and then say that ‘you’re going to have many surprises to come so go faster, go stronger, you’re going to be up and down.”

Elodie de Marchi

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: February 13, 2021

Kaiko's Head of Growth is Elodie de Marchi. She is presently located in Paris, but formerly worked in Silicon Valley for 9 years. She began her career with 6 years in traditional banking, followed by 3 years at VMWare, where she worked in investment strategy and corporate venture capital, or CVC.

After that, she reflected on her experience at the Silicon Valley bank, where she had spent the most of her time dealing with entrepreneurs from an early stage. She felt more like a partner, like an ally to entrepreneurs raising money, as a banker at a Silicon Valley bank, where she raised VC money for 65 percent of the startups she worked with.

Elodie attended Stanford for a few classes before becoming a mentor in the Stanford Latino Entrepreneur Program and a company adviser. She knows the lifecycle from startup to larger organization, but she wants to take it up a level and go to a startup and grow that business for herself, as she transitions from a 30,000-person company to a 16-person company. She was seeking for a firm that would understand her principles and management style, and she discovered it at Kaiko.

VMWare

She then proceeded to VMWare and worked in financial due diligence for a corporate initiative. She spent three years with VMWare, a huge firm with 30,000 workers, $9 billion in revenue, and a market valuation of close to $15 billion, thinking about how to expand and create a company with them, which grew organically.

Elodie believes that evaluating a business is healthy; there are no red signals before investing in or by a startup, and in this way, Elodie was on both sides of the table deciding whether the startup was worthwhile, and on the other hand, is constructing or generating value where she requires funds to speed growth and complete the project.

VMWare is a fantastic organization, and Elodie liked her time there since she had so many prospects for advancement. VMWare was very active at the time, having acquired roughly 20 firms in three years, ranging in value from a few million dollars to a few billion dollars. Elodie also managed the financial integration of Carbon Black, which was acquired for $2 billion in 2019. She moved from an incredible atmosphere and moments at VMWare to a startup with a short runway, where she was extremely solid and had visibility into what was coming next.

KAIKO

Kaiko is a remarkable firm; they've raised $5 million in initial funding, which is impressive for a European company, but there's a time constraint, and Elodie is new to the company with only 18 employees. She's a part-time CFO and head of growth, and she improves the efficiency of their cells' motion cycle and, in essence, grows the currency base. She works in PR and was also in charge of fundraising for their series A, which is expected to be pretty substantial in the United States. She's now focusing on tech fundraising, as well as conveying their narrative and goals to venture investors. Elodie handles a little of everything, which she finds daunting because her previous experience was in banking at a larger firm, and she didn't have the time to consider what her strengths were and how she'd handle new challenges. In some ways, she still believed she had more to contribute than she had to lose. And it was at that point that she decided to declare her passion for entrepreneurship.

Kaiko is a blockchain and financial firm. In the digital finance business, they are a data supplier for digital assets. Finance hasn't been neglected out of the digital world today, especially with COVID, hence they discuss digital currencies like cryptocurrencies, bitcoin, Ethereum, and all the sites where digital assets may be traded. When it comes to digital assets, Kaiko works with all market players to gather data, standardize it, store it, and then offer it to customers who utilize it for training tactics and smarter investment decisions. 2020 was a watershed year for crypto and digital assets, with major institutions such as JP Morgan, American Express, Robinhood, and PayPal leading the charge in terms of training volumes and establishing this asset class as the future of finance. The idea that they're seeing this year is contemplating about a digital financial industry.

Kaiko is similar to Bloomberg in some ways, but one distinction is that they don't have the hardware, and there are some other differences. They just formed a collaboration with Bloomberg, and as a result of that cooperation, they will be creating new industry standards. Any new digital assets discovered in the crypto market anywhere in the globe will be sent to Kaiko in order to obtain a unique identifier called fee, which is significant for the segment. They, like Bloomberg and other comparable businesses, are setting new industry norms in the data sector.

Kaiko may be found at www.kaiko.com, where they provide weekly fact sheets. They have substantial research collaborations with MIT, U Penn, and Princeton. They recently established a relationship with Thomson Reuters Refinitiv, as well as Dow Jones Factiva, where they publish weekly and monthly research.

Startup Ecosystem Journey

Elodie took advantage of the option to pursue her master's degree in business across Europe, spending at least six months in a non-French-speaking nation. She had a couple acquaintances who are now at NASA; one was a French journalist covering the innovation field, and another was a math teacher in San Francisco whom she visited on vacation. She decided to hunt for a job at the same time and began networking with individuals in Silicon Valley, which piqued her interest in the excitement and atmosphere of the Silicon Valley environment.

Elodie recognizes that Silicon Valley has aided her in better understanding what business entails and realizing her full potential. She traveled from France to Silicon Valley for an internship, where she honed her business skills at the age of 21. The person who supplied the internship recognized talent and motivation in her and gave her the opportunity to advance in her profession, but as Elodie points out, she had some excellent years, but the odds weren't in her favor.

According to Elodie, Silicon Valley is a significant historical milestone that defines what it is to be innovative and to start a firm, as well as demonstrating incredible potential and business models. With the many digital workspaces and a growing style of conducting company, she firmly feels that there is an evolving model today. There will be a mechanism to disseminate the startup attitude. By spreading the word, not only in Silicon Valley, but throughout the world, there will be a potential to grow.

In terms of the startup ecosystem in France, it has been growing since 2014, and there have been far more capital investments, as well as far more venture capital firms that have launched or are now investing in France. The number of startups in France is rapidly approaching 10,000, which is about equal to the number of companies in Germany. Given their good schools, good talents, people with entrepreneurial spirits and mindsets, and also resources, financial resources, people who spend time outside the country learning stuff and returning home to try to nurture and ensure their learnings, France today has a very fertile ecosystem for startups.

Insights from Elodie

Elodie believes that entrepreneurship will be a solution to all the problems that we face in today's society, and that if you don't take action and attempt, no one will do it for you. She also states having worked on 18 different acquisitions ranging in value from a few million dollars to billions of dollars, and that she rose up the ranks quickly. She formerly worked at Silicon Valley Bank, where she developed a variety of talents and abilities. She's always been good at what she does, and she uses all of her experience and expertise to help Kaiko.

Find Good Allies

"If you have something you want to do and you’re convinced that this will make a difference, I would recommend thinking about a good group of people or allies that you can tap into to reassure you if you feel scared to do things. You will never know everything unless you know that you have: a good direction, a good vision, and people that could help you reach that objective."

Observe Before You Try

Elodie's Silicon Valley education instilled in her the ability to assess risks and pursue it. It's fine to try and fail. Elodie finds it really encouraging to visit Silicon Valley and witness individuals with ideas trying, failing, and then beginning again and establishing a new enterprise and not giving up.

Trust is the center of any kind of business

Since then, the COVID epidemic has rattled businesses, and Elodie has found it difficult to be a member of a firm that is now virtually growing. She had never met the CEO or the rest of the staff before starting the job. She relocated to Paris and had never seen her flat before moving in; everything was virtual. Establishing trust is a lot harder to achieve virtually, but it is achievable when it is reciprocated. Trust is at the heart of any sort of business, any kind of endeavor involving people. Elodie is currently in charge of a team spread across many time zones, which necessitates qualities such as candor, humility, listening, and above all TRUST.

Beginner's Mindset

“Be Always curious about your environment, always stay humble, don’t think you’re an expert. Always ask people their views and how they think of something so you can always learn, and constantly learning is super important so you can better adapt to environments.”

Comfortable in uncertainty

“A lot of people don’t take action and that’s where there’s a key difference between entrepreneurs. People who wait and see are people who are uncomfortable with uncertainty, they just don’t do anything and just wait until they have visibility. Having an entrepreneur mindset is being okay not knowing what’s going to happen and still moving forward.”

Growth Mindset

“Entrepreneurship is both born and made but mostly, it’s more of the latter. Your environment, the people you choose to be surrounded by, can teach you a lot and they can fill any gap. Anything you want to put up your mind towards, any goal you put yourself towards, just go for it. Having this growth mindset and appreciating the journey and sorting yourself with people who can teach you a lot is important.”

A message to her younger self:

“I would tell myself to trust myself more. When you’re starting your career, you always doubt yourself, questioning ‘Am I good enough for this? Or do I know anything about this? I wasn’t comfortable with uncertainty at that time. I would say just trust yourself. If you feel that something feels right, just go for it. There’s rarely something you can’t undo, so I would say take more risks for things that you believe in that are worth your time and effort. Trust yourself and maybe be a little less hard on yourself. I always care about everything I do if I put time and effort into something. I care about people, people I work with, and people I work for. If I take on a new project, I have a sense of ownership, and sometimes we’re a bit too hard on ourselves when we want to do things well. Sometimes just saying ‘hey, you’re doing your best’ and it will be okay. Do not beat yourself up because it was not perfect the way you wanted it. As you’re starting your career, trust yourself, take more risks, be comfortable with the uncomfortable and also be kind to yourself. You will need that to grow and evolve to a beautiful person later.”

RECOMMENDED BOOKS & RESOURCES:

Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Huggy Rao

Leezel Tanglao

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: January 14, 2021

Leezel was born in the United States to a family of Filipino immigrants in the late 1960s. Earl Valencia first met her as one of the top 10 young Filipinos in America under 40, which is known as FYLPro (Filipino Young Leaders Program) and is chosen by the Philippine embassy in the United States. Earl considers her a friend and one of the community's leaders, not only in the Filipino community, but also in the built technology and media community at large, from whom the public would learn a lot.

Leezel is presently a senior editor for membership and innovation at HuffPost. She describes herself as a bridge journalist since she sits at the crossroads of editorial, marketing, product development, sales, and revenue. Prior to joining HuffPost, she worked at major news organizations in a variety of capacities, including local, broadcast, network, cable, and startup, giving her a unique perspective on the industry.

Journalism Journey

Leezel began her career as a print journalist covering local news in Southern California, but when the business shifted, she was forced to adapt. She now sees herself as a bridge journalist, working at the crossroads of editing, marketing, product development, and sales, as well as revenue. Her editing experience and understanding of how to tell a narrative implies that understanding how the entire process works and seeing how everything relates is critical.

What drew her to journalism in the first place was her fascination with hearing other people's experiences, giving voice to the voiceless, and everything else that she considers to be deeply rooted in her family, culture, and heritage. She enjoys writing and sharing narratives, so she decided to pursue the field. What's fantastic about the opportunity is that it effectively pays to ask questions, to be interested, and to experience life twice, as one gets to relive and tell someone else's life/story while still living one's own. It's blazing new trails and, in many respects, defining a lot of things that might be described in a variety of ways.

Leezel worked for a while at a Temecula-based press company in the Inland Empire. That first job helped her get to where she is now. Covering municipal council meetings and school district boards in her early work helped her find and nurture sources. Those are vital transferrable qualities to her, regardless of whether she remains in journalism or not, because it all comes down to the people, according to her. It's all about connections and not being too transactional, just like in reality.

Forward to the Future

Leezel's background is in editing, but she gradually fell in love with working with the product team, where she learned about how they handle problems and difficulties, as well as how to interact with marketing, sales, and revenue. This setting aided her in seeing the larger picture and anticipating the next several years as well as her objectives. What she enjoys about her present position in her work is being part of a community that allows her to be creative and original. Leezel discovers a place where she may connect with others in an unrestricted way, where she can trace her own route, which she finds fascinating and scary at first but liberating once fulfilled.

Leezel foresees future innovation by rethinking present challenges, considering what else we can do to fix and sustain them, and linking real life to a more virtual environment. Furthermore, she enjoys working with data since it tells a narrative, whether it's on the editorial side, the business side, or even when determining what the next product to develop. She also predicts further technological innovation and new experiments aimed at improving the user experience and making it more accessible to everyone. According to her, innovation does not have to be entirely new because there aren't necessarily new ideas, but there may be new approaches and methods to build on people's work.

Insights from Leezel

Self-Awareness

Being self-aware is so powerful. As Leezel states, “Sometimes you're not that self-aware until you start putting yourself out there in other places that you may not always gravitate towards. That’s very difficult, but to try to figure it all out, the only way to do that is by trying it.” The best way to start anything is to start from YOU. Getting a good grip to your core and staying true to who you are will always bring you to new places. "I have the power to define my story"

Reframed Mindset

Start to reframe your thoughts, “reframing in the sense that if you want to grow, you have to do things that are uncomfortable. You have to really be intentional about putting yourself in situations that feel uncomfortable” Having a reframed mindset is one way to go the distance.

Connect with People

Whom you surround yourself with will have a great impact in you. Surrounding yourself with people that are like-minded and not, actually does cause you to think about things that you would normally never even think of and do. On the other hand, in terms of work, Leezel states, “You have to know your audiences and how they interact with the platform you're using. Coz you have limitations on the platform itself and there’s also different audiences on each of those platforms. you have to think what would they want to know? What do they want to hear and if the piece of content is facts, news, or is this opinion, it needs to be labeled as so.”

The Mindset of Thriving

Being a Filipino, Leezel shares the qualities of being one: resilient, adaptable, stubborn and never gives up. The Filipinos have imprinted in her nature and history the mode of survival, but this time, Leezel aspires to see a shift in the mindset of surviving to a mindset of thriving.

Go all in or not at all

According to Leezel, it's really the dramatic moments in your life that impacts you the most, sometimes for the best. What finally shakes you from whatever was a blocker in your life and from going for what you want will break you through the surface. Admittedly, Leezel heeds herself as the type of person whom if you put on something, she'd go all in or she doesn't go at all. Taking a step back led her to reflect on things more. As chapters closed, it put her in a space where she could think about what she can do as a person in this life? Who knows how much time we have that we’ll be able to make an impact? This pulled Leezel back on track in terms of moving forward.

“I need to be intentional and very clear with what I want to do.”

Attitude of Gratitude

Failures can be devastating, especially when you put your heart and soul into something. But it has failed for a reason and with what Leezel shared in her experiences, it actually led her to a wider door open. It gave more clarity in terms of what was going on and if it was going to move her forward in terms of life purpose. From a distance she sees a lot of painful lessons from her job but it also spurred an attitude of gratitude because going through those difficult times she realizes “Your job is not your identity. Because your job can go away but it doesn't mean you go away.”

"You could have the best title, you could make the most money, but if you don't have an impact, then what's the point?"

-Leezel Tanglao : Senior Editor/Membership & Innovation at HuffPost

RECOMMENDED BOOKS & RESOURCES:

• Susan Cain - Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

• Leezel Tanglao - Delano Grape Strike: Keeping the Manongs’ Story Alive

It’s about the Delano Grape Strike started by AWOC, AFL-CIO (Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee), composed of Filipino workers written on the weekend of Labor Day in 2005 in conjunction with its 40th anniversary. That strike was actually inspired by a much smaller strike that actually happened a few months before in the Coachella Valley, as Leezel shares. That created a huge impact on her career as a journalist and resonated further on its readers.

Jojo Flores

Jojo Flores, a Filipino venture capitalist and co-founder of Plug and Play, in the early years, studied and graduated from the University of the Philippines, where he began his journey to business. After he graduated, several offers from big multinational companies surfaced. However, one particular experience from an interview with an HR pulled him from pursuing this path. Instead, it led him to the doors of his Professor in Advertising in college, who also happened to be an entrepreneur having a chain of appliance stores in the country. He offered Jojo to work for him first for two months, and after the completion of the construction of the company branch in Makati, Jojo was given a chance to run it.

The Beginning of Wilkins

After staying in the first company, running his very own team, Jojo found the need for more formal training as the company was still run informally. Then he came upon this management training program with the advantage that the management trainees would be reporting directly to the CEO. Finding great interest in this opportunity, the CEO decided to put up a bottled water company where he volunteered to work on, and that was the beginning of Wilkins. Wilkins started with Jojo as a business plan and in April 1992, they sold their first bottle.

After Jojo ran the company on the sales and marketing side and served as a general manager for three years, the company decided to sell it to its number one competitor that resulted in Jojo’s exit. But, it leads him to join Saeed Amidi, who became his good friend and business partner. Friendship prospered between Saeed and Jojo that became the cradle of their bottled water business partnership that lasted for about 10 years, expanding dominantly in Europe.

Plug and Play

In 2005, Saeed invited Jojo once again for another business back in Silicon Valley, where he seems to have noticed an odd setting. Little did he know about the bubble burst that resulted in 300,000 people losing their jobs, and there are about 10 million square feet of empty real estate. This sparked the idea of buying one of the empty buildings, section it, and then lease it to the target audience - the startups. Intrigued with all the businesses that thrived in the “Lucky Building”, they’ve decided to invest in it. Without even knowing, this investment gave birth to Plug and Play, a real estate term coined by Saeed, which means a space where you can set up your business quickly. Plug and Play paved the way for accelerating startups through funding, mentorship, or introductions to corporations.

On the Startup Ecosystem in the Philippines

Concerning the startup ecosystem in the Philippines, not many of the startups were Filipinos. Jojo took that personally and vowed that for the next 10 years, what he’d do is try to help closer to home. Upon rating the growth of the Philippines in the startup ecosystem since 10 years ago, on a scale of 1 to 10, the Philippines falls around 5 or 6. There are still a lot of things to be done for early-stage startups and we still don’t have very successful stories here.

Insights from Jojo Flores

One major thing that Jojo generously shared is to have a “Sales Mindset”. It is a mindset that he sees most of the startups to lack, and one that he highly recommends them to have. One must constantly ask himself how to generate revenue and cash internally, and be profitable as soon as possible. From the very beginning, this attitude is a must, as the first goal of being an entrepreneur is to get a flow for growth. To enable growth, there will be experimentation that will go one way or another and we won’t always get the right answers right away, but it’s much easier to do that when you guarantee that you can sustain yourself.

Jojo puts forward this Sales Mindset concept by first being honest to yourself and knowing your strengths and weaknesses. When you recognize the part where your weaknesses linger, it’s where your team comes in. To cover your weaknesses, you need to find someone to join your team who would complement you, especially with your weaknesses. In your team, you identify someone strong in one area and you let that person take care of that part of the business.

According to Jojo, in the process of making progress, failure is inevitable mainly because of 2 things; first is, it can be process-oriented, involving the business plan, the people you’re working with, or the product itself; the other thing is because of failure to execute well. But it is not to be feared, but to be embraced and confronted with full responsibility and hard work. The strongest motivator to rise above it and succeed is courage and survival instincts. According to him, being an entrepreneur means that you also have to be a little hard-headed, not taking no for an answer and believing in yourself.

"Failure is one painful discipline, but as long as you’re still happy with what you’re doing, as long as you’ll keep learning from what you’re doing. As long as you’re enjoying the people that you’re working with, and as long as you haven’t given up on that deeper purpose of why you’re doing what you’re doing, then you have all the reasons to keep going. Alongside this, having a good grip of faith in something bigger than ourselves will keep us strong and smart, especially during those trying times."

Jojo Flores

"Be Sales-oriented. Make sure you can sustain your business, especially on days when you’re trying to experiment on investments and on days when the challenges may cave in."

Patrick Moran

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: January 22, 2021

Pat Moran is a former Senior Marketer at Netflix and the former Global Head of Marketing at Spotify. Pat was enthralled by technology, its progress, and its influence on user behavior on a worldwide scale. He discovered the appropriate spot for it when he moved to the United States after graduation around 20 years ago. Prior to that, he worked for 7 months at a lead stage technology startup in Silicon Valley.

He worked with Spotify for roughly three years, where he was part of a team that focused on increasing the number of active users throughout the world. Pat states he has had the good fortune of working with not just excellent individuals in the United States, but also outstanding and intellectual people all around the world. He enjoys hearing various people's viewpoints and experiences on something that everyone enjoys: MUSIC. Pat was living the dream, whether it was working with different teams or discussing cultural affinities to various genres of music from around the world. Prior to that, he worked in many aspects of performance marketing, finally focusing on increasing user-value and user-base units. Pat also worked for Netflix for a while. He arrived eight months after Qwickster and eight months before House of Cards, which wasn't the best period for Netflix.

The reason behind Pat's gravitation towards media and tech, as he shares, is first, it’s to be a part of something that you know you love. To Pat, it has always made things a lot easier to work while working for those companies. The second thing that fascinated him is the innate curiosity to understand how other people in other parts of the world are consuming the technology that they’re working on.

"When you’re talking about something you love and are passionate about, and then you’re talking about it from the lens of your personal experiences of having those exchanges with people with other experiences. The innate level of curiosity and wanting to be a part of that thing really becomes sort of a motivating factor."

Growing and scaling the service so that even more people can start to use it and then understanding how they’re using it and consuming it, has been fascinating to Pat.

Marketing Roots

Pat's early interest in marketing began in college in the Philippines, when IT businesses were few and far between, with just a few paths available, such as finance and operations. Pat grew up surrounded by the media and is fascinated by it, particularly how people consume it, how it interacts, how it reaches various individuals, and how it impacts them. Pat was on his first trip to international marketing at Unilever. Pat's transfer to New York after college was a major culture shock for him, since he grew up in the Philippines and was immediately thrust into a new city, new atmosphere, where even if they spoke the same language, there was something fundamentally different from everything else.

When it comes to higher level indicators, such as subscriber interactions, subscriber growth, and things that need to be rethought on a high level, according to Pat, there are a lot of parallels. If there's one thing Pat has learned from Spotify and Netflix, it's that there are much more differences than similarities when it comes to lead generation. One factor is that there is a cultural divide. Between Stockholm and New York, Spotify has two major offices. Netflix has offices in Los Gatos and Beverly Hills, but all technologies has cultural and stage nuances at the time.

Netflix has been publicly traded for over ten years, and the firm was more than 10-15 years old at the time, so the executive team was extremely observant. By that point, the leadership team had gone through a number of major belts. Spotify, on the other hand, has gone through numerous battles with labels. There was a different era, a distinct society, and a variety of individuals. Technology has progressed, and a variety of things have altered as a result. While there were many parallels in Pat's experiences on the surface, he maintains that there were more contrasts in his encounters than similarities.

The thing with marketing, is that the equations for optimization have never really changed, and doesn’t assume it will. What’s changed are the capabilities of driving that and to break that down to 2 aspects: one is the technology neutral structure to plug in data which has gotten a lot more sophisticated; another is about being able to use algorithms like machine learning to scale predictably. That’s been the challenge with growth marketing: being predictable but also scaling, which technology happens to allow. With the logic side of technology, it allows you to scale predictably.

Competitive Landscapes

Spotify has had to contend with a lot of competitors at various times. They were up against minor competition at first, but by the time Pat departed, they were up against competition from other music firms. By the time Pat departed, Netflix was on the verge of being bought by HBO. Prior to then, they were focusing on improving user attention. Obtaining competition information is costly, therefore optimizing and creating based on what your people are doing or like has always been an advantage Pat has seen some successful organizations optimize against. Following that are the marketing components of those actions. There is a contrast between brand marketing and performance marketing, according to Pat. Pat uses Spotify's end-of-year campaign as an example, claiming that it is not only brand marketing but also a blend of product experience. That has been by far the dynamics of marketing of some companies, according to him.

Pat is well aware that when the epidemic struck, all the data, patterns, and tactics that they had been optimizing were thrown out the window. It's become an exercise in attempting to redefine what new trends or what new normal looks like during the first two months of the shutdown, between April and May. There are firms that are on the bad side of this, as well as companies that are on the good side, but in any case, all companies have had to act globally in order to respond to the new normal.

User Value

As Pat points out, there's a theory in the software services industry that's fundamentally different from CPG, cart goods, or retail, and it's actually quite solid and proven: you can't expand without first having a product market. In the end, this means that the product must already be good naturally in order for the marketing to be effective. The user's worth is fundamentally equivalent to the fate of the market product. The more and longer users stay on a service, the more valuable they are to that provider, and the more likely they are to refer others to that service. Pat was a member of some of the best marketing teams in the industry, and he was instrumental in figuring out how to scale a fantastic product offering, both in terms of acquisition and engagement. As a result, the product's strength must exist prior to its introduction.

Patrick Moran

"You never know when your breakthrough is going to hit, so just keep hitting."

"…things change exponentially faster now than they have ever been… being okay with change and at the same time being okay with learning things over and over again is an asset you need to make sure you have."

Recommended Books and resources:

One of the books that Pat really enjoyed is “The Power of Habit” (Charles Duhigg). The reason, as Pat says, is that when you’re young, you’re impatient. You want anything instantaneously and you’re not necessarily thinking about the long term, not until this part from now. It’s like a confounding risk.

“This thing takes time when it builds. And, a lot of mindsets, and a lot of motivations and the habits you build when you’re young are going to have a significant winding path when you get older. Either you’re going to continue to employ them or you’re going to continue changing them. Either way you’re going to have to face them.”

Jonathan Javier

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: January 11, 2021

Jonathan Javier is the Founder of Wonsulting: a company that rests on the mission to fuel people coming from non-traditional backgrounds and non-private schools to get into their dream careers. Having done 80 speaking engagements in the past year and a half, the company has now helped tens of thousands of underdogs by amplifying talents to receive offers from top companies, Google, Facebook, Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, and many more!

Previously, Jonathan’s been working at huge companies such as Cisco, Google, and Snapchat. Upon his transition from Google to Cisco in June 2019, he decided to surface his story, and Jeff Weiner actually liked and shared it, and everything came full circle shortly that marked the beginning of Wonsulting.

WONSULTING

Back in January 2019, the idea of helping people who are from non-private schools and who are from non-traditional backgrounds get their feet into big tech companies came in place. Trying to prove that coming from a non-traditional background does not mean you can’t break into tech or even start a company. Jonathan was once in the same shoes, and his experience and career journey proved otherwise and inspired a lot of people which is now how he helps them.

Concerning the tech world, the percentage of Filipinos is very small and the gap between Filipinos and tech companies needs to be bridged to build a community that would open more opportunities for the country. Part of Wonsulting’s mission is to rectify the belief that “All Filipinos become nurses” because there are Filipinos who belong in the Tech world. This pushed Jonathan to recalibrate this mentality saying, “I don't want to be a doctor to the patients; I want to be a doctor to the underdogs whom I’ll turn into winners.”

Jonathan worked in the corporate world firsthand before founding his company. In Wonsulting’s beginning, he was alone, and then he grew his network by hiring diligent interns and eventually finding his partner Jerry Lee to join the team. They’ve been a great help by guiding the underdogs into their careers and each of them being able to successfully get into the top companies such as Google, Facebook, Linked In, and Adobe. With Jonathan previously working in these successful companies, he invested in learning how these companies became successful and learning the process that they utilize, and eventually, he implemented those learning to Wonsulting and grew from there.

The challenge for Jonathan was with innumerable inquiries from people due to his company’s rapid growth. Genuinely wanting to help people but not having enough time was one issue too, especially in terms of helping more people get access to his zone. But, to provide solutions for this, he issued a free copy to everyone who couldn’t avail of his service to share his resources without having them spend a single dime.

In terms of achieving goals, one thing Jonathan asks is “where do I want to be in 6 months?” subsequently, he creates a concrete plan on how to do it. What he did was identify the challenges and problems firsthand and, ultimately, providing a solution to them alongside always thinking about the long-term game. He acknowledges the presence of the ups and downs and the doubts that restrained his company’s growth but outperformed it with perseverance, reflective thinking, and surrounding himself with supportive individuals who aspire to achieve the same goals.

Insights from Jonathan

GROW YOUR NETWORK by starting from where you are. Build community because there’s a lot of people who are in the same shoes as you. If you're able to build a community of individuals who also correlate directly with what you are trying to do, you’re going to achieve so much more than you have sought. “You have to go out there, reach out to people, and make things happen for the growth of the company.” Developing relationships with individuals who will boost your progress to your goal will ultimately turn into an opportunity.

According to Jonathan, working in corporate is cool as several companies inhabit a good culture and good vibes but as per Wonsulting, what’s amazing is that WORK-LIFE BALANCE. “Being your own boss, managing your own time, and doing the things you love and enjoy is great, and loving what you do can impact thousands to get into the cruise.” Jonathan reiterates that working corporate is good and he also encourages entrepreneurship, but if you have ever considered being your own boss, his advice is to check out working in corporate or company first and then go jump into entrepreneurship.

In the middle of the pandemic, people are losing jobs; some companies are declining to the extent that closing becomes an option. Opportunities are scarce and the competition upon landing that job grew fiercer for the world. Jonathan’s take on this matter is: “There are two options in dealing with your business: You can fall and stay discouraged, or you can fall up and utilize the setbacks that happened to you and ultimately turn them into context. Adaptability; learn from your environment. Focus on what you can do to replicate those losses. It is how you bounce back from the things that are recurring that can set your business apart from others.”

Startup Mindsets of Jonathan Javier

There are four mindsets Jonathan allocates to us:

• being FULL FORCE when it comes to powering up your business by committing to your purpose and service;

• having a mindset of GROWTH by building your network, and reaching and connecting to more people;

• a mindset of SURVIVAL when it comes to facing the challenges and risks in your business;

• and the mindset of KEEPING GOING by never giving in to the difficulty of challenges nor the discouragement that may come.

Jonathan Javier

“Whomever you associate with and whomever you hang out with is a reflection of yourself. It’s super important to have people who push you to get into your dreams and aspirations. People who will hold you accountable for the things that you are trying to get into, and will push you to do your hardest to get a team that will achieve what you’ve always wanted to achieve.”

Beryl Chavez Li

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: January 18, 2021

Beryl Chaves is a Silicon Valley resident who grew up in Manila, attended top schools in the United Kingdom, created a few firms there, and worked in a few startups in the Philippines. Beryl authored one of the earliest Philippine startup roadmaps, and without her, the Philippine startup ecosystem would not have been recognized by the government. She obtained a Master of Finance degree from Cambridge University, as well as an International Management Certificate from Stanford University during the summer quarter, and a bachelor's degree in International Business, Finance, and Economics from Manchester University. Beryl also worked as a consultant with Unionbank Philippines, where she assisted in the development of their investing platform. She was also the founder of CapchianX, a member of the founding team, and the Entrepreneur in Residence at Coins.ph.

Beryl comes from a family of business owners. Her father is an entrepreneur, and she has witnessed the ups and downs of his company. He would take Beryl to meetings with him, introducing her to the space at a young age. He'd invite Beryl to work as a telephone operator at his hardware shop, which had roughly twenty phones. They sell generator sets both retail and wholesale. This was how Beryl spent her early childhood training. She began to become more entrepreneurial in grade school and high school, selling cupcakes for 20-30 pesos, for instance. Her interest grew as she realized it was getting closer to what her father was doing. She found finance fascinating in college, too, because of the transactions that were brought to the table and closed. Beryl makes her plans based on where she sees the most potential for growth.

She began her career in early-stage venture capital in Shanghai, where she spent a year and a half after receiving her undergraduate degree, attracted by technology, notably WeChat, Alibaba, and many other Chinese digital businesses. She interned at an ed-tech firm, and following her time there, she opted to join the Asian startup industry, founding China's first crowdfunding portal.

Cryptocurrency Startup Ecosystem

Beryl was interested in Southeast Asian startups, which brought her back to the Philippines, where she spent time researching and attempting to understand the startup ecosystem, and where she chose to produce world startup reports for nations such as Brazil, China, Malaysia, Portugal, and including the Philippines. She was in Cebu for around five months while producing these reports, as well as conducting a lot of research remotely and speaking with a number of startup entrepreneurs from all over the world. She then opted to do this program at Stanford for a quarter, which allowed her to meet a lot of incredibly fascinating CEOs and entrepreneurs in the Bay Area, sparking her interest in cryptocurrency.

Ron Hose, who happened to be a friend of Earl's, was also interested in bitcoin as a means of transferring payments and approached Beryl about joining Coins.ph. Unfortunately, she had to spend time in the Philippines due to problems with her work visa. Beryl was an entrepreneur in residence as soon as she started helping out at Coins.ph, establishing the marketing and operations teams, looking at partnerships and remittance corners, and aiming bitcoin as an infrastructure to truly transfer remittances.

In 2014-2015, Coins.ph was the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the Philippines, and it was finally bought by Go-Jek. After that, Beryl opted to pursue her master's degree in finance in the United Kingdom, where she wrote her thesis under the supervision of Jack Lang, co-founder of Raspberry Pi. Beryl also works for a number of exciting firms in Cambridge's research cluster. One of them was ARM, which was bought for 32 billion dollars by Softbank in 2016. That prompted her to decide to build a company based on her Cambridge thesis, which was essentially about secondary markets on the blockchain. CapchianX was founded as a result of this, with two of her co-founders situated in the Bay Area. In 2017, a number of companies started doing their ICOs, and at the end of 2018, they’ve decided to step down, and a new company took over and rebranded it to Originator X, based in Canada doing cross-border R&B payments.

Shortly after, Beryl returned to Manila and began consulting for Unionbank's innovation arm, UBX, where she began developing their investment platform, which is divided into two parts: the first is an auction of repossessed assets, and the second is an investing platform. The second half was primarily a 200 million peso crowdfunding platform, which they're now tokenizing.

Aside from her Unionbank consulting work, Beryl was a former innovation officer at StudX, where she gradually got increasingly involved in a project to tokenize endangered species in South Africa. It's a crowdfunding site, but the assets are endangered species, and a percentage of the proceeds go back to the farmers. A portion of the revenue also goes toward the cloning of Sudan, the only male white rhino.

Being in a Corporation vs Being in a Startup

Beryl has noticed a few differences between working for a large organization and working for a startup. As a startup, there's a need to expand and there's nothing to lose. A company, on the other hand, has resources but can't lose anything. As she points out, organizations, particularly the republic firm, are more concerned with expenditures, reputation, and the fear of losing their banking license, therefore they lack the capacity to take risks. Furthermore, corporations are wired to have very few verifiers when they do anything since they can't afford to lose, therefore they take a lot more care with their reputation. Permissions must be sought, and the red tape involved in going through approvers and checks is considerable, and it might take a long time. In a startup, though, it is simpler because there are fewer people in the firm.

Beryl believes that being an entrepreneur in the corporate world is about the person as much as the environment. Being entrepreneurial is a choice, and it is viable within corporate boundaries. However, if the firm compels you to survive within their gates, you will lose your originality.

Beryl did a brief consulting stint with BlackRock, where she highlighted that if you've worked for a large corporation for 5-10 years and climbed the management ladder, it's tough to quit. Beryl enjoys building things, and opportunities abound, but the question is always if it's suitable for one, and if one has the necessary abilities or connections to pursue that specific opportunity.

Beryl Chavez Li:

Bez Bajrami

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: January 24, 2021

Bez Bajrami, is the CEO and trader of Cube Wealth. He came from an entrepreneurial family, had a degree in Finance, did his wealth management internship at Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and subsequently spent a few years at J.P. Morgan in Manhattan for his first year at an investment bank and his second year at a private bank, specializing in asset management. Bez founded CUBE as a side project to assist people on learning about different investment terminologies and such.

CUBE WEALTH

Cube began as an Instagram page in late 2015, then evolved into a subscription platform to teach average investors how to invest, mostly for educational purposes rather than day trading. The subscription began in August 2018, and the company has been in business for over five years.

Cube's name came about because Bez saw that businesses using three-word slogans were having a lot of success. He came up with a three-dimensional approach to assisting people, and the CUBE slogan became "learn, discuss, invest." Bez was only thinking about 3-word phrases and 3-dimensional words when he came up with the moniker CUBE. Knowing that investing might be terrifying for a lot of individuals, it came out as a friendlier term. Cube Wealth has almost 15,000 followers after 5 years of updating every day, 2-3 times a day. As a social media plan, he enlisted the support of several industry insiders, as well as a number of influential and well-connected acquaintances in the social media arena, who sat down with him and simply figured out this approach in the appropriate direction.

Cube was conceptualized at a networking event in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, when Bez was working at J.P. Morgan. After a period of working on the Instagram page, he started informing others about it and coming up with ideas. In the end, Bez requested feedback on the concepts. The overwhelming response was that they wouldn't be interested since, in general, investment assistance isn't provided unless you have a specific amount of assets. Financial advisors will look you up for a minimum of 50,000 or 100,000 dollars, take possession of your account, own it, and then administer and disclose everything about it. Bez advised them to "treat the million-dollar customer the same as the hundred-thousand client" as they're the same ones who lead the right folks in the correct direction.

Bez was also working on various other projects while at JP. Some of his team members own well-known websites and social media profiles, and they expected these new businesses to pay off quickly, but they didn't. After the deals fell through, Bez held CUBE. After his previous two businesses failed, he quit his job in order to focus on monetizing CUBE sooner. He's been working on CUBE for a long time but has yet to deploy the service due to a lack of funding.

Opportunities for CUBE Wealth

After two unsuccessful endeavors, Bez now aims to start from the beginning with a subscription-based strategy and then start making it all happen, throwing the prior model behind. He launched it in August 2018, he lost his membership after more than a year, and it took some time to get back on track. Cube reached 20,000 subscribers in the first month but still had a tight cash flow, so the aim was to work harder and quicker. If he doesn't make a thousand dollars by December 31st, Bez says he'll return to the corporate world. However, Bez earned $1,001.47 in December, indicating that he should keep the Cube business going. Since then, he's kept it running for months, and it's now approaching the next milestone by the end of February.

New tech companies, such as Robinhood and Weebly, have made it possible to push everything to a zero-dollar free commission, free transactions. Bez recognizes this opportunity to address a current issue in trading, in which individuals rush because they are experiencing FOMO as a result of digitalization - this entire trend began with Robinhood. Launching CUBE at the same time as Robinhood pushed additional business to CUBE, increasing retail in the market. CUBE sees an opportunity to break down knowledge barriers, much as Robinhood has done with entrance barriers. Cube provides the path to understanding what stock to invest in, how to tell whether it's the appropriate one, how to manage it, diversify it, and how to take care of it so that it lasts for 10, 20, 30, 40 years.

The Influence

Bez was working nonstop and kept his work ethic intact, and this was under the influence of his father. His father owns properties and started his car service, like black limo service in New York, back in the early 1990s. He sold that after a few years, then he went to the car wash business and owned a couple of car washes since then. Each year the earnings levels up and on the 4th year, he starts paying Bez minimum wage, teaching him the value of a dollar. Eventually, he introduced Bez to selling all the cool packages, and upgrades of their service. Until this day, Bez’s father owned that car wash for 20 years, and to this day, no one has sold more of the products than Bez did, bringing his dad almost a grand plus extra sales. That influence brought Bez to where he stands now.

Challenges

Bez believes he's still progressing, despite the fact that he admits the company's slowdown and the costs of trying to grow it. Growing a brand, a business, and taking care of everything on that front is just as traumatic and stressful as the events that occurred behind the scenes. Bez disputes that social media sites have created unrealistic expectations about entrepreneur lifestyles. He clarifies the idea by stating that this life is not for everyone. It's stressful, a hundred times more than imaginable, and it will send you to your knees, but you will know precisely what you're made of at that moment.

The Downside of Digitalization

According to Bez, the downside of embracing digitalization is its effect on people’s priorities, and that includes losing the value of a dollar. On a different angle, people are losing the focus on what actually matters and what’s actually on the frontline. As the world digitalizes, it’s also losing touch with reality and its beauty, and losing the gratitude of having the privilege of it.

Treat the million-dollar client the same as the hundred-thousand client.

-Bez Bajrami, CEO of CUBE Wealth

Akshay K.

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: February 1, 2021

Akshay K. is the CEO, and founder of Line. It is an AI-powered technology straight out of Techstars, that helps qualified and banked individuals without a relevant credit history, payslips, or credit scores, establish credit and access affordable financial services such as personal credit. For the record, Akshay and Earl were in the same Techstars class focused on financial access and financial inclusion that’s co-sponsored with Western Union.

Before Line, Akshay was Global Product Head for Research Labs at PayPal, where he was working for re-platforming PayPal for the under banked and underserved. Before that, he was head of eBay, PayPal Retail Labs where he worked with the top 100 internet retailers from Nike to Nordstrom helping them understand their customers with what they are looking to buy, and why they are not buying. During that time Akshay had the opportunity to see this innovative consumer credit product called PayPal Credit which launched, scale-failed, and was shut down.

After Akshay departed from PayPal, he spent a year and more embedding himself in the community. He did about 36 thousand miles as an Uber driver and a Lyft driver in the San Francisco Bay Area. He would spend at least 5-10 hours driving an Uber and Lyft. He took the time to understand the user’s end by living with them, living like them, and learning from them. Based on those learnings, he created Line. The inertia of having to jump through so many hoops, and all the commotion it takes to get money, was what drove Line’s identity and mission to create as easy as buying a consumer product or subscribing to Netflix. Doing that helped a lot more people and that was the origin of Line.

“The dots need to connect when you look backward”

Akshay swears by this saying from Steve Jobs as he acknowledges his roots, being a product of two incredible individuals that helped mold him in his base. His mom has 3 masters in Archeology, Epigraphy, and History, and his dad an MA in Economics. Akshay grew up under the arms of his grandmother, who was an amazing and inspiring lady who did farming and educated all of her kids despite poverty.

Akshay grew up hustling his way out and did things like selling the latest WWE postcards that he got from a place in the ghetto to his rich classmates, which he would get it for 25 cents, in India, it’s 25 paise. He used to borrow 2 bucks from a friend, convinced him, and negotiated to give him 4 bucks if he gives Akshay 2. For those 2 bucks, he bought 8 postcards and sold them for 8 rupees that equal 8 dollars. As soon as his dad knew about it, he went furious and sent Akshay back to school, instilling in him a lesson that stuck with Akshay since.

The Startup

Akshay got into building his own startup as his first stint while schooling, but it failed eventually. It was a site he built as a competition for Yahoo.com for India before the internet took off in India, it was called Defueled.com. Akshay figured out how to partner with 10s of other US sites and had a lot of comments on his site about Yahoo giving only 2 MB email space, and so Defueled would counter that giving 4 MB. Akshay even recalls getting on a call with Tony Hseih from LinkExchange who was the CEO of Zappos. He tried to make a deal to put banner ads on the site, but Akshay built the site at a time when India was not ready for it and so he shut it down.

After school, he joined a very popular Indian company that was India’s first billion-dollar company started by a regular dude, which got him inspired. He was crazy about computer networks so, during the training program, he emailed an entire business unit telling everyone what he wants to work on and so he was placed there. That started off Akshay’s journey and he ended up coming to the US to do his Ph.D. but eventually dropped out.

Line

Line is a company reimagining money as a consumer product for the new generation of consumers today, living in a world in which, predominantly, people have a fluctuating income. There’s a 30-40% income variance and these consumers need frequent affordable access to money, but there aren’t any alternatives present, so Line is looking to change that. Line comes with a subscription fee and people get up to $500, use it as they see fit, and payback in 12 months, no interest, no credit checks, no fees, no income restrictions.

Line started in November 2019. Most of the investors are people from the PayPal network where Akshay used to work: the XCP of PayPal has invested in them along with the XCR of Ripple as well, and got excited hearing Akshay’s story about understanding people by living like them. They got the ball rolling and they got into Techstars where Akshay met Earl.

In terms of traction with the customers, Line has spoken to more than thousands of their users, knowing the pain they’ve gone through and seeing where the product could help change the individual’s life. These are not people who are throwing away money but are hardworking people who just need a chance. 60% of Line’s users are women: there are single moms, educated, urban immigrants who give money back to their family, trying to juggle their whole lives, working very hard, and that has been the motivation for Line. There’s been a lot of demand going 100% month on month. They are at 56,323 users and counting and expect to be at 200k at the end of the next month. They’re acquiring users at a very low cost, taking all the inertia that exists in financial products, and are delivering money like a consumer product.

Line has stumbled upon this crazy growth and this uniqueness that 60% of their population are women, and in light of that they’re doubling down on fundraising. Line is in the US right now, and aims to be global, and the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated this space. Akshay foresees in the next 10 years, the majority of the world’s working population will have fluctuating income or unsteady income. We’re going to live in a world where there’s a lot more uncertainty as far as financial life is concerned. Despite that services still have to be delivered to people, and Line is doing that today, not 10 years, but today and so when that becomes a real status quo, Line envisions being the leaders in this space.

Insights from eBay & PayPal

In his journey with eBay and PayPal, there are 2 things Akshay shares as he learned: one is that consumers were asking for consumer products, but everybody was giving them financial products that put a lot more confusion and a lot of inertia; the second thing is, to any customer segment you’re trying to serve, you need to be deeply embedded in that community and know what it means to be under their skins for a very long time.

Powered by Techstars and Western Union

Akshay acknowledges Techstars and Western Union accelerators dramatically changed Line’s trajectory. As his folks from Techstars says, "we are good at something and we’re not good at everything, therefore, it allows us to learn from each other". He got to learn from the challenges and how other startups work on their challenges, then he gets a tribe that Techstars put behind him: a tribe that supports him whenever he needs support. As per Akshay, you require a group of experts, mentors, and even friends who have gone through similar journeys. It tells you that everybody goes through certain circumstances in life and you have to stick to your guns. Never give up, and just get to the other side and believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel - that’s what Techstars is about according to Akshay. It’s not just about your startup, it’s not just about making a startup accelerator and be profitable. It’s that they’re accelerating new founders as individuals, putting one in front of people who have had a similar situation to get you the inspiration. To give you life tools which will then help you build your business the different way, better, and accelerate.

Not giving up doesn’t mean you keep doing the same things. Not giving up means if it’s not working, try something else and figure something out.

-Akshay K., CEO of Line

Amit Garg

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: February 12, 2021

Amit Garg was born and raised in a smaller capital of a smaller state in the periphery of Brazil, and which become a much bigger city since. His parents immigrated there about 50 years ago from India. He has built his career in technology for over 20 years in Silicon Valley. As a venture capitalist, he focuses on seed-stage applied AI investments in Digital Health, Automation (cars and robots), and Enterprise.

Amit studied as an engineer and a doctor at the same time and decided to combine both but as he went to Google for work, Amit picked the technology side over the medicine side. From technology, he indulged in startups and then into VC which has been a concentrated portfolio and he has tried to strike the balance with what’s best for him.

Some of his key successes are nuTonomy (seed, sold for $450M) at Samsung NEXT Ventures and Misfit Wearables (seed, sold for $250M) at Norwest Ventures. He has an operational background in product and analytics at his startup (currently valued at $450M) and at Google. Amit joined in the younger years of Google, having less than a thousand people before it had gone public. He spent his first 2 years in what was then the campus, which was the 4 buildings that were considered the heart of Google. He has also co-founded and has been leading a non-profit since 2000, crowd-funded and built a high school lab, a library, and a hospital in rural India serving a community of 100,000 people.

Hospital for Hope

Going from place to place in Eastern India, Amit witnessed tons of problems in terms of health. He witnessed somebody die in front of him, a whole family suffering from malaria, seeing children who had polio who couldn’t afford a wheelchair dragging themselves on a made-up wheeled cart, witnessing the worst of humanity. This provoked Amit to be part of building a hospital in rural India, which he recalls to be during his time as a freshman in college.

In his sophomore year, Amit took over a student organization with the same medical mission, started training his classmates to go volunteer help in different regions, and ended up sending over 450 people for 4-5 years and is still ongoing. It’s been picked up by successive generations of students, which Amit finds grateful for, especially to the founder whom he inherited it from. They started to raise funds and eventually helped build the library, the High School Laboratory. Eventually, they decided to expand it outside of college and built it into a full-fledged non-profit, now called Hospital for Hope. For the record, the infant mortality rate in India is 70 births per thousand, which is ten times higher than the national average, and Hospital for Hope intends to make a significant difference. They teamed up with a crowdfunded organization, and finally generated enough funds to establish a hospital that has been serving a 100,000-person community for the past seven years.

Tau Ventures

Tau Ventures is an AI-first, seed-first VC fund in Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, focused on three verticals including digital health, automation (cars, robots, drones), and enterprise. Uniting these 3 verticals is artificial intelligence. Together with Amit’s business partner, they’ve been entrepreneurs, operators, and investors for almost 20 years, noticing that AI has now come to an inflection point. There are a lot of opportunities for people building AI, but the focus according to Amit is on people who are applying AI. AI for them is a horizontal rather than a vertical and finds this similar to the cloud and with mobile 10-15 years ago or even with the internet 25 years ago.

Some companies they’ve invested in were from the oncology space. Such companies who are helping detect cancer early on. Using computer vision called Iterative Scopes, a company that is helping develop antibodies for cancer and COVID-19 by using machine learning to identify biomarkers. The other company that is focused on identifying the right kind of drug to treat the right kind of cancer in dogs and therefore creating a large database of drug responses that can eventually be leverage for human beings. That company is called Fidocure, which is previously covered by Startup Mindsets on an episode with it's CEO, Christina Lopes.

In the enterprise, they had an investment in a company that is helping protect social media data and personal information on the web. In automation, they have companies focused on producing food in more automated ways. In general, as seed investors based in Silicon Valley investing in the US and Canada, they’ve been open towards teams located globally. The focus is the company's center points in the US and Canada because it’s the market they understand the best where careers are built.

In terms of deal flow, venture-capitalist-wise, Tau Ventures was doubled in size as for their efficiency. As a VC fund, they’re only aged a year and a half. The more mature the fund becomes, the more people know about it, the more exposure it gets, more publicity, more thought leadership, and the more deal flow it gets. Also, unlike many established VC funds, Tau Ventures keeps enough capital in reserves and more capital to deploy. Given that, some funds have taken a step back, those funds that are taking a step forward end up getting more deal flow. As an emerging business, Amit acknowledges being more well known now and becoming more efficient as the deal flow has doubled. The runway has about a thousand companies a year, and right now is 2000 companies establishing a pretty confident deal flow. The serendipity has gone down, but the target has increased so much more that it has been a net-positive.

Investments

One of the companies Amit invested 5 years ago was called nuTonomy, a self-driving company that was mostly in Singapore. It is a US company with US founders, and it was sold 2 years later for $450 million, which was a remarkable success. They are now LPs and investors in Tau Ventures and Amit got this investment fully virtually 5 years ago. Amit did not meet them in person before making investments, and Tau Ventures has adapted the same philosophy. Having done several investments this year, they’re now coming up to 7 investments that they’ve done fully virtually. In most of those cases, Amit did not know the founder or the team before but it helped a lot that he could triangulate very quickly. He was able to do a disciplined approach, write up a deal memo, put in about 50 hours of work before making the investments considering that him not being able to meet them in person was not a barrier.

Tau Ventures’ investment thesis has not changed much. They see it as a lot of opportunities for digital health, automation, and enterprises, like cybersecurity, tooling, and food automation. Instead, what has changed was how they look at those opportunities.

When looking at investments previously, they used to look for runways of 18 months, now they value if a company has a runway of 24 months. They aim to make sure a company is being a bit more conservative with their cash. Either because their burn is low or because they’re raising a bit more, but at the same time making sure that they have a window of 18-24 months ideally.

The second thing is they syndicate the rounds. The seed stage is far more collaborative, and the late-stage becomes far more competitive. At the seed stage, it’s about trying to deliver the risk by having other good VCs in and playing both roles, whether bringing in somebody else, or somebody else brings them in. As Amit says they are not a huge fund yet so if the other VC is larger and has more funds, they consider it a valuable plus. However, those two things are not hard and fast rules but otherwise, they continue investing in the same things.

In the presence of the pandemic, at least in the US and even globally, valuations have been on a downturn. But to Amit, it’s less of a downturn and more of a correction. As the rounds previously were not in all companies, but were in some cases higher than they should’ve been based on the metrics that VCs have historically used.

Rounds are taking a bit longer to complete. On a very rough average, it may have taken companies 1-3 months to close their rounds from the start of conversations to final close and now it’s taking them a bit closer to 3 months, sometimes 4. As a VC, it means that people are being more disciplined in making their investments. And, at the end of the day, that is overall better for all as it means companies are getting well funded after people have gotten to know them well.

More on Amit Garg at the Startup Mindsets Podcast!

“There’s no such thing as perfection and if you’ve achieved perfection, I think you’ve failed because that means that you’ve stopped believing you can always be better."

-Amit Garg, Managing Partner of Tau Ventures

Recommended Books & Resources:

Amit likes to read about stories of companies and people, how they did it, and why they did it. This year, he’s read Steve Jobs’ biography, Elon Musk’s biography, Jeff Bezos’, the stories of Uber, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and a lot of things related to his profession. What he recommends to anybody interested in entrepreneurship is to pick up a well-written story of somebody you look up to.

Euvin Naidoo

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: January 25, 2021

Euvin is part of the group called The Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum, where Earl knew him and became close with him. They were interested in two things: one is in digital transformation and the fourth industrial revolution, and two, how it applies to emerging markets. Euvin is one of the faculty of Harvard Business School who launched the first short intensive program on scaling agility in January 2020. In the podcast, he shares his strong knowledge and understanding of capital markets and emerging economies.

Euvin was part of the launch of the first intensive program, which brought together thinkers in the world of agility. Agility is about creating an organization that is running rapid experiments. Part of Agility is how entrepreneurs can get into the iterative loop to rapidly get feedback. The longer you take to get the feedback, the further down you are in a particular path, and the harder it is to change the trajectory, therefore leaders must have the ability to observe and learn the coachability.

The Agile Mindset

The “agile mindset” is the adaptable mindset, which suggests being very clear of the path of what it is that you need to deliver and embed it in the people that you bring in with full transparency and communication. As a venture capitalist, Euvin always encouraged founders to stop thinking in terms of feedback because people aren’t always going to give the right feedback, therefore you filter it. The more you’re able to listen to your most valuable asset which is your team, the more you’re able to adapt and listen to your customers is what’s crucial. Being adaptable is about taking the advantage of a situation, building resilience into your organization to support your employees, your family members, your customers.

The Venture Capital Space

Euvin looks back to the roots of venture capital, specifically from the Father of Venture Capital: Georges Doriot, who came from the era of World War I, where he fought. During World War II and post that era, he got into the ecosystem of the Harvard Business School in Boston, and that’s when Venture Capital was formed. Through that element, he looks at the innovation that is taking place at that time in terms of new technologies, entrepreneurs, innovations in this difficult time in World War 2 where the challenges are taking place all around him. From a student, he became a faculty member and he managed his experience in the industry with this ecosystem around him, creating the American Research and Development Corporations seen as amongst the first original venture capital funds. Eventually, they partnered entrepreneurs at the seed stage and helped the technology and changes nurture through.

Entrepreneurs in the era of Doriot had a mismatch between how to get capital, and that includes expertise, guidance, mentorships, to help the company, which was a tough thing to go through. To take something from an idea into a growing concern and to scale is always challenging. For Euvin, you’ve got to develop muscle memory, be it in your specific sector or field. Whether it be on Fintech or healthcare, or from a geographic perspective, it's crucial to know the ecosystem, local context, and one's strengths.

Venture capital is born in an era of scarcity, an era of crisis, and the so-called “venture mindset” is one of what we call creative disruption which replaces existing business models, replacing the way things are done with new approaches. In today’s context, that would be the famous disruptive innovation: what has often underestimated models suddenly becomes highly successful models.

Euvin has spent a lot of time helping people about what it means to be able to execute. He's seen brilliant founders taking businesses to great successes but also seen and engaged with founders stagnate mainly due to blind spots, a false track of what their true potential could be. Everybody has blind spots, as per Euvin, but the trick is to be aware of it and to actively seek to conquer them. In the venture capital world, you have to have partners that can go with you through the journey, and that chemistry that exists with both is not just capital but should truly work to unlock the ecosystem.

Entrepreneurs

Different entrepreneurs have gone about it in different ways and we hear of success stories, but for the many success stories we heard, there are thousands more that are not successes. A lot of that is a combination of not just entrepreneurship but timing, sometimes luck, the ecosystem, and the partners you choose. That makes the birth of an organization an incredible journey to be part of, not just as an entrepreneur but also as an investor. As someone who is a risk-practitioner as well, Euvin states what successes never guarantee are great venture capitalists, as well as great entrepreneurs who've got to come together to co-create and work to reduce risk.

Entrepreneurship is about the journey to create something, build something, build a movement, building people together to change how they do things to be courageous enough although obviously, the scales are different in terms of what’s at stake. As Euvin says, what has been a primary driver is to look for remarkable people, always adding value and making sure it’s satisfying what’s important to you. Support an environment that's rich and nourishing and where you can grow.

One of the most significant elements in entrepreneurship and venture capital is the ability for leaders to manage risk, and Euvin breaks down the factors that could help shape your risk management. The first way is your ability to try to get a 20-20 vision of everything, and knowing your strengths and your weaknesses. Secondly, surround yourself with the right people and the right partner, people that close your blind spots, or enhance them. Third, which Euvin loves about the agile world, is execution. There is no right or wrong model, what is critical is the ability to move from an idea to get more traction. These tractions involve tools to reduce its risks: strategic vision and operational discipline.

The journey is as important as the destination.

-Euvin Naidoo, Faculty at Harvard Business School

Recommended Books and Resources:

• Jim Collins - “Good to Great”

• Nancy Koehn - “Forged in Crisis”

• Clayton Christensen - “How will you measure your life?”

Dan Healy

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: February 13, 2021

Dan Healy, CEO/Founder of PickUp, was born in Serbia, San Francisco, grew up in Seattle, made his way out to Connecticut, went to schooling in Ohio, and found himself in Brooklyn, New York. Every place that he lived, he had a sense of community that was typically surrounded by the conversation of Sports. Sports conversations used to happen in person, but now it is shifting to digital. And that's where the platform of PickUp was created - it allows people to make picks on headlines, and getting those picks right means winning PickUp coins, which are worth tangible goods convertible to items in the marketplace.

Dan used to help run a company called Prolific Interactive where they used to build mobile apps for companies such as SoulCycle, American Express, Abercrombie, Gap, a lot of retailers and health and wellness companies, as well as fintech companies. Having this background and experience building native mobile applications, it became easy for them to create an app, span it up in a very specific location, and in the process, validate a lot of the hypothesis around user behaviors. They established the PickUp app in June 2019 and grew to 1,200 active users and 150,000 picks over 3 months, actively validating a lot of behaviors and now working on scaling that out.

Witnessing a quickly evolving market in the world of sports-betting, user-behavior was then validated. As they searched for product-market fit, they tried to figure out the place they could dwell and it was across this market of independent publishers who were being pushed out of the Sports media world by some bigger sports publishers. Dan recognized a way to monetize a distribution channel as opposed to paying for distribution and in the process added a ton of value to the fan which led to having a clear case for monetization. The biggest difference or the most important element of that was taking a targeted approach as they had conversations with VCs and Sports tech because that fit their portfolio.

Dan’s first startup was built while he was at Ohio State in 2005. It’s called Sloopymenus.com and he did it for the Columbus, Ohio market. There are 50,000 students there, 100,000 people go to the campus, 200,000 on game day, and kids are on their laptops in their dorm rooms, or their houses or apartments, and they’ve got a menu board up on the wall with paper menus. It became the turning point to the idea of creating a website that scans those menus and allows people to go and order online. They licensed the software from an amazing group of guys from Penn State, who also started a company called Lionmenus.

PickUp

Dan is the co-founder/CEO of PickUp, a company that dwells at the center of sports media, sports betting, and fan engagement, empowering a new generation of sports fans to play the headlines. PickUp is co-founded by Chris Meisner, who’s also an incredible designer. They started PickUp about a year and a half, seeing sports-betting being adaptive by the public or the casual fan, which is needed for the business’ success. Given its receptiveness to the conversation around big media and hyper-local, PickUp created a platform that enables content creators, writers, and bloggers to embed contextually relevant questions directly into the content. It makes it playable, it makes it engaging, it gives them some remarkable stats, but it also allows them to tap into this growing sports betting market.

In 2020, they saw growth in 6 states in the District of Columbia where they pushed registration through, and now, 19 states allow sports betting although not all of those are mobile. There’s a big difference between mobile sports-betting and land-based sports betting. The only place legal to place bets is at a casino, but the state of New Jersey, which is one of the more progressive states, is the first state to go legal in terms of sports-betting. It has set the bar for how important mobile sports-betting is. Now sports-betting is legal in states such as Colorado, West Virginia, Indiana, and more!

PickUp is now a legal affiliate in 8 states and foresees about 7-8 more this year, including a big one which is the state of New York. In California, the agreements that are in place are not yet in favor for sports-betting expansion as the casinos are driven by Native American tribes. As per Dan, it’s more difficult for California but this year, PickUp is waiting on New York, Texas, and other states going live, online and in-mobile and eventually, all of Canada drops over the next 3 years.

According to Dan, the biggest wins have been the hires that they’ve made. Dan states, his celebration is being able to watch a group of people talk about what they need to do and put it into action without him having to say anything. The other thing that they celebrate is that the seed round was fantastic, but the most important part of the seed round was bringing partners and a group of investors into their space who have been helpful tremendously. Recognizing the market of independent publishers, and getting their first 3 publishers on board when the platform went by was a big celebration as well. Watching those 3 publishers turn into 30, and having a path to a thousand was also remarkable.

Sports-betting

In May 2018, states could make decisions to offer legalized sports-betting. That led to a flurry of sports folks coming in from the UK and other countries as well as some homegrown ones popping up in the US and everybody wanted to create a sports book. PickUp set up to offer sports-betting as states began to go legal. The biggest advantage was to FanDuel and DraftKings because they already had that audience, which was sports bettors that play daily fantasy sports. Their ability to convert the daily fantasy sports players to sports bettors is almost impossible to compete with. The reason it’s so difficult to compete with is that it’s a battle of user acquisition. The competition is for the coveted 3 spots that follow FanDuel and DraftKings, and those are currently filled by Bet MGM.

Over the last year and a half, more activities in the MNA space have emerged, and right now, what’s happening is a battle for customer acquisition. However, what people don’t think about, don’t understand is that the world of sports betting is actually a relative in low-margin business and it’s a 4-5% margin business and the opportunity is actually in the online Casino. Sports betting is an entry point for the sports books to bring people into their online casinos and for the media companies, the opportunity to sell data and get followers.

If you have conviction around something, stay the course.

-Dan Healy, Founder of PickUp

“There’s something about having something that is your own, that everybody expects to fail or nobody understands how big of a deal it is, and it’s all in your control.”

“If you have conviction around something, stay the course. Remain as consistent as possible. It’s a battle against time. The longer you can stay in the game and the more people you can communicate with and help bring into the fall, the closer you’ll be to creating something. So, stay persistent, persevere if you can.”

To his 20-year-old self:

“It’s a bit more of a personal thing than anything else. But, I would tell my 20-year-old self to diversify my network as much as I possibly could and to take better care of myself physically and mentally. Do everything in my power to prepare for a relatively draining lifestyle. Which means learn how to sleep, learn how to exercise, learn how to meditate, learn how to cut alcohol out when necessary. Learn how to do all the things that make you feel better and clear your mind so that you can be the best version of yourself.”

Madhu Iyer

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: February 7, 2021

Madhu Shalini Iyer is a partner at RocketshipVC, a Silicon Valley-based fund investing globally. She was the Chief Data Officer of Gojek and helped grow the business into a $10 billion unicorn. In addition to being a board member, she started the Singapore office and played an active role in the strategy, new business development, and data as a competitive advantage.

Before Gojek, Madhu was part of the founding team of Intuit’s Quickbooks Lending Platform. As the data science leader at Intuit, Madhu helped grow the platform to $300 million and holds 2 patents in the areas of user-data augmented algorithms for financial inclusion.

Madhu was also the Chief Data Officer for Ethos Lending. There she built the underwriting platform and was responsible for all b2c revenue, resulting in a $65 million gross market value per month. Madhu was further responsible for building and running the marketing team.

Prior to that, Madhu was a partner at a $150M private equity fund, Stem Financial, in Hong Kong. She started her career as a senior data scientist with a leading think tank in Menlo Park, CA.

Madhu was born in India and was raised in Singapore and went to high school there. She went to a university in Sydney and did Computer Engineering. She went to the US and was fascinated with Applied Math and wanted to drill down on that, which is what led her to become a scientist.

Madhu was a senior scientist at a company called Exponent in Menlo Park which was started by her Stanford folks and it had a statistics and data sciences practice. A lot of clients came for consulting assignments, and it was a practice full of Ph.D. status stations. Madhu worked with them and looked at product analytics. She was in the payroll, doing meetups and ingesting large data. That was pre-Python days and that data was just exploding around in the late 2000s.

Madhu began to meet a lot of very interesting entrepreneurs and founders in the Valley in 2006-2008. She’s seen the effects of building data-driven products where she realized the beginnings and the saplings of how to use data, not just to solve problems, but now to build products. That was the reason Madhu then moved from Exponent as a senior scientist to Intuit.

RocketshipVC

RocketshipVC is a 140 million dollar fund with 140 million dollars AUM assets and management. The 2nd fund is 100 million and the 1st fund is 40 million dollars, which was more experimental. They started in 2014, investing differently and disrupting VC to that end they set, and looking at the deal flow from the angle of the largest database/startup database in the world. They started running algorithms on top to curate their deal flow and the 2nd fund got to 100M dollars which they just raised.

Madhu joined last year and have been looking at exciting companies all over the world. Three things came together for her in this fund: first, not just investing in their backyard, which is the Valley and the US, but also investing in all the other partners; second is operators and entrepreneurs who built really large startups just like Madhu; and thirdly, everything is data-oriented and everyone’s got deep background and expertise in data.

In terms of networks, RocketshipVC does not look at any location constraints upon investing and does not have any objective bias and what they go after is coming up from the data and marginalized endeavors and founders.

On Southeast Asia Commerce & Investors

Being agnostic investors in the startup portfolio, they found something very interesting upon starting the fund: it was all about finding great companies through data. A lot of trends have started in Southeast Asia’s commerce in the 3Cs. Southeast Asia is like India in the fact that it is not a homogeneous population, as there are 600 million people there. It’s not the same as Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand which are very heterogeneous markets. Every state is different, every vernacular is different, along with the different cultures and commerce and many other factors.

In the last few years, there have been incredibly strong founders in Southeast Asia. It’s not just people that are going back to different investment countries to start things at home, but it’s also just homegrown entrepreneurship that’s becoming more and more prevalent. They see that in the founder’s quality as measured by the conversations that they’re having.

In this period in Southeast Asia, Madhu has seen some sectors affected and some emerged. As it comes to some emerging markets, India and Southeast Asia are certainly starting to build tech even for the US in the B2B realms. What will be released in Southeast Asia as it bubbles up are a lot of commerce and fintech activity. The COVID-19 crisis that hit everyone in the world along with its tailwinds and headwinds in every region, every geography, every sector, were hugely impacted. However, in Southeast Asia, there is a digital, commerce, and logistics boom that has everyone excited about how these enterprises are being done.

GoJek

Madhu joined GoJek at a very interesting time in Asia and Southeast Asia. It was the very early days of the tech ecosystem and the startup ecosystem in Southeast Asia, and the data science market ecosystem was very nascent at that time. When she joined GoJek, as their first Chief Data Officer, she was on the board and started the Singapore office. Data science in the field was new, and technology as a field in Southeast Asia was just emerging. It was a learning time and the ecosystem truly grew while Madhu was there. They raised 550 million dollars and became a unicorn.

One of the other things is that they grew to have 1 million transactions per day. There was GoCar and GoBike, and the data needs for that just exploded, even so as they built GoPay that had more transactions than the bank of Indonesia, measuring in the data science and data org. That was a gratifying time to see the impact of what was getting built while at an organization and seeing the impact on the ground and as a country. At one time, GoFood, GoPay, and GoRide were just pervasive and you could see an impact of technology and data.

Intuit

Madhu was at Intuit prior to GoJek, building a fintech product which was called Quickbooks financing. In 2010-2011, data was all-pervasive. Not too many years before that became online, they were seeing a ton of data in the cloud, and that’s when fintech as an entire industry was emerging. Kabbage has started. Lending Club was there on the deck. So, the impact premise is how to get working capital using data to the Quickbooks customers. They were able to build that platform into a 250 million dollars length before Madhu went to Southeast Asia.

As per Madhu, when you’re in all of these rides, you’re never able to reflect truly because you don’t have time to even experience it properly because every day is frantic. According to her, every startup that she’s been with was frantic and it’s about survival and its teams and work.

The ability to be a better person is how you deal with your failures, not your successes.

-Madhu Iyer, Partner at RocketshipVC & Former Chief Data Officer at GoJek

John Morada

Article by: Francheska Camille L. Barrios

Date: January 24, 2021

John Morada is the vice president of Agile Stacks. He has played every position within early-stage companies such as finance, sales, and engineering, and has spent last year as the vice president of Agile Stacks. His first entrance to entrepreneurship was at the age of 13 in a garage startup. After that startup, he went to college and earned his degree in engineering. Then he moved to New York in the year 2000, where there was a dot com boom. Shortly, he joined this first dot com company called oncology.com with a mission to build a central space for a community of people who are cancer survivors and undergoing treatment. Since then, John has done a couple more startups and now he’s the vice president of Agile Stacks.

John is also an Agile Professor in his Alma Mater teaching software engineering, and one of the most interesting topics he’s been involved in right now is quantum computing. For the past 6 and a half to 9 months, John focused on just diving deep and reading as much about quantum computing. He’s gone to various meetups regarding climate computing, and attended webinars.

Agile Stacks

John came to Agile Stacks right after doing the seed when one of his good friends, John Mathon, who was a CEO, invited him. He was involved with another big system innovator company at that time and was doing well and enjoyed the work. Mathon still insisted John to check out and see what they were doing in the particular space of infrastructure software, assuming John will enjoy it and learn a ton on and indeed, he was right.

Being in a very early stage startup, everybody’s doing everything whereas at John’s first dot com, he just had an engineering degree and all he did was particularly producing code. Being an early founding team member, you do whatever it takes to make the company great, and the best part of it is being able to think about things differently. John also does market research where he enjoys looking at competitors, looking at people in equal space, and then figuring out how to navigate distinction, and uniqueness that people want to buy.

Agile stacks help companies to accelerate software deliveries and data science with composable and customizable stacks. They usually communicate and talk about the vision at every leadership meeting they have, as Tech changes very fast and affects the company as well. They’re changing their messaging certainly, but the vision stays consistent, which is to take the complexity of building software and just make it easier for developers and operations engineers.

On the technical side of Agile Stacks

John says as an engineer or having had that engineering mindset, it’s about solving a problem and doing it in a way that we can design the path on how we solve it. What they really enjoy doing is making sure that their product works well for the customers for them not having to face the struggles and the challenges of building software stacked together that they’ve had to face in the past.

Agile Stacks is a SaaS product and the amount of information that users give by taking on different configurations of software, spending time on a certain page and not, gives some kind of data. It just adds and makes the features even better for them to want to use the product even more. It can get very technical as they continue to evaluate and observe so they can make the product even better. That’s where this area of constant monitoring and constant data collection will help for the betterment of the company in the future.

In the technical space, one of the challenges of Agile Stacks was trying to deal with translating some feature values and making it consumable by the average reader. As good as possible, they try to keep it between 8th and 9th grade reading level, making them want to engage in their website. From a marketing perspective, what he does is try to figure out the best way to get the brand recognized but in a consumable, easily-readable way. Writing from a tech perspective, John being an engineer, tried to build pages like an engineer, tried to solve a problem to be geared to achieve the best possible result in a programmatic, systematic way. They do a lot of content work in Agile Stacks, so the team consists of contractors, ghostwriters and on staff.

Marketing Aspects

In terms of discussing marketing strategy and change, Agile Stacks did an analysis at the end of 2019 of where will they generate the most leads. They found that over 80% of their leads were from either events that they attended to, like conferences or done through email campaigns and then far fewer were in balance through their website. Taking that knowledge leads them to thinking about changes in 2020 that are more effective. What they decided to do in 2020 was to deeply drill into a segment of the target audience that would be more receptive to any and all messaging. The change was to do a lot more marketing through content via omnichannel approach, hitting multiple media outlets that are effective where buyers tend to be. Analysts, tech magazines, digital blogs, and social media are some of the platforms they used.

Agile Stacks looks forward to further growth: acquiring customers, making sure to have a good base of customers that are consistent, that start really using their products, and are loving it. The reason being is that Agile Stacks is a wonderful infrastructure software company, but at the end of the day, what they actually look at that really drives value is the data collected from the use of their system.

Venture Capitalists

In terms of VCs and a personal board of advisers, John shares he has not worked directly or that closely with a startup work in the past. So, learning about the board was learning on the job just recently. John applied an engineering mindset, to break up a bigger problem into a smaller bit and solve for each one over time.

His entry into venture capital actually began with his time at Capgemini, where he was Head of Strategy for the CTO. Consulting companies needs you to have some level of density and traction in the market before the scale of a consulting company like Capgemini, Accenture, Deloitte can take advantage of that and vice versa. There were practices that actually developed around the sales force, but in the early days, it was just this small startup that was in a CRM practice. Until eventually, it graduated into a much bigger division of Accenture and Deloitte that was a dedicated practice on its own. The idea was building a microphone that can build those companies upright to the point that this pipeline of amazing companies could be gained.

John enumerates a number of VCs that helped the business up: Canaan and Maha, Hewlett Packard, pathfinder as investors with Abhishek Shukla, Rosecliff Ventures with Michael Murphy and with Alumni Ventures Group which is MI fund team. The details that they get from what they’re saying have been wonderful, also, the perspective of their ability to introduce Agile Stacks to their network has been great. Their portfolio companies have been some of the conversations they’ve had early on in the company. So, it’s really been phenomenal to have them with us on this journey.

When you don’t get to ride high enough, you need to do better.

-John Morada, VP at Agile Stacks

Recommended Books & Resources:

• Startups by Guy Kawasaki

• Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin