“The sum of parts”
By: Diego Sevilha Nassif (participant), Naiara Andrade (participant), Matheus Ferreira (participant)
This week was more free in the entrepreneurship part, the groups had more freedom to do what they needed to do to move forward with their respective projects. Also, this week covered heavily the feedback part of the 24 steps, it felt like this was a deadline, a good chance to be sure that the project you want to do is possible, both in the technical sense, in the market sense and by the speakers experience.
I guess because of this underlying pressure the week felt urgent and stressful, some of the groups were dealing with negative feedback, pivoting left and right, discussing topics that could very well lead to the break of their ideas, and as much as this is an important step in this whole process, it’s never an easy one.
Daniel Barzilay, a venture capital partner from Verus who came as a guest speaker, did warned us though, entrepreneurs, specially start up entrepreneurs, fail way more than they succeed. But in fact, this may be the hardest yet the most important step and lesson from this whole course (so far, at least).
Speaking of Daniel, we had three memorable speakers this week, Daniel, Renee and Lucas, all of them with incredible and impactful presentations.
Daniel’s presentation was harsh, yet it was probably the most useful of the whole week and perhaps even of the whole course. It really showed us what Danilo said in the first presentation ever: We will fail and people will disagree with you till the end.
It surely put everyone out of their comfort zone, and maybe he was even more aggressive than he should, but I suspect that that was his intention, to show that the world of start-up it’s not that sea of roses the media sometimes make it to be, it’s more of a gray miserable sea that only the crazy, the fool or the brave jump in. And his perception was really important to bring back to reality all groups ideas, with his feedback most groups learned new things and looked over some unseen weakness in their pitch.
In a more practical sense, it was also really nice to see the perspective of the funds and investors that… well… invest in start-ups. Understand their mindset, how and why they think the way they do, and what some of them are looking for in those companies.
Renee’s presentation was impactful as any of the other three we are mentioning here, but for a very different reason. In many ways, it acted as the opposite force to Daniel’s presentation.
They showed us how hard the way can be, how sometimes, as we walk in this road, we will feel as if the whole world is against us. Renee, she showed us that even if that is true, it’s still possible to not only find success in this path but it’s also possible to be happy walking it, but for that, you need to walk with passion, with a true love for what you do and an unshakable belief in what you are doing. Then, and only then, you can beat this path.
Talking with them was very inspirational, because they had a very bad scenario for entrepreneurship and with the power of will they managed to succeed, curiosity and effort, among other qualities, made what they have today, and they started from nothing. So what we could learn was that you only need will to start a business and chase a dream.
Lucas, from MIT lab was amazing, the work he does is simply… Incredible, it really shows how well the mind can work when given total freedom, when you think about the idea first and the utility second. Or, as a wise woman put it, how amazing it is when the dreaming mind of a 12 year old is not lost to adulthood. He was able to open our minds and help us to get out of the relation between startups and APP’s and also that startups must emerge by a problem solution, he showed that you can come up with an idea, a dream, and then see how this idea can fit in the market, maybe it will need to create its own market, or adapt an existing one.
The major lesson of this week was that you will (probably) fail and that that’s ok. As the saying goes, the master had failed more times than the pupil has even tried, and that might as well be true for entrepreneurship, in its own way. And much like a pupil, we can learn from the people ahead of us, learn from their mistakes and successes, and probably more important, that it’s ok to fail.
