In one of my first blogs of the year, I referred to our Entrepreneurship class and our start up projects. Today, after 3 months of working on our start up project with our entrepreneurs, we finally presented our results and have our final presentations with Venture Capitalists scheduled for Friday morning and this marks the end of our start up projects.
We’ve been spending intense hours in the dungeons this week focused on these presentations and trying to wrap up our projects; and in the many discussions we’ve had about our various projects (rather ‘challenges’ ’seems to be a more appropriate word!), the common theme is the craziness of some of the ideas, the passion of most of these entrepreneurs and their excitement to get their “babies/concepts” out to the world and to capitalize on these innovative ideas. But every one of these stories also has a “not so pretty” side that involves the challenges, the competition, the financial feasibility (or infeasibility!), the fact that many of our groups had to reposition our entrepreneur’s vision or convince him to try something else with his idea…
In our group, we had to reposition our entrepreneur’s current product, develop a new version and help them design a project plan to launch this new mobile app in the ever so competitive world of android mobile apps! Luckily for us, our entrepreneur is very receptive to new thoughts and had already realized that his current idea was not going to cut it but I can’t help but admire his team’s passion to have attempted and tried their ideas for over a year, a year filled with up’s and down’s…launching a mobile app on their own and winning a start-up competition, the many hours of coding and then networking with the tech-entrepreneurial community in the Geneva area…but wait, I forgot to mention that our team of 3 entrepreneur’s had successful careers in a large multi-national corporation and decided to leave all that to pursue their dreams! (Something to this day, most of us can’t understand or imagine)
In these past 3 months, I have learnt a tremendous amount about android mobile apps and about the start-up ecosystem, but the most important lesson for me comes from the fact that after more than a year of challenges/struggles, our entrepreneurs have still not accepted defeat…yet, they are also realistic and are currently looking for full time jobs but are doing that to simply find money to continue feeding their “babies” – their ideas and their vision!
Start-up land is not always happy and exciting but where’s the fun if there are no challenges in life! Now, since it’s 1am and I still have many challenges...
From start-up land, with great respect for our entrepreneurs,
Vikas Menon
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