Future of Tech Podcast Series — Startup Success Secrets: SCET Students Interview Founders
What do you do when students are sick and tired of writing papers and doing endless case studies? You get them to leave their dorm and interview real entrepreneurs in the wilds of Silicon Valley and beyond! Here are a few who rose to the challenge and had recorded short interviews asking their founders about their startup success factors and value propositions. Are the subjects your typical Silicon Valley bros? Absolutely not. We had incredible diversity of experience, perspectives, and background, including:
- A startup called Bright, a Scandinavian enterprise that created a solar lamp for people in Africa who did not have access to the utility grid. Their success factor was a design that centered on solving multiple needs at once.
- TED Recyclables, a female-led startup focused on thrifting and upcycling, and highlighting how a collaborative process was the most important success factor for their team
- ZIPEvent, an event management platform in Thailand. The principal there highlighted the diversity of their six co-founders and their focus on earnings before the hype and user growth
- An interview with a leader of two incubators, including Silicon Valley in Your Pocket, Jeff Wallace. His emphasis was on need-based and specialized mentors for each of his startups, and the importance of networking and storytelling
- Shomit Ghose, a serial entrepreneur and his reminder to keep learning
- Binglang Chen, a CEO of a pharma company, highlighting the importance of integrity and persistence as a success factor
- A student-led startup called Playvision, a computer vision and sports analytics startup with a value proposition for athletes and teams
- Doug Leeds, focusing on the power of the pivot
We hope that you enjoy these brief perspectives, where founders tell us what motivated them to start their entrepreneurial journey, their value proposition and differentiation, the most important success factor for their company, and finally any lessons that they would like to pass on to aspiring founders. This was all done in the context of a class where 70 undergrad and grad students surveyed existing startups in AI, healthcare, and blockchain and tried to discern what made them successful. Was in the founders, go to market plan, or the technology? A netnographic analysis of over 200 startups, scores assigned to each possible success factor, and later analysis of these statistics culminated in the production of a book. Teams of students formed groups focused on design, editorial, marketing, and analytical tasks and published a book on the Amazon Kindle Platform. We hope that you enjoy the book and the podcast series featuring the entrepreneur wisdom:
What do you do when students are sick and tired of writing papers and doing endless case studies? You get them to leave their dorm and interview real entrepreneurs in the wilds of Silicon Valley and beyond! Here are a few who rose to the challenge and had recorded short interviews asking their founders about their startup success factors and value propositions. Are the subjects your typical Silicon Valley bros? Absolutely not. We had incredible diversity of experience, perspectives, and background, including:
- A startup called Bright, a Scandinavian enterprise that created a solar lamp for people in Africa who did not have access to the utility grid. Their success factor was a design that centered on solving multiple needs at once.
- TED Recyclables, a female-led startup focused on thrifting and upcycling, and highlighting how a collaborative process was the most important success factor for their team
- ZIPEvent, an event management platform in Thailand. The principal there highlighted the diversity of their six co-founders and their focus on earnings before the hype and user growth
- An interview with a leader of two incubators, including Silicon Valley in Your Pocket, Jeff Wallace. His emphasis was on need-based and specialized mentors for each of his startups, and the importance of networking and storytelling
- Shomit Ghose, a serial entrepreneur and his reminder to keep learning
- Binglang Chen, a CEO of a pharma company, highlighting the importance of integrity and persistence as a success factor
- A student-led startup called Playvision, a computer vision and sports analytics startup with a value proposition for athletes and teams
- Doug Leeds, focusing on the power of the pivot
We hope that you enjoy these brief perspectives, where founders tell us what motivated them to start their entrepreneurial journey, their value proposition and differentiation, the most important success factor for their company, and finally any lessons that they would like to pass on to aspiring founders. This was all done in the context of a class where 70 undergrad and grad students surveyed existing startups in AI, healthcare, and blockchain and tried to discern what made them successful. Was in the founders, go to market plan, or the technology? A netnographic analysis of over 200 startups, scores assigned to each possible success factor, and later analysis of these statistics culminated in the production of a book. Teams of students formed groups focused on design, editorial, marketing, and analytical tasks and published a book on the Amazon Kindle Platform. We hope that you enjoy the book and the podcast series featuring the entrepreneur wisdom: