#joerestivo

[umichenginabroad]

Post-Entrepreneurship In Porto

Hello one last time friends.

It's time to give one last little reflection on my time abroad in Portugal. My flight was cancelled so I had one extra day to think about this post. To anyone considering whether or not they should apply for this program with European Innovation Academy: Do it. I cannot recommend this experience enough. It's uncomfortable. It's exciting. It's challenging. It's interesting. And the part I'm feeling right now, it's heartbreaking when you know you're about to leave it all behind and continue on. So with the newly acquired last hours in Porto after my canceled flight, I spent night with just me and watched the sunset and the lights of Ponte Luis Bridge as I happily photographed every inch of the city with camera. I love you Porto and I'm sad to you leave you behind. But I'll be back. Please enjoy these shots I got of the city. They make me smile as I sit here at the airport both the saddest and the happiest I've ever been. I'm excited to see my dogs and my guitar and my family. And I'm also excited to plan my next world trip to visit my new friends. And I'm excited about moving forward. If you read this far, again, you are an amazing human and I appreciate you. Goodbye everyone.

Joe Restivo

Chemical Engineering

Entrepreneurship in Porto, Portugal

[umichenginabroad]

Week 3: The Grand Finale

So this is it. The last week here in Porto has come and gone. It felt so far away when I arrived on the first day. But I really don't want to just lament that it's the end: I really want to talk about everything I did this week just like the past two weeks.

This week was really stressful for lots of teams. It was the culmination of the last two weeks: intellectual property and pitching. My team and I spent lots of time in mentor clinics, workshops, and customer validation checks to learn about intellectual property law and the art of pitching your business. Each team on Friday would have to pitch their team to investors. I was designated as the pitch person for my team. It took a little bit of practice and editing but eventually, we all agreed on the pitch and created the pitch deck. Finally, Friday arrived. We all dressed up in our Sunday best and prepared ourselves to blow the investors away. And the pitch went well! We were prepared and I think they liked our pitch. Even though we weren't one of the top ten teams, I could not be more proud of myself and my team for all the work we did. It was hard, it was fun, it was an experience that you simply cannot find in a classroom setting. I am eternally grateful to my team and it makes me very sad knowing that I won't be seeing them for a while. But it's not goodbye and it's nowhere near the end. This is just the beginning of some life-long connections.

And now there's the rest of the final week. There was nothing really planned out for the last week because everyone had different flights home so it was hard to coordinate any big group activities. However, my friends and I did finally make it to a Portuguese beach. We went to two of them actually: Matosinhos Beach and Praia do Molhe. They were just as incredible as I thought they would be. Fair warning though if you ever want to swim in Portugal -- the water up north near Porto is FREEZING. I mean it bone-chilling cold to the point where there's actually not a ton of people in the water like there are at some other beaches down near Lisbon. We saw some amazing sunsets and ate some yummy yummy fresh seafood.

Then I spent my final hours in Porto doing something less exciting but it also might've been my favorite part of the trip: sitting around outside near the pool in a couple chairs with some pizza, some melon, some snack and drinks, and hanging out with all of the wonderful and amazing and talented friends I made during my time here. And even after just three weeks, it's difficult to imagine my life without meeting all of these awesome people. I know this post is a little bit shorter but the truth is that I'm very very happy with my time here and wouldn't trade it for anything else in the world. I laughed and I cried and I swam and I drank and I learned and now I'm going to have a really hard time saying good-bye. But again, this is far from the end. I have a couch to stay on in at least 4 other countries now and I know my friends know they're always welcome with me. What a finale.

Joe Restivo

Chemical Engineering

Entrepreneurship in Porto, Portugal

[umichenginabroad]

Week 2: Best Week Ever

Welcome Welcome Welcome back!

This week was intense. Educationally, emotionally, physically, and drinking-ly (drinking-wise?). The theme for the program this week was marketing and prototyping and let me tell you something: it can be very difficult to create a prototype of a product when you have very little money, resources, and expertise. And I suppose that is the point -- start-ups do not have a lot of money or resources so it is essential to be as efficient as possible with the resources you do have. At least I'm pretty sure that's what the point is: otherwise we're just spending money. However, I digress. Let's get into this week.

This week, in addition to prototyping your product, the team was also tasked with formulating a marketing strategy. So we decided our best bet was social media: everyone is on it all of the time and our target audience is college students and young adults. That being said, please follow @theloungepopup on Instagram! The bio has a link to our website so please check out if you're interested!

We also continued experimenting with mocktails this week and we had a breakthrough! Our favorite recipe so far according to our team and everyone who has tested it: the gorgeous mocktail "Mama Knows Best". It's amazing what some college students can create with orange juice, orange syrup, sprite, mint, pomegranate juice, and black currant syrup. Behold:

We debuted this drink at the business expo on Friday where all the teams had the chance to walk around and see other teams projects and practice pitching their start-ups to friends and staff members at EIA! Our team had a great day and everyone loved our mocktail. So it was amazing week for business but it doesn't come close to the fun we had outside of business this week.

This weekend we spent exactly 24 hours in the city of Lisbon, Portugal which is about a 3 hour bus ride from Porto. Lisbon was a massive city and had a very different energy from Porto. We arrived at 10:30 pm Friday night and proceeded to head out to Bairro Alto: a half-mile square block of streets filled with bars and nightclubs and is well-known as Lisbon's nightlife district. Unfortunately I didn't take a lot of pictures in Bairro Alto, only lots of drunken videos that are over a minute long so I want to spare everyone reading here but trust me it was one of the best nights out I've ever had.

Then we spent the rest of Saturday in the beautiful town of Sintra which is about a 40-minute train ride from Lisbon. We really enjoyed the gorgeous little town and then explored the castles that Sintra is famous for!

Finally, we arrive at my favorite part of the Porto trip so far. On Sunday, my friends and traveled with a tour guide to Peneda-Geres National Park. I cannot say enough how this tour was one of the best experiences of my life and I've never seen or done anything quite like it. We hiked and then swam in the azure blue and green lagoons of the park before having the most delicious traditional Portuguese lunch at restaurant with scenic views of the mountains. I could talk for hours about how amazing this place was but instead I think I'll just drop a bunch of pictures and let them speak for themselves. That's all of the updates I have for this week so if you actually read this far, I appreciate you and hope you're doing well. Hopefully these pictures are motivation enough to make you want to visit Porto and Portugal! See ya next week!

Joe Restivo

Chemical Engineering

Entrepreneurship in Porto, Portugal

[umichenginabroad]

Week 1: The Lounge

What. a. week. The first of three weeks is now over and it went by in the blink of an eye. This week was a couple of things: more touristy exploration, the first week of actual "classes", and the week I've had the least amount of sleep in recent memory. BUT this loss of sleep was of course not because I was up late doing homework or studying. Here in Portugal, the night really is young pretty much all night. Anyway, let me start at the beginning of the week.

Sunday July 16 was day 0 of the European Innovation Academy's program here in Porto and it was crazy, fun, slightly (maybe very) stressful couple of hours. After some introductory speeches from the program leaders in the morning, it was time to start forming teams. Anyone who had an idea for a product or a service or some business was able to write it all out on a poster board and try to recruit 4 other people to their team (so 5 people total on each team. So if you didn't have an idea, like I did, then you had to around to lots of different poster boards and try to get yourself on a team! I got pretty lucky... I found an idea I really liked pretty early on in the day and I also loved all the people on the team.

So allow me to present our business: The Lounge. The business, as envisioned by our CEO Taylor, is a non-alcoholic cocktail pop-up and drink service. The idea is that the non-alcoholic options offered at most events and venues are very boring and bland like soda or water and so it's very easy for college students to feel pressured to drink when they go out or they may not go out at all because of the presence of alcohol. And that's the problem we're setting out to solve! If instead, people had the option of having a beautiful, colorful, delicious "mocktail" then everyone will feel more included.

Our pitch of course is a little more involved than this but that's the foundational idea behind what we're trying to do! So the five of us worked hard all week. We had keynote presentations from 10-12 and then independent work from 2-5 and sometimes even later. The pace is fast but I think we're keeping up pretty well so we'll see what we're able to create in these three weeks. Already this week, we started experimenting with some mocktail recipes! Nothing has been an absolute hit yet but we're close.

Now when I wasn't working I was either a) eating b)drinking c)drinking and eating d)exploring downtown e)taking a wine tour through the Douro Valley. Okay, that last one is really a one-time thing but I'm going to focus on it anyway. The Douro Valley is breathtaking and not only did we get to taste some amazing port wines and tour the vineyards but we got to take a relaxing and scenic boat ride down the Douro River.

One of my favorite things that I did often this week was find new restaurants and new places to watch the sunset. It is still just mind-blowing every time I watch it. Then afterward my friends and I would go look for a new gelato place or go get pastel de nata (the best thing in the world). This is pretty much the entire update for week 1 so I'm going to dump so cool pictures here and get excited for week two! Ciao Ciao!

Joe Restivo

Chemical Engineering

Entrepreneurship in Porto, Portugal

[umichenginabroad]

Week 0: Pre-Entrepreneurship In Porto

Hi everyone!

My name is Joe Restivo and I'm a senior studying chemical engineering and mathematics. Then after the next three weeks, I'll know a lot more about entrepreneurship too! A little bit more about myself -- I love music and I play drums, guitar, a little little bit of piano, and I sing; I have two dogs, a pug and a beagle, who I will miss more than anything; and, I took this past semester off to go work at an engineering firm in Cleveland!

I arrived in Porto, Portugal yesterday Friday 7/14 and now I should get used to writing the date the way most of Europe does: 14/07/23. The program doesn't officially begin until this Sunday, so we had some time today to go out and explore the city! There were so many things I was excited about before we went out. Porto is known for its incredible diversity of restaurants and unique architecture that makes for some very pretty pictures (I also love photography!). Also like I implied, I didn't explore the city alone! In some of the pictures below are a few more Michigan students here with me: Brooke, Emilia, Alex, Logan, and Abby. But we also found some new friends: Annalise, Tedra, Calli, and Blazej.

We had an amazing day exploring each and every little street! One of the program participants also decided to host a networking/mixer event at a very cool bar venue downtown. We all had a great time and met so many new friends from all over the world including countries like the UK, Brazil, Spain, Finland, France, and Ecuador.

Finally, we finished off an amazing day by watching the sunset from the top of the Luis I Bridge. My jaw dropped when I made it to the bridge and took just one look out over the city with the blazing orange ball of fire slowly sinking below the clouds and horizon making for the perfect ending to a perfect day.

I am already deeply in love with the city and I've barely even tried the food yet! However, everything will be different starting tomorrow because the program actually begins tomorrow and we have to form our teams. I'll be posting an update after week 1 to talk all about the start of the program and I'll introduce the team that I'll be working with for the next three weeks! Até Breve!

Joe Restivo

Chemical Engineering

Entrepreneurship in Porto, Portugal