#startuphoyas

[msbgumba]

Through involvement in the Georgetown Entrepreneurship Initiative, students learn to see the world as entrepreneurs do, while learning the skills they need to act on their ideas and make an impact on society. The initiative provides students support through academic, co-curricular, and off-campus programs, while connecting them to industry experts and the startup community in Washington, D.C. Learn more about Full-time MBA student Phillip Jung’s experience with the Initiative.

My enthusiasm for education technology startups drew me to Washington, D.C., and Georgetown University. Blackboard, EverFi, and 2U were all founded in the nation’s capital, which is often why the city is referred to as the “home of the EdTech revolution.” Through McDonough’s entrepreneurship treks and alumni contacts, I was able to connect and visit these companies. I also had the unique opportunity to experience the investing side of the startup ecosystem through the MBA Venture Fellows Program, where I interned with a Venture Capital firm and helped support investment decisions focusing on the edtech sector. Through programs such as these, Georgetown has taken great strides to promote startup culture and put Washington, D.C., on the map as a major entrepreneurial hub.

In 2009, the Georgetown Entrepreneurship Initiative was founded to “enable students to see the world as entrepreneurs do, while providing the knowledge and skills they need to act on their insights and add value to society.” The Entrepreneurship Initiative operates under the banner of StartupHoyas and has rolled out countless programs aimed at teaching entrepreneurial principles, inspiring students, connecting individuals to the startup community, and launching new business ventures. Here is a snapshot of the programs run by StartupHoyas that I’ve found to be particularly helpful in my involvement with the startup environment:

MBA Entrepreneurship Club – provides resources, networking opportunities, and education for students wishing to start a business or join the entrepreneurial community. The club’s activities include hosting speaker events, workshops, and networking opportunities. More than 80 new MBA students joined in 2015, making the club the third largest MBA organization at Georgetown McDonough.

StartupHoyas Summer Launch Program – an incubator program that provides students and recent graduates with the opportunity to launch their startup ventures. In addition to support from faculty and mentors, the school provides working space to incubate young businesses. New business founders also attend workshops, seminars, and networking events in Washington, D.C., culminating in a final demo day held at 1776, which is attended by community members, entrepreneurs, and investors.

MBA Venture Fellows Program – a 12 month apprenticeship program that matches top MBA students with venture capital and private equity firms in Washington, D.C. Students work part-time during the school year and full-time during the summer to gain valuable hands-on experience with these firms.

Global Venture Capital Investment Competition – the world’s largest venture capital competition among top MBA programs where students play the role of venture capitalists and evaluate early stage startup companies. Georgetown holds two preliminary rounds where students train to become aspiring venture capitalists and startup entrepreneurs and compete to advance to regional and national finals. Georgetown has the distinction of holding the global championship in two of the past three years.

Entrepreneurs In Residence (EIR) – an avenue for faculty and students to engage with seasoned entrepreneurs and successful investors to foster collaboration and shared learning. EIRs serve as mentors, guest speakers, advisors, and members of many expert panels.

The Entrepreneurship Initiative has resulted in many students expressing a keen interest in entrepreneurship. The MBA Entrepreneurship Club is now the third largest club on campus, and students graduating from Georgetown McDonough have had tremendous success in the startup world. Whether you are looking to find a co-founder for your business, become a budding venture capitalist, or start a social enterprise, Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business has myriad opportunities to support your entrepreneurial endeavors.

[inwanderus]

Understanding Our Consumer PAIN

Through our work at SLP we’ve talked a lot about Steve Blank’s Customer Development Methodology:

Customer Discovery -> Customer Validation (repeat w/ multiple MVPs) -> Customer Creation -> Company Building

It’s an iterative process that focuses on understanding the customer pain and solving from that point, as opposed to a more linear approach of identifying a problem and solving to the best you/your team’s abilities. This approach forces you to crowdsource the pain, synthesize, test mvps, and then develop. I’m very curious people and behavior, so I’m confident that this iterative, people-centric approach can help us get closer to our goal.

Nonetheless, we’ve struggled with it. We’ve struggled to identify the one pain that our customers have. We saw an opportunity space in lowering access barriers to urban outdoor spaces. With more research, we also found that people, for almost all age groups, were spending less time outdoors. Yet, we see reports showing the correlation of time spent in green spaces with increased mental and physical health, green spaces providing relaxation, concentration, productivity, and even doctor’s providing “park’RX’” prescriptions for a variety of issues ranging from asthma, diabetes, and mental health disorders. (These people are going to the doctor to FIX their pains, and are given parks as a CURE).  The exact pain (pain is a feeling and is personal) that we’ve heard from people has varied:

Original thoughts customer interviews and their thoughts on pain -

Love the outdoors, but I have other competing priorities (not a pain, but a reason why)

I spend most of my time outdoors with my friends, on occasion I’m exercising outdoors.  (not a pain, but reasoning)

I’d like to spend more time outdoors, but I’ve got competing priorities (reasoning)

One’s ability to find restful and relaxing places within the city (solution)

One’s ability to access outdoor spaces (solution)

not easy to access outdoors (reasoning)

Hard to plan outdoor time into immediacy of everything else in life (reasoning)

Updated thoughts on pain - (if you’re reading this, what is your pain?)

feeling unhealthy - inactive

overwhelmed from the pace of the city  

too much screen time,

stress from work, life, etc.

desire to be healthy

motivation - fear of looking unhealthy

claustrophobic

inactive, dullness

Update # 2 on thoughts re: customer pain:

Most people would like to spend time outdoors, majority of those people would like to try something new, but rarely go to new outdoor spaces

Many people identify with a green, healthy, active lifestyle, but they don’t have immediate convenient ways to access it

Urban centers are drawing over 80% of the US population to reside there, just 100 years ago it was an inverse proportion. How are these people nurturing their outdoor needs in constructed spaces like cities?

Plan for next week:

1. More interviews -- targeted for November Project, Lululemon Team. Using invision to get feedback on a prototype.

2. Meeting with Marc to discuss customer pain/development.

3. Answering, why must people use Wanderus?

4. Five Forces analysis

[inwanderus]

Check-in

Hi, I’m Drew. I’ll be checking-in from throughout the journey of creating Wanderus to give updates on what we’re up to and some of the reasoning behind our decision making. If readers have any questions, feel free to leave a comment and either Anh or I will get back to you.

With the first two whirlwind days of SLP behind us, I feel energized. I see people around us who believe in us and I’m trying to balance this excitement and convert it into energy to push this forward. Alyssa, Marc, Jeff, and Cindy kicked off the program with a good review on a variety of entrepreneurial methodologies. They are also pushing the tempo, asking for us to discover and drive our time in SLP, use them as sounding boards, and also inviting us to a variety of events. Ultimately they want and I expect, this to help each team to make a decision - to launch, not launch, expand, close down, continue to grow - in an informed way.

Anh and I had a quick check-in yesterday to prioritize our work for the week. Our top priorities are:

Digging deeper into customer pain - revising and sending out a survey with focus on understanding outdoor enthusiasts’ decision making and behavior around their outdoor activities. This is a significant shift in our ideology on how to solve the “problem”.  We originally started with a prescriptive hypothesis, lower the barriers to accessing the outdoors and more people will come. Now we’re trying to make it easier for those who enjoy it. Then leveraging things like the network effect to help others find and enjoy the outdoors more often.  

Launching blog (external) - We see this as an immediate half step to “launching”. We’re hoping to gain a following that we can use with our beta testing.

Refining our 3 minute pitch (customer pain in-mind and target market problems vs potential market problems) - We had a great opportunity to give a pitch to the cohort, faculty, mentors, and advisors last Friday. Anh and I went back and forth on a script for the three minute pitch. We were in the midst of shifting how to solve the problem and the ideology behind the pitch was a mixture of the two thoughts - the original question is: How do you get more people to participate in outdoor activities, our original thought was: Create a solution that makes the outdoors more accessible with a target market consisting targeting those people who don’t go outside (it made sense at one point). Then we shifted and said:  Create a solution that makes it easier to go outdoors with a target market of outdoor enthusiasts (potential market includes those who participate only little – ultimately we’d be happy to shift the needle just a smidgen). Anyway, the pitch came out to be less than satisfactory, a bit embarrassing, especially given our recent success with a much longer and more involved pitch for MassChallenge. Anh and I are in agreement that our intro is off, so that will be what I’m trying to fix first. In the end it should flow and be very easy to memorize and presentable by either Anh or me.

Prepping for SLP June 10 showcase -  Another great opportunity is just a week away. Anh and I are thinking about some sort of a story board, perhaps with some mockups that we’ve been working on. We want to convey the knowledge gap, the convenience, and our Team’s ability to do this. We’ve recently been working with my roommate from Babson, Vicente Casellas, who’s helping out with the graphic design. We’re hopeful he’ll also help us look a bit more polished.

So far, SLP has shaken things up for us in a productive way. I’m hoping to continue to engage and learn from other teams in the program. Some of my early favorites are:

Foodhini - “a for-profit social enterprise, brings truly authentic, home-style ethnic cuisine to the fast casual urban consumer. Foodhini is a mobile on-demand platform through which consumers can order the cuisine of their choice at an affordable price for delivery within 60 minutes. The meals are prepared amateur cooks from the largely untapped immigrant communities, whose recipes have been developed and passed down from generation to generation, but are rarely available to the public.  A a socially minded company, Foodhini is providing consumers with expanded choice while also  providing a source income for immigrant chefs who have limited access the capital needed to launch their own catering businesses.”

Misfit Fruits - “makes premium, cold-pressed juice from surplus fruits and vegetables that would otherwise be discarded, in an effort to combat the growing epidemic of food waste.  20 - 40% of a typical harvest, while perfectly safe and healthy, never makes it on to supermarket shelves because it fails to meet the aesthetic standards of the retailers. Misfit pays market prices for this fruit, providing the farmers with an incentive to collect this produce. Misfit Juices are currently on sale in a handful of DC locations, and the company has plans to scale aggressively in the coming months.”

[launchposse]

LaunchPosse at Hoya Entreprelooza

Great time at Georgetown's Entreprelooza last week.  Tons of fun to see several of our old professor's and get a chance to meet with the current students.  The Startup Hoyas club is bustling with activity and new initiatives.  Among them include efforts to engage more alumni and startups in the broader DC community.  We love to see that!

Professor Jim Hunt was recognized for going above and beyond in support of the new entrepreneurship track for students.  As former students of his, we absolutely appreciated the passion and commitment he puts into his classes.  We're big fans - the award is well deserved!

Entrepreneurship is thriving at Georgetown and the university is doing a great job at tapping into the student body's energy under Jeff Reid's leadership.  Excited to see what's next!  Hoya Saxa!