Product Placement
JVL
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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Kaledo Art
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
tannertan36
$LAYYYTER
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
DEAR READER
almost home
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
NASA
taylor price
izzy's playlists!
#extradirty
Sweet Seals For You, Always
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pixel skylines
Not today Justin
seen from Brazil
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seen from T1
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@venture4america
1. There are no original ideas—embrace the competition.
Most people who want to be entrepreneurs can relate to the experience I’m about to describe. You think of a great business idea, and you think it’s the one. It’s the most brilliant thing you’ve come up with yet. You get out a piece of...
Relay race huddles for the last series of Venture games! AKA hunger games. #vfabootcamp
Happy Birthday Taylor! @tsundali Giova..I mean Giuseppe, Drew and Evan with the birthday boy!
Final challenge 1 minute video presentations are underway! Fellows present on how they created value in the past 48 hours #vfabootcamp
From the Fellows: "What I learned from IDEO..."
By Frank Teng, Class of 2013
Liz pulled me aside with a concerned look.
"Frank. You can't just skip an interview because of VFA training. If you're not going to take this seriously-"
"No, no", I interjected. "I'd skip VFA training any other week. But this is IDEO. I've loved them ever since I heard of them in my junior year. There's no way I'm missing this."
I noticed when I said that, my voice was some strange mixture of stubborn determination and squealing-fan-girl enthusiasm.
---
What fascinates me most about IDEO, and design thinking in general, is the focus on a human-centered approach to creating systems. Who knew that slapping a sticker of a fly on urinals could increase aim by 80%? These "Human Centered Designs" fueled my curiosity as a Psychology major—if one well-placed sticker can dramatically modify male behavior at a urinal, what else can we do?
As our team geared up for the product challenge, IDEO helped us brainstorm ways to find problems around Providence.
The emphasis on Human Centered Design allows us to focus on issues that we usually overlook. For example, roleplaying as a hospital patient allows us to feel empathy for them. We can learn this emotion by noticing that patients spend most of their time staring at a dull ceiling. How might we improve the quality of life for patients?
This is why I love IDEO: they understand that emotions drive human behavior as much as reason. Emotion, however, cannot be recorded easily as data. Furthermore, emotions quickly become habituated and are difficult to describe.
These techniques are useful frameworks for experientially reliving how others might feel when going through a situation. By developing empathy, our designs put human sensory back into the experience.
So, what did I learn?
Structure the right group environment- Going through IDEO's post-it brainstorm process was a lot more beneficial then throwing ideas around at a table. I am now convinced that creative intelligence matters less than having the right brainstorming process when coming up with great ideas.
Don't hesitate- This is where our team was the weakest. We were all too focused on finding THE perfect market that we lost valuable time. Just go and do it!
Rapid prototype it!- GET YOUR PRODUCT OUT TO MARKET, FAST. Sitting in a chair and ideating is great, but until you validate your product out there, your ideas are worthless.
Although we didn’t win the Product Challenge, our team definitely came away with a better understanding of what success as a team meant.
Board Members Eric Cantor and Jeremy Shinewald are here to give advice to the Fellows who will soon be starting their jobs in their new cities!
We have attorney Bhikaji Maneckji here to give the Fellows a talk on startup law #vfabootcamp
The Venture for America program offers jobs in start-up companies that aren’t the usual magnets for recent college graduates.
We were on the front page of the Sunday Business Section of the New York Times! See why our Fellows chose VFA over six-figure salaries.
You cannot become what you don't believe
Claudia Chan
We have the incredible @claudiachan here to speak to the Fellows and start a conversation about women in entrepreneurship #vfabootcamp
The wonderful media wiz @lisag429 is here to give the Fellows media training - thanks, Lisa! #vfabootcamp
Pat Corry, Managing Director and head of marketing at UBS, is here to give a training on brand management and marketing #vfabootcamp
A big thanks to the CEO of Havas PR and the coiner of the term "metrosexual", Marian Salzman for being here today! #vfabootcamp
Thank you to @Betaspring for hosting programming and a mixer for the Fellows! #betaspring #vfabootcamp
HBS Professor Joe Fuller is here to give a training on entrepreneurship skills #vfabootcamp
Announcing the Profit Challenge Winner!
Last Monday, the Fellows received their 3rd Training Camp Challenge: to make as much profit as possible in 10 Days in the most scalable way possible.
The Fellows came up with a variety of ideas to make money, and today, they presented their pursuits to a panel of judges. With the help of the Danny Warshay (G-Form), Barbara Tannenbaum (Brown University), Brandt Squires (Swipely), the VFA team, and others, the Fellows hustled their way through the week.
Among other things, the Fellows had to work well in teams, learn to fail and reevaluate their ideas, find market opportunities, and work under significant time constraints. Some sold water bottles at parks and the beach, some raised money for charity, and others put their skills to work as freelancers and consultants.
After judging for total profit, scalability, proof of sales, process, originality, and more, the winner of the challenge was:
Team Peloton!
TOTAL PROFIT: $2,981
Jon Hills, Shilpi Kumar, John Yarchoan, Charlie Mohn, Taylor Sundali and Tom Lynam hustled to make money by selling t-shirts and promoting a book, but ultimately succeeded by creating Ally Effect.
Ally Effect is a consulting service that offers the talents of VFA Fellows, from coding to social media, to early stage companies to help with projects they need to grow their business. In the end, they had generated the most profit, and the judges felt Peloton had the most scalable idea and worked well together as a team. We've encouraged them to continue to build Ally Effect as a place for Fellows to put their skills to use.
Congratulations, Peloton!
We have @Joaquin_v_Roca here to talk about personality types, neuroscience and entrepreneurship! #vfabootcamp
