February In Review: What have I been doing!

February might be the shortest month of the year, but February 2019 felt like a whole year to me! My life is noticeably different then it was on February 1st, and I don’t just mean because of the passage of time! So what’s been happening?

MIT Bootcamp

I am sure people are sick of hearing me talk about it. But the week I spent at the camp was an intense experience. I certainly feel like I packed a few months worth of learning into a long, 18+ hour week. I am glad I took the opportunity offered to me. It was a blast!

I am now slowly but surely trying to revive Virgo 19 using the 24 steps. I am in the middle of generating 108 ideas. I am in no hurry, and that’s good because I want to do this right!

Abide Gets Into Impact Boom Elevate+

As soon as the MIT Bootcamp ended, I got the opportunity to apply what I learnt in the context of Abide and the Impact Boom Elevate+ social enterprise accelerator. Our paired mentor for the program, Tobias Speck of PWC, is a more on the lean startup side but that’s okay. We are not a methodology purist, and we know we have to show results within a short period. So we will use whatever methodology we need to get our startup going. But my co-founder and CEO, Andy Smith, is finding the Disciplined Entrepreneurship as insightful as I do!

JOSARI Gearing-up to apply to Collider

I will write a post explaining JOSARI, it’s a video based micro-consulting platform, and my involvement with them soon! But for now, I am excited to be working with them to apply for the Collider accelerator. Watch this space for updates!

Not continuing with Your Happy Place

Not everything that happened in February was positive through addition. I have posted about Your Happy Place a couple of times before, the first post being in November. My contract with them was to get an MVP of the people, personality and places concept out in a usable format. I was successful in achieving this goal: Your Happy Place the app, is available for download from Google Play Store. However, Your Happy Place is not the right fit for me going forward. But the concept remains as viable and interesting as ever. I hope to see Your Happy Place be a resounding success as it goes on. However, from my point of view, I think this is positive through subtraction for both myself and Your Happy Place.

Hospitals, hospitals and more Hospitals!

To finish off this update on a more personal note. I physically crashed badly after returning from the MIT Bootcamp. I later found out this is because my blood iron had dropped to dangerous levels again. I am getting an iron infusion this coming Sunday, and my doctor thinks after the infusion I should be able to relax for the next six months.

In addition to my health woes, my poor niece also suffered. She came down to Brisbane from Townsville for what was supposed to be a week-long vacation. However, she ended up staying for two weeks, with the last week hospitalised from a mysterious virus. She got out less than 24 hours ago, but she has mended enough to be back to her happy self. So I am glad we are leaving the medical drama behind in February and starting March on a fresh note all around!

MIT Bootcamp Completed!

I did it! I completed the MIT Bootcamp! It was tough because we were working from 8 AM to 2 AM from Sunday to Thursday, with a solid eight hours to begin with on Saturday and finishing off with 4 hours of pitches on Friday. The long days started to take it toil, but I am happy to say that my team and I stuck to our vow to follow the process of disciplined entrepreneurship. I am happy with what we accomplished during the week, and whatever happens from now, I’ll always be a Bootcamp Alumni! But let’s start from the beginning!

Day 1 - Saturday

Day 1: I look so fresh!

The first day started with all the Bootcamp members gathering for a late afternoon tea, meeting each other and alumni from previous iterations of the Bootcamp.

We had a brief opening ceremony featuring speakers from QUT, MIT and the Government. The highlight of the opening was the welcome from the Nunukul Yuggera Aboriginal Dance Company. I didn’t take any photos, but there are plenty on social media for those who want it!

There was a change in how groups formed this year. The alumni tell me that in previous years they had to pitch their ideas to each other and recruit team members, which is what happens at Startup Weekends.

However, this year, we were assigned groups with the criteria that every group had a woman, and there was as much mix of nationalities and background as possible. My group consisted of,

• Pascal Seibold - From Germany, but he recently moved to Sydney

• Manish Pahwa - From Melbourne

• Maria Susana Benitez (Su) - From Ecuador

• Michael Frangos - From right here in Brisbane

I loved my team, and we had a lot of fun. We didn’t have big arguments or fallout. I hear that without storming groups often fall short of producing their best work. Maybe that’s true but we came to the Bootcamp to learn the process of disciplined entrepreneurship, and I think we learned the process better because we weren’t at each other throats. The week was stressful enough without interpersonal drama.

Day 2 - Sunday

Saturday was supposed to have an early stop at 11 PM. But we went overtime by two hours and that extra time spent in the lectures took an early toil on me on Sunday when we started the program in earnest. Our day started with lectures from Bill Aulet himself during the day, followed by teamwork from dinner until 2 PM. My team agreed that we would follow the process and not get caught trying to fast track the tasks. So, on Sunday, we spent considerable time generating ideas, taking time to vote for ideas to narrow down our list to three, before conducting the “five whys” exercise with the top three.

The easiest to wrap our head around idea was one about shoes. But our coach suggested we should pick something a little more abstract so that we were forced to undertake the process. So instead, we choose a very abstract problem related to productivity, and our problem statement ended up being,

Young professionals are not productive and struggle to focus; they are frustrated at their lack of control. They experience 7 interruptions per hour, this results in 58% of the entire work day being spent on interruptions. To deal with this, these young professionals currently use productivity apps such as trello, brainFM, Pomodoro, Microsoft project, etc. despite the fact that these “solutions” are adding to the disruptions.

I was struggling a lot as the night progressed. So my team kindly let me go home early. It was only a few extra hours of sleep but it set me up for the rest of the week!

Day 3 - Monday

We again started with lectures from Bill. It was also the day we had our first guest speaker, former South Sydney Rabbitohs Player Trent Young, who is the current CEO of Young Guns. We had more team time on Monday because we had to go out and talk to humans to do our primary market research. We then compiled our research into a persona we wanted to target. Our persona did change during the week, but that’s a good thing.

I am happy to report that for a change, I stepped out of my comfort zone, and did some interviews too! In previous Startup Weekends, I stayed in my corner and opted not to talk to humans. But if there is one thing I learnt from the weekend, to ensure you are solving problems for paying customers, you do have to talk to humans. Speaking of which, I am yet to finish reading the book “Talking to Humans”, but I will!

Day 4 - Tuesday

Our second guest speaker was Alison Price of Soilcyclers, who had an interesting and different entrepreneurial journey. She started the company to get work for her husband, then her boyfriend, and it grew from there.

Tuesday was also the last day we had with Bill Aulet, and for me it was a bit of joggling act because I was down for two networking events, one for the MIT Bootcamp and the other for Impact Boom Elevate+ (more on that in a different post). Tuesday was also the first day my team did our elevator pitches. So that was also something I wanted to be there to support. There was a lot of Ubers involved but in the end, I managed to be everywhere I needed to be!

Day 5 - Wednesday

Eleanor Carey, Steve Corlett and I

Wednesday started early with a fancy sit down breakfast with the Alumni from previous Bootcamps. Most of them were locals, but there were a few who flew in to attend. I think that shows the power of the Bootcamp network.

I found the discussion with the alumni very illuminating. I was intrigued to find out the even when the alumni didn’t start their own business; they were able to apply the process of disciplined entrepreneurial to their everyday jobs.

Our guest speaker for Wednesday was the very inspirational Eleanor Carey, who rowed the ocean as part of an all-female crew. Her’s was also the last guest lecture I attended as I opted to skip the morning lecturers on Thursday on account of having a client meeting at lunch.

Wednesday was also my turn to be the CEO, I should have mentioned that the role of CEO rotated among all members throughout the week, and I marshalled my team away from cake and alcohol to deliver the customer acquisition strategy and the associated cost calculations. We were one person done because one of my team members was in intense pain, and so we sent them to the hotel early!

Day 6 - Thursday

I had a late start on Thursday but joined my team as we start team time. But there was some afternoon time dedicated to a panel discussion on team and culture for startups. I should mention that the coaches hosted a number of workshops on things like pitching, business modelling for social enterprises and interview techniques for primary market research. I don’t remember what day which workshop was one. It’s all blending together at the moment.

Once all the workshops were done, it was just full on pitch practice, and pitch deck creation. We also formally named ourselves Hiper! All credit for out beautiful looking pitch deck goes to my team member Su. Manish was the CEO for the last day. He did an excellent job of keeping us focused. We tried very hard to have a strong emotive element to our pitch, but we weren’t dealing with burnout but productivity. That’s more brain and process, and heart and emotion. Our inability to figure out a way to tug at the heartstrings was unfortunate because we knew were going to be up again two very emotive pitches in the finals. But sometimes you do the best with what you have, and not pretend to be something you are not.

Day 7 - Pitch Day Friday!

Pitch day arrived, and Team Hiper did an excellent job if I say so myself. All of us had to do a section. I took our secret sauce section, the team section and the ask. I managed to finish exactly on the bell. So I was super happy with my pacing on the day. We were not among the eight teams selected to pitch a second time in front of a fresh set of judges and a general audience. Nevertheless, we were happy with our performance as a whole.

Our shortcoming was that we couldn’t generalise our solution so that the older gentlemen who judged us would understand why our solution would work with young men of a certain type. That’s an important lesson on messaging. For real pitches, practice in front of as diverse a crowd as you can!

Day 7 - Conclusion

After the pitch, we had a three-course lunch at Howard Smith Wharves. At lunch, every table had previous alumni, and my table’s alumni was Mark Phigram who used his Bootcamp experience to launch the Travelling Dads startup as a side gig. He is not interested in turning Travelling Dads into his full-time job. I think that’s something a lot of us forgot, our ventures don’t have to become our full-time careers. Sometimes people want that, but more often, they are content to have something apart from their 9 to 5.

Drinks organised by the Brisbane alumni group followed lunch. Most of the Bootcampers somehow had the energy to keep partying on! But I ended-up crashing at the hotel. I spent most the last weekend sleeping. But I am recovered now, and since I moved everything I am doing as CTO into Start with Tinni, I am ready to resurrect Virgo 19 as the startup implementing my ideas as CEO.

However, I am going to take my time and do the process. My first task will be to generate at least a hundred ideas before I start filtering the list for ideas that I want to do, can do and for which there is a market. In the meantime, I hope to bring my knowledge to bear for my Start with Tinni customers as we go forward to building viable businesses that make a difference in how we live!

Lastly, even though I am a Brisbane local, I was warned to find a place close to QUT Garden’s Point campus for the duration of the Bootcamp. So, I moved into the Brisbane Sky Tower apartments for the week of the Bootcamp. This proved to be a great decision because I don’t think I would have gotten any sleep if I tried to commute from home. As it was, the ten minute walk from QUT to Brisbane Sky Tower felt like an eternity some nights. The Sky Tower was great for the most part but they are still under construction and low and behold, the two mornings I managed to sleep in a bit, I was woken early by jackhammers. That was not pleasant but I spent so little time in the apartment that it didn’t matter.

Can you spot me in QUT’s video about the MIT Innovation and Entrepreneurship Bootcamp?

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

Extreme Ownership was a book that was originally on the MIT Bootcamp reading list, but I noticed that it was removed from the most recent list. I am not sure why because the book is pretty good. Listening to the book, because I went with the Audible version, straight after Made to Stick was interesting because Extreme Ownership told a lot of stories. But the stories were told with a purpose, and you understood the importance of extreme ownership.

I was going to write a bit more, but I think I’ll let one of the authors speak for himself by putting his TEDx talk. But the big take away is that don’t play the blame game. Take responsibility and act decisively. But that is not to say you have to keep malfunctioning parts around. But it is your job to remove, replace or support to improve members of your team who are not performing. So yes, another book I would recommend!

Made to Stick

With less than a week to go to the start of my MIT Bootcamp, I am focusing on getting through the pre-Bootcamp checklist. To that end, I finished listening to the Made to Stick Audible over the weekend. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. The book was well written and made me flashback a lot of the mental models, schema and other things I learnt during my PhD and my post-doc with Middlesex University. Marketing is not my strong sweet, and while I have no issues speaking in public, I always felt I communicated less then I intended. So this book covered exactly what I need to know about effective messaging.

The book promotes the "SUCCES" (with the last s omitted) model where each letter refers to a characteristic that can help make an idea "sticky".

• Simple – find the core of any idea

• Unexpected – elements grab people’s attention

• Concrete – examples make the ideas easier to remember and recall

• Credible – give an idea believability

• Emotional – can help people see the importance of an idea

• Stories – narrative empower people to use an idea

The Succes Model

The most interesting part of the book to me was the concept of the “Curse of Knowledge”. While not a term I used in my PhD, but Loculus was all about computers supporting novices through their gap in knowledge. Made to Stick, talks about the reverse, what happens when experts get lose their audience in the details or on concepts that are obvious to them because they are experts. But we need experts to talk to novices in a way that the novices understand. Because based on my observation, a lot of bullshit movements like the anti-vax movement are a result of the fact that people understand the misinformation more readily than the actual science.

For example, people understand mercury is poisonous, and so it’s easy to make the idea that mercury in vaccines is bad “sticky”. But the truth is that mercury wasn’t present in the vaccines in quantities to make it harmful and the only thing removing mercury did was make vaccines more expansive for poor people. But such is life, the great thinkers are not always the greatest talkers, and the greatest talkers are often full of misinformation. But that’s another topic.

Overall, I enjoyed this book very much, and I would recommend it to everybody who wants to learn how to communicate better!

Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup

Finally started tackling the reading list for my upcoming MIT Bootcamp. I started with listening to the Disciplined Entrepreneurship on Audible. The book was a good choice because it covered a lot of basics, including terminology I was not familiar with or had forgotten. I am not going to do a full review; there are plenty of those on the web. Instead, I want to highlight three points that stood out to me.

Firstly, the book exists because the writer, Bill Aulet, believes that you can learn to be an entrepreneur. The idea that you can learn to be an entrepreneur is not something universally acknowledged. We, humans, are prone to mythologisation and so naturally, successful entrepreneurs a turned into myths. You also have people in the entrepreneurial space who talk about entrepreneurs as a people apart. Now I am not saying that some people don't have the personality to be more inclined to go down the entrepreneurial path. The truth remains that anyone can learn to the skills to be an entrepreneur and often, it is circumstance, and not personality, that dictates who does and does not become an entrepreneur. But personality might indicate who becomes a serial entrepreneur.

Secondly, the author expressed the belief that you don't have a business unless someone pays you something for your goods or services. E.g. he didn't consider Instagram a business until Facebook bought it. While this might seem a bit extreme in the age of platforms and apps, I have to agree with him. Take for example something like Tumblr. It was a very successful microblogging platform that attracted people active on various fandoms and as well as people making original content. However, they didn't have a monetisation strategy and Yahoo, which bought Tumblr, has had a rough time trying to monetise it. The reason being that "fandom" isn't always advertiser-friendly, and fans can be very entitled. Trust me on this; I would be sending DC comics hate mail on a regular basis if I wasn't so easily Googlable. So it is a fair point to say that you don't have a business until someone is willing to pay you.

Lastly, I was intrigued by what the book had to say about the competition. The author suggested that while we should be aware of the competition, focusing on them, especially trying to crush others in the market is not the way to go. The suggestion was that if you create a new market or industry through your innovation, both you and your competition can thrive. But if you focus too much on the competition, you end up losing to the bigger enemy: the status quo! I support this idea wholeheartedly. A lot of things in life is not a zero-sum game. For you to win, someone else doesn't have to lose. You can win together.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and learnt a lot. I am looking forward to completing the other books on the reading list.