Sunday 31 July 2016

CECS and the City Episode 4: Entrepreneurship


The stories of mega-million dollar businesses popping up out of someone’s garage are becoming more and more common. They’re usually run by an unkempt high school or college drop out with too much talent to be sitting around in university lectures. Most start ups don’t begin this way, despite how the media makes us feel (so please don’t drop out of university).  However, as we move through the digital age, more and more people have been inspired and encouraged to create something new and enter the world of entrepreneurialism.  


Through channels like the Tech Launcher program at ANU, the CBR Innovation Network and the Griffin Accelerator, there is a shift to an environment where innovation and new ideas are nurtured and encouraged. QPay is a great example of this. They started out of ANU as a software development company called Imagine Team. Then QPay (focusing on bill sharing for students) sprang from this, and have now expanded to be the best ticketing and administrative system for university clubs and societies. These guys have picked up plenty of grants along the way too!

So, just in case this start-up craze is for you, I’ve put together some advice from the conference that might point you in the right direction.

Earl Valencia from the Science and Technology Advisory Council helps start ups in the Philippines. His organisation provides financial, legal and advisory support to innovators. He has seen thousands of proposals and supported hundreds of them as they became businesses, so he has certainly got plenty of experience in who makes it and who doesn’t.

So…which ones do make it? He came up with a nice list of things for us. Invariably, the most successful start-ups came from people who:
  1. Didn’t give up! They failed plenty of times, but they always asked for help.
  2. Have global ambition. These are people who believe that their idea should scale up in the future in a big way, not just remain a local business.
  3. Aren’t afraid to do the dirty work. This means being the one that builds that website or enters all that data. There are likely to be a lot of menial tasks on the way to success and you’re the only one who will care enough to do them.
  4. Know who they impact. The first question is: who is it that benefits from the product? Then this leads on to a million other questions that have to be answered about those people and their lives. A lot of start-ups make too many assumptions about these people and forget to take the time out to get to know them.
  5. Have a deeply meaningful vision. This has to be something that you believe in, and something that you can convince your investors to believe in too.

So don’t overlook those 5 things!


Now we turn to Yobie, the billionaire entrepreneur who has a gene fabricating machine in his basement. Yeah, that’s not normal.   

He had all sorts of advice and interesting perspectives. A lot of these were only applicable to those who already had a mini fortune (probably not you, sorry), but some really important things came out that are applicable to all students, not just those looking to create a start-up. Ready for another list of advice?
  • Be prepared to pivot. This means you have to be flexible with your game plan. Paypal changed their business model 16 times. As you go on, you’ll learn more about the market, demand for certain products and the realities of the consumer world. QPay have done a great job of this as they saw the opportunity to get students signed up by moving into the world of university societies.
  • Make sure you tell a story. Whether you’re crowdfunding or selling your product, he says half the job is telling stories. The best crowd funding efforts I’ve seen always have a great video, with a great story!
  • If you want to do good, you have to be practical. If there’s one thing I learnt in Cambodia with Engineers Without Borders, it’s that without economics and business viability, humanitarian engineering doesn’t really work. The products or services that make the biggest impact in developing countries don’t usually come out of aid organisations. The best example is the mobile phone. It has made an absolutely huge impact in developing countries. It caught on because it was a marketable product that people were willing to invest in. Earl Valencia’s organisation sees this, which is why they are supporting business and innovation from locals in the Philippines as a way to create social change.
  • The most important skill an undergraduate needs is…curiosity! So don’t bother practicing your MATLAB, maths, or CAD skills. The students who want to find out more about the world, try new things and ask the right questions are the ones who go places. This probably fits in with his idea that we won’t need programmers soon as computers will be able to do that for us. I don’t think that means we should stop learning, but it does mean we should make sure we have skills that focus on design and problem solving, not just the extremely technical, sometimes repetitive, work.
  • Reply to your emails straight away. Perhaps the most boring piece of advice, but it’s my favourite. It’s all about doing things straight away and efficiently dealing with things as they come. It’ll help you to power through your day if nothing else.

So there you have it. Nothing they’ve said is shocking. Advice from successful people is rarely shocking and rarely that practical, but there’s a reason these things stand out to them. It’s up to you to figure out how you can apply them to your work.


Emily

Monday 25 July 2016

CECS and the City Episode 3: Acronyms and Lists

By day 3, we’d figured out the secret to being a good presenter at a conference…acronyms! Speakers were throwing them at us from all directions, especially on the final day as our focus turned to social innovation, entrepreneurship (a word I have never in my life spelt correctly) and leadership.

We learnt that start-ups get money from FFFs (friends, family and fools), the new craze is SALt (sustainable alternative lighting), lots of attendees were YGLs (young global leaders), and that POWER (P, W, R = power with results, minus approval from Others and seeking External validation) is the leadership mantra we’ve all been looking for. Oh, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) became STEAM (add in the arts), and then STEAM became STREAM (add in reading and writing). My notebook felt like a glossary by the end.
  
Those who were slightly less adventurous stuck to numbered lists to get their points across. However, it became apparent that only lists of three things were acceptable. Four is too much for an audience to remember, and two is barely enough to keep them interested, so like goldie locks, we found that the middle is just right. 

My favourite list of three from the conference was from Dr Teresa Kennedy who spoke about mindfulness. If you’ve read my post about engineering and empathy (http://goo.gl/2DqWYg) then you’ll know that I’m a big fan of mindfulness. Although on second thoughts, I didn’t present that idea in an acronym, so you probably don’t remember what I wrote! Damn. Oh well, luckily Teresa made us a list of three so now we can’t forget! Here it is:

Steps to Mindfulness
  • Be present
  • Have a beginner’s mind
  • Pause and reflect
It seems so simple yet we’re all pretty bad at these three little things. So often we are focusing on the future or the past, and that’s why we need to be reminded to be present, to enjoy whatever is happening right now, and observe what’s there around us.

Having a beginner’s mind is so important. It’s worryingly hard to find someone who has that open mindset, is willing to entertain different ideas, admits they don’t know things, and is genuinely excited about what’s happening. No one ever stops being a beginner, and the moment you think you have, all of the doors close in on you.  

Finally, without pausing and reflecting, everything you do has a little less meaning. When potential employers get you in for a job interview, they don’t just want you to say you were President of something, or did this big group project, or got these amazing (or not so amazing) grades. They’re looking for you to reflect on these experiences. Tell them what you learnt about yourself, what you would do differently next time, why you chose to do it, what’s next for you or how it has influenced the way you look at things. These are the sorts of questions you should ask over and over again when looking at your life or your work. Take the time out to ask yourself “why?”


Before I go, I couldn’t give you a rundown of day 3 without mentioning Yobie. He is someone that doesn’t need a last name. If you say “Yobie” in New York, people will know who you’re talking about. He is one of those College drop outs turned mega billionaire entrepreneurs (still can’t spell this word). He was involved in the early days of lotus and that made him a lot of money at a young age. Since then he’s been jumping into bed with some of the most ambitious and talented innovators going around. He had some pretty crazy things to say, so I wanted to give you little snippets of the things that made my jaw drop.  Oh and to demonstrate my presentation proficiency, I’ve put them in a list of three for you.
  • He owns a gene fabricating machine. He keeps it in his basement. I’m not entirely sure what it’s purpose is, other than to be a cool thing to brag about.
  • He purchased bandwidth that can cover the whole world. Which means he can control drones anywhere. Think about that.
  • To help prevent illegal poaching of rhinos for their horns in Africa, Yobie and his mate flooded the market with 3D printed rhino horns so they’d lose their value. I love this idea. Economics, right!? 
He also reckons he will soon be able to predict the stock market in real time. There wasn’t room in my list of three for that fourth fact, but I also couldn’t come up with an acronym with four letters that meant something! Oh well, I should probably give up on my ambition to speak at conferences one day.  

You can read about some of the advice Yobie gave us for entrepreneurs in the next post. 


Emily

Friday 24 June 2016

CECS and the City Episode 2: SDG Number Five

CECS and the City Episode 2: SDG Number Five

This is me doing me best to smile through the cold NY weather.

When you get a group of really ambitious people together, it can be the perfect dose of motivation for a young person. On day 2 of the conference we heard from some women and men who had achieved a lot. There was Lord Dr Michael Hastings (Global Head of Citizenship at KPMG), Senator Imani Duncan-Price from Jamaica, Jacques Philippe Piverger (founder and CEO of the Soleil Group) and many more people who were frustratingly successful and really eloquent speakers too.

We spent the morning talking about the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while it snowed outside (dogs were wearing snow boots to walk around the city!) The SDGs are the 17 global targets released by the UN in 2015, and are the successors to their Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Each of the 17 is important on it’s own, but there’s a huge crossover and it would be hard to focus on just one at a time.


Number 1 is a biggie: no poverty. If you’re pessimistic about this one, you might be surprised to know that we’re halfway to eliminating poverty. Yep. That’s a huge deal! It’s something we need to celebrate for sure. BUT, you wouldn’t stop halfway, right? The following video from the UN is pretty awesome and makes this point. It features some interesting facts plus some celebs like Usain Bolt and Coldplay, I definitely recommend you take the 2 minutes to watch it.   
Video: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/no-point-going-halfway-to-end-poverty/

Some of my favourites are number 4 (quality education), 6 (clean water and sanitation), and 17 (partnerships for the goals). Seventeen is important because it makes people focus on doing things together, and that’s a really nice (but also highly effective) way to go about it. The best part is that under each of these goals are really specific targets that can be measured, so they’re not just some vague areas of interest that the UN threw together, these are some serious goals with serious targets.


Number 5 is gender equity. In the room of highly ambitious women, this one led to a big discussion on equal pay, having more women CEOs and breaking that glass ceiling. It was really interesting and, of course, really important to hear. These women were very passionate about these issues and about creating opportunities for women.  But there was a really powerful moment later in the morning that made us all take a huge step back from this.  In the middle of the fired discussion, Lord Hastings said to us all “yes, these things are really important, but there is this preoccupation with acquisition of position. We need more than that. Girls need education, we need to eliminate poverty. Where is the social justice for those who can’t get to the first base point? Let’s start at the bottom and not the top”.

Damn. We had all been so preoccupied with number 5 and how it related to ourselves, but there are 16 other goals and billions of women on the planet that we were ignoring. I realised that empowering women is essential to meeting all the other goals, and women in developing countries need to be a huge part of number 5.

Jamaican Senator, Imani Duncan, described it really nicely and gave me my take-away message for the day in one line. She said “number five, gender equality, is the thread that runs through all of the goals”.

It was exactly the shift in perspective that I think we all needed.

Emily

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