Linisha is touring around San Francisco and Silicon Valley, gathering inspiration for her new photography platform and magazine, Shoot Creativity.
Feeling so inspired. Started my day out by meeting Mikkel Svane, founder of zendesk, to a talk about being a Danish entrepreneur in San Francisco. The biggest take-away was DO DO DO! If you have an idea – don’t hesitate to get started – it will be an adventure in one way or the other!
After the meeting at zendesk, we headed to Stanford University for a lecture with the founder of GrabCAD – a gazelle that has created a community where mechanical engineers can share knowledge and collaborate on CAD models for customers, who upload a sketch or a description of the product they need. Was so amazed that Photo Pitch (one of Shoot Creativity’s main product lines, which will be launched in April) was built around the same concept of letting the mass create their prototypes and thereby letting the customer choose the best option. Knowing that this model worked for GrabCAD is giving me much more confidence for launching Shoot Creativity’s Photo Pitch.
The inspiring founder of GrabCAD, Hardi Maybaum, gave us 20 learnings which one should bear in mind when starting a company:
#1 don’t give up after first obstacle
#2 celebrate victories
# 3 have an understanding wife
# 4 raising money from Europe is difficult and expensive (in equity)
# 5 build a minimum product – launch it and see how people use it!
# 6 talk to customers
# 7 learn how others innovate
# 8 everything is not like it appears
# 9 you are in or out, no middle choice
# 10 talking to people gives you a lot of great feedback
# 11 you are not the smartest person – throw it out there and see what the masses create
# 12 learn from other entrepreneurs (different industries do have the same challenges)
# 13 experiment with models
# 14 make A/B tests
# 15 don’t give up after first failure
# 16 talk to customers
# 17 read forentrepreneurs.com
# 18 the team matters the most
# 19 find people you enjoy working with
# 20 find people who want to learn and develop
1 comment
Linn says:
Feb 1, 2012
I think this post is really good, and I most definitely agree with the last points, about finding the right people around you. Even if you sometimes tend to forget the importance of that, you always end up with the same conclusion – it does matter.