Private Blog Post 7 - Entrepreneurial Journey Thus Far

Hello all,

As our final class approaches, this blog post will talk a little bit about my entrepreneurial journey and some of its biggest takeaways, as well as some of the highlights and lowlights of the class and the whole process. The class has really flown by - it seems like not too long ago that we were packed into a room in Giannini, and no we're hours away from doing our final run through in front of the class. I can say with certainty that I've learned a lot. I'll first be talking about the most important takeaways from the entrepreneurial journey.

Find the perfect balance between ideal and practical. I believe that a big part of the entrepreneurial journey is compromise. You're always going to have an "ideal" situation, an "ideal" product - given infinite time, resources, this is the best product you can design. But there are always restrictions. One of the big things we learned how to do was compromise between our ideal vision of the project and the vision that we could realistically create and implement. One big example of this was when we were debating about whether or not to choose CRISPR as our patent. On one hand, all of us were very excited about the visionary technology and what it could mean if it was developed further. On the other hand, that vision was many years of R&D and a lot of investments away from becoming a reality - not the best choice for a startup to tackle. And, in that case, we had to sacrifice our ideal choice for a more practical choice - a patent we were almost equally excited about, but one that was far more realistic. That's not to say you should always give up and pivot at the first sign of trouble, but I think it's important to go into the entrepreneurial journey with an open mind and the willingness to change or stand firm, given a certain situation.

You don't always have to meet all your deadlines, but you have to set them. To clarify, I am not saying that it's ok to miss deadlines because you're being lazy or because you choose not to do some work on time - that's a recipe for disaster. I do believe, however, that when something comes up, it's ok and even important to deviate from schedule. The key, however, is to HAVE a schedule in the first place, so you can always come back to it. For example, after switching patents, we fell 1-2 weeks behind every other team that had stuck to their initial ideas. We also fell behind on our customer surveys, because we spent a long time researching our patent and understanding the technology, reaching out to the research teams, etc. But I'd say these were both valuable "tangents," because we picked a more realistic patent and garnered an excellent understanding of our patent and the underlying technology, and that's helped us immensely in the process of creating the product and the pitch. But, we still had a schedule we were on, and we were able to get back to it. We have Rick and Tal to thank for this - they had set a schedule for the class, with benchmarks for what to get done every week. Many of the weeks, we didn't necessarily meet these benchmarks. But the fact that the schedule was there meant we had a mark to aspire to, with a hard deadline to have the deck done & the pitch ready. We worked harder and faster over the last few weeks to make up for lost time, and we are now ready with the deck and ready to present in today's class. If we hadn't had a schedule, with a hard stop date, we would have never actually gotten back on track.

Clear communication and delegation are vital to having good teamwork. The most efficient way to do a group project is to have open channels of communication, constant debate and discussion, and clear delegation/segmentation of tasks. At the beginning of the project, we definitely did not talk very often. As a result, no one knew exactly what they were supposed to do for a given week, and we ended up not working too efficiently. But as the semester progressed, we learned to have very clear delegation of tasks. We got into the habit of setting up a whiteboard or google doc in our virtual/in-person meetings, and we would list every task that needed to be accomplished and put someone's name next to it. By doing this, everyone knew what he/she was responsible for, and there was far more visibility and accountability. These are small, but vital processes that made our team more efficient.

Now, I will briefly look into some of the highs and lows of our project before wrapping up. I'd say the lows were primarily concentrated during times where we felt too far behind schedule or too overwhelmed with work. Specifically, right after we rejected the idea of a CRISPR-based product, I was worried about catching up to the rest of the class, and I was worried that our final pitch would suffer as a result of having less time to work on it. It was also concerning when we were struggling to get replies from different professors (especially the Berkeley team) to discuss their patents. However, I'd say that the lows were never too bad - I personally always had confidence that our team was talented and hardworking enough to succeed in the end. The highs were in the moments that everything came together - when we got excellent customer data supporting our product idea, when we finally put together our deck and did our first pitch, etc. These moments were pretty fulfilling, as they showed that all our hard work had come to fruition.

I would say that IEOR 185 has fulfilled my expectations and more. I signed up for this class because I wanted to learn real-life entrepreneurial skills, and I have been able to do that in a very hands-on way. I would definitely look to take another IEOR challenge lab class in the future.