My entrepreneurial journey...
While reflecting on this semester, I've realized that I went from not knowing what the fundamentals behind a startup are to now being relatively well versed in the elements that go into building a business.
This class has taught me several practical skills from constructing financial statements to raising money from VC's to understanding the subtleties of intellectual property, but I think one of the biggest things I've learned is how to work with a team. Understanding how to work with my team has been an important yet underrated part of entrepreneurial journey.
In the beginning, we had some issues forming our team because we had 1 too many people so it was tricky trying to figure out who would be in our final team. I had to mediate some stressful situations regarding our team formation involving talking to everyone so they would understand who would be in the team if we had to cut 1 person. Luckily, one person decided to join another team so we were fine. However, this initial communication between the team was one of the low points of my journey because I was immediately thrown into a tricky situation that I did not know how to handle.
Throughout the semester, I noticed a lot of inconsistency with the pace at which we did our work. I've mentioned this in previous blog posts, but I felt that I had to really get the team together because no one was showing initiative initially. Our facebook group chat was inefficient at first in getting people to respond. However, as time went on and we realized the amount of work we needed to do increased more and more, we became very organized with our work process. We would meet once a week and figure out what work needed to be done for the Thursday meeting. This was definitely one of the high points - when my team became committed towards the common goal of figuring out our costs for the product or our customer or how to better sell our product.
I think these hands-on communication skills will definitely help me with my future entrepreneurial endeavors - whether I'm working at an internship at a big company or starting my own thing, if I have more experience with working with different types of people then I can surround myself with a good team and have a more successful result overall.
While reflecting on this semester, I've realized that I went from not knowing what the fundamentals behind a startup are to now being relatively well versed in the elements that go into building a business.
This class has taught me several practical skills from constructing financial statements to raising money from VC's to understanding the subtleties of intellectual property, but I think one of the biggest things I've learned is how to work with a team. Understanding how to work with my team has been an important yet underrated part of entrepreneurial journey.
In the beginning, we had some issues forming our team because we had 1 too many people so it was tricky trying to figure out who would be in our final team. I had to mediate some stressful situations regarding our team formation involving talking to everyone so they would understand who would be in the team if we had to cut 1 person. Luckily, one person decided to join another team so we were fine. However, this initial communication between the team was one of the low points of my journey because I was immediately thrown into a tricky situation that I did not know how to handle.
Throughout the semester, I noticed a lot of inconsistency with the pace at which we did our work. I've mentioned this in previous blog posts, but I felt that I had to really get the team together because no one was showing initiative initially. Our facebook group chat was inefficient at first in getting people to respond. However, as time went on and we realized the amount of work we needed to do increased more and more, we became very organized with our work process. We would meet once a week and figure out what work needed to be done for the Thursday meeting. This was definitely one of the high points - when my team became committed towards the common goal of figuring out our costs for the product or our customer or how to better sell our product.
I think these hands-on communication skills will definitely help me with my future entrepreneurial endeavors - whether I'm working at an internship at a big company or starting my own thing, if I have more experience with working with different types of people then I can surround myself with a good team and have a more successful result overall.
Hi Nitin,
ReplyDeleteGood insights regarding team. It's non-obvious when you get started but so important as you're looking to build something. We took a couple of weeks longer to build teams than I thought we should but it turned out to be the right thing to do.
Welcome any suggestions on how to do this better.
Otherwise, look forward to having you pitch on Tuesday.