Week 4: SF Summer Venture Program
Lot’s of happenings @ Babson San Francisco! We had a very eventful week including 3 all star speakers Elliott Adams (Customer Development), Armando Biondi (Growth Strategies), and Dwight Gertz (Decisions), our 5th *Hot Seat*, a Gari focus group, office hours with mentors, and we celebrated IdaRose’s birthday!
Elliott, one of our SVP advisors, gave an overview of the business model canvas and led an exercise on how to interview customers in order to learn about actual market needs.
Armando is the co-founder of AdEspresso, an SaaS tool that allows people to quickly create, analyze and optimize Facebook Ads, and he encouraged everyone to leverage their expertise (do what you know how to do best) and getting to the $money$ faster (done is better than good).
Dwight teaches in the entrepreneurship division @ Babson and gave a presentation about how we view and mitigate risk when making decisions.
Our next *Hot Seat* was with Phil Motto (ModPost) who is creating an automotive social media platform that publishes crowd-sourced content. Phil explained the need of having a website that properly manages and exposes the countless number of user written automotive content on the internet.
Later, we had two Babson alums provide office hours: Bryanne Leeming (M’16, SVP ’15), CEO of JumpSmart, and Robbie Leer (Ugrad ’08), Manager of Bay Area Operations @ Pillow, reservation management startup for short term rentals.
On Thursday, we had a focus group with Mike C. (Kiwi International) where everyone sampled Gari, a West African staple food made from Cassava root. We tasted many variations of Gari including coconut and chocolate flavors. It was a great opportunity for Mike to evaluate the product and test his ideas before it’s made available to the public.
Later, we had a very special birthday celebration for IdaRose, our SVP director in San Francisco! The team went “meandering with a mentor” and the destination was the Ferry Building, a popular marketplace with artisan food and locally grown produce. Obviously, ice cream is always a great idea 🙂
Stay tuned for more updates!
Save-the-date: Summer Venture Showcase: August 4th
