Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

Week 6: Summer Venture Program 2018

Starting Week 6!

Week 6 of the Summer Venture Program was all about the legal matters of running a business. With the help of our sponsor Pierce Atwood LLP, our entrepreneurs had all of their legal concerns addressed and put to ease.

Before delving into our lunch and learn with Pierce Atwood, our teams shared their midpoint updates—recapping all they’ve done the first half of the program and outlining what they plan to do in the remaining half. Devin Cole, Head of Community at Workbar, sat in on these updates and provided useful connections to many of our teams. Following updates, Jack Steele and Kyle Glover from Pierce Atwood spoke to our entrepreneurs all about the collection, usage, and storage of data. Topics covered in the talk ranged from the effects of GDPR to creating privacy policies for your business. To simply sum up the conversation: tell your customers what you are going to do with their information, and then do it. To end the day off, some of our startups sat in on a product design sprints workshop with thoughtbot. Eric Bailey and Elaina Natario from thoughtbot covered the importance of clarifying the problem space your product exists in and how to identify and reach the goals you want to.

The following day, Hari Mahesh of exclusive.ai pitched his business to the rest of our entrepreneurs during our hot seat exercise. After receiving constructive feedback, the rebuild team went to work in fixing his presentation. On Wednesday morning, Workbar hosted a pancake breakfast to formally introduce SVP to the rest of the Workbar community. The food was delicious and our entrepreneurs enjoyed talking with other startups in the Boston community. Wednesday was a productive working day our businesses. We had two office hour sessions this week—one with the Speech Center and the other with Pierce Atwood. Our entrepreneurs thrive in smaller settings where they can ask personal questions to the experts.

Female founders collaborating

To end the week, Babson’s marketing team filmed some shots of the Summer Venture Program at the Babson Boston campus. We hope they got some good footage! Shaymaa Gaafar from Shay Jaffar pitched her modest luxury brand and again was given incredible feedback. I am always amazed at how constructive and useful all the feedback is, as well as how kindly everyone takes the comments. A few of our entrepreneurs helped Shaymaa rebuild the pitch for her to repitch the following week.

Our startups are continuing to search for opportunities and connections as we enter the second half of the Summer Venture Program. To highlight one company in the cohort, Dondoctor was 1 of the 12 people selected out of 4,000 applicants for the Johnson and Johnson One Young World Program. This is just an example of the phenomenal things SVP 2018 is doing.

Register now for our Summer Venture Showcase on Thursday July 26. Follow all SVP happenings on Twitter and Instagram with #babsonsvp!