My Experience on StartupBus
StartupBus is an annual competition that challenges entrepreneurs to conceive, build, and launch a company while riding on a bus for 72 hours. The competition is fun, inspiring, and extremely intense. It has rightfully earned the nickname, “The Navy Seals Boot Camp for Entrepreneurs.”
With the help of the Burton D. Morgan Foundation, I had the opportunity to be a part of the StartupBus North America competition this summer. I joined the Ohio MakerBus and we combined with our friends from San Francisco, creating the “SFRon” Bus. We left from Akron and rode the bus to New Orleans where the final pitches were, while stopping at co-working sites in Columbus, OH, Charlotte, NC, Decatur, GA, and Jackson, MS on the way there. I learned many valuable lessons during my time in this competition including; how powerful being uncomfortable can be, the power of being decisive, and that the team is the most important.
Being Uncomfortable Can Be Powerful
Generally, people don’t enjoy or look forward to uncomfortable situations. Having to create and launch a business on a bus in three days with a team of people you’ve never met before is an unfamiliar and uncomfortable situation for most, and it was for me. Uncomfortable situations though, also can lead to growth, as it did for me during the Startup Bus. The pressure of having to execute in such little time forced me to do work harder than I thought I was capable of working.
Being Decisive is Important
As I mentioned earlier in the article, Startup Bus challenges entrepreneurs to create and launch a company in 72 hours. For the team that I was a part of, it was more like 24 hours. We had some very good ideas (I think we had the best ideas, but of course, I’m biased), but kept pivoting between them and did not decide which direction we would go in until the last minute. The time and energy we spent on working on ideas that we didn’t present, was time and energy wasted. Having only 24 hours to work on our company and out pitch was a huge disadvantage and it showed in our presentation. We had high potential, but just not enough time. From this, I learned that sometimes a person just has to pick a choice and roll with it. Being indecisive paralyzes you and you waste valuable time.
The Team is More Important Than Anything
Everything starts with the team. In business or in any team sport or competition, the team is more important than the idea(s), the individual skills, and anything else. Specifically, how well the team can communicate and work with each other is most important. As I mentioned before, I thought our team had some really good ideas and we were also extremely talented and I am sure that we will all go very far in our careers and life. We weren’t able to execute and reach our full potential as a team though because we were a dysfunctional team in the beginning. We were dysfunctional because of poor communication and we all had different goals for the competition without establishing clear team goals. Toward the end of the competition, we started accomplishing more in a few hours than we did in two days after communicating with each other better. This was awesome. A unified team is strong and can reach higher heights than any individual can.
I think part of the reason why this was difficult for us at first is because we all were used to being the leader in the teams we have been in prior to the competition so some of us had to learn to be role players. I learned that sometimes, an individual had to adjust and sacrifice being in a position that best utilizes his/her individual capabilities for the better of the team.
Conclusion
I am thankful for this experience and the lessons that I’ve learned from it. I am already applying these lessons to my career and personal life. I am even more thankful for the great people that I had the opportunity to meet. My favorite part of the competition by far was meeting people from all over the world and forming relationships with them. Also, I don’t want to finish this article without thanking our bus conductors and mentors. They gave us a tremendous amount of help and insight, and for all the lessons that we all learned, they helped us realize what we were learning. I am proud to be able to say that I am now a part of the Global StartupBus Family as an alumni!
