What were you doing before you joined Dotforge & what brought you here?

Even as a tech founder at Rentlord, I was quite involved with social enterprise and helping young founders or potential founders succeed. Apart from individual mentoring, I was a mentor for NACUE, an organization that partners with student entrepreneur societies. I love working with students and young entrepreneurs especially.

Going through 500startups and Seedcamp was a truly invaluable experience and I wanted to take advantage of the knowledge I gained. Joining Dotforge seemed like the perfect opportunity!

Why social enterprise?

My link with social enterprise goes back a long way. I worked at a human rights NGO at the UN in Geneva, before I went into academia at Cambridge, or even got into technology; it was very gratifying. I helped set up a large human rights network spanning most countries in Asia and the Pacific… and the challenge was doing it all from a tiny room in Geneva. This was before internet and Facebook pages were popular, so I networked them one by one, by phone from that small room!

What should the incoming teams for the accelerator expect to learn from you?

I would like to take the entrepreneurial tools and lessons I’ve learnt as a founder, and put it into doing social good. Things like building a product, A/B testing, customer validation, customer re-engagement, metric monitoring, and basically creating the most impact even if you’re a very lean team of 2 or 3. A lot of these tools are very current in the tech circle, but may be new to social entrepreneurs, who have come to the problem from a different angle. Tech entrepreneurship is very similar to social entrepreneurship, because they start with the core idea of changing the world.

What are the key lessons you’ve learnt going through 500startups and Seedcamp?

The most important thing is: get the product or service launched and in the hands of users. No matter how basic it is. Get customer feedback quickly. Find a small pool of users, say 10, who care about your mission, and keep interviewing them, giving them the latest version of what you’re building. As a startup, you should be concerned whether or not you’re solving the right problem in the best way. For accelerators, it is great because they help (or should help) keep you focused on product building, and keep you pointed in the right direction. As a founder or creator of a new product, there are 200 things to focus on. An accelerator should help keep you focused on the 1 or 2 things that will make a huge different to your company in the short term.

If you’re ambitious, and solving a big problem, and have a solution that can help a community, or even the world, we’ll give you the tools and connections to make it a reality. You can find more about the accelerator here!