MAP Accelerator Program — Week 3
Another week of super exciting content. There’s no time to waste, so let’s dive straight in.
Identity
Our first session this week was about identity. The questions that we were meant to think about were:
- Who are we personally, not professionally?
- Why are we doing what we do?
The mentor guiding us through the session made a good point, that personal branding is very important in a business leader. This applies to how your employees see you as well as how your customer and partners see you. The fundamental idea was to be authentic. This might sound a bit corny, but most people actually can smell bullshit quite well.
As we went around the table and each founder gave some insight into their character, you could just see that with most people you can identify at least with some aspects of their personality. This shows that we’re all on sort of the same spectrum. And if you meet someone, who tells you something about themselves and you cannot identify with any part of what they say, then most likely they’re not completely honest with you.
Ultimately this translates into business: if you are authentic, people will see some attributes of themselves in you, which allows them to trust and respect you. This translates into trust and respect for the brand and the company you represent.
VC Funding
Another important session this week was about VC (Venture Capital) funding. The mentor made sure we understand the essence of VC investments: VCs look for the One-Billion-Dollar start-up (aka unicorn) — not for semi-successful $50M businesses. She made clear that we don’t take it the wrong way — there’s nothing wrong with a successful $50M business, but VCs might not be a suitable investor in this case. There’s other types of investors out there (private investors, angel investors, etc).
The mentor ranked the criteria for whether a VC invests into a company as follows: (1) Have a great founder/founding team, (2) have an idea how your product(s) can become essential to your customers, (3) time your market entry well and (4) have some sort of moat or ensure you cannot be easily out-competed.
The great founder/founding team criteria is by far the most important. What makes a great founder? There’s a couple of attributes and a great founder should tick at least a couple of them: data-focused mindset, exceptionally smart, action/result-oriented, learning on the fly, composure/perseverance, organisational skills and a strong vision/purpose.
For the pitches to investors the mentor recommended looking at it as a sales meeting, where the product is your company. Just to have the right mindset. They also provided some rough outline how to structure the pitch reflecting the ranked criteria outlined before: (1) You and your team, (2) the problem you solve, (3) your unique solution, (4) the progress to date and (5) the grande vision for the future and how far towards that goal any investment would take you. Don’t use buzz words, don’t pretend or postulate (“we’re the next Uber of …”) be realistic and use simple explanations. If a VC wants to know more details, they will ask.
The topic of NDAs (Non-Disclosure-Agreement) keeps popping up in all sorts of learning sessions of the program. Generally, VCs won’t sign any as it can inhibit their ability to work with other companies within the same industry.
Hearing all this made me think: our main concern when talking to investors was that we’re over-optimistic and not realistic enough. However, there’s a fine line between being humble about your trajectory and having a vision of where you’d like to be and confidence in figuring out a pathway towards this goal. Overall, this was a great overview and I wish I’ve heard all this before we first talked to investors.
Advisory Board
Another interesting idea that was suggested to me this week was the creation of an advisory board. This can happen quite informal at the beginning with a few mentors, who are willing to help you out with guidance and ideas in their area of expertise. The person I spoke to mentioned that they found an exponential increase in the value of their mentors, once they started having regular workshops with all their mentors (with different expertise) together in one room. The overall value of these workshops was much bigger than the sum of the individual value of each mentor, as they cross-pollinate each other with ideas.
It’s important to note here that these meetings should be well prepared — that means: (1) have an agenda of what you want to work through and provide that agenda to the mentors and (2) provide each mentor with enough context beforehand for them to “do their homework” and come prepared. This avoids wasting everyone’s valuable time.
Stakeholder Map
The busy week finished off with a workshop focused on creating a stakeholder map. The idea being that you create sort of a mind-map with your main target customer(s) at the centre and then all the entities, organisations and people that affect these main customers. These will be the nodes in your graph. Once you have the stakeholder nodes mapped out, it’s time to create edges between the stakeholders, which represent the relationship these entities have.
This was a very useful exercise and exposed some gaps in my knowledge about the landscape we operate in. Understanding all stakeholders and their relationship is critical when talking to any of them, because you need to know who they interact with and why. It can also expose potential avenues of approaching your customers via one of their relationships.
The last step is to add two different classifiers to each stakeholder: (1) an indicator/metric of alignment with your own mission and (2) the relative power/influence of this stakeholder. This allows you to identify the entities to focus your efforts on (strong alignment and powerful) and also can help you avoid “wasting time” on stakeholders that might be super-aligned, but ultimately don’t have any power and don’t progress your business. However, some times it can still be useful to engage with them. Likewise, I think you have to somewhat engage with stakeholders that are not aligned with your mission, but have a lot of power.
