Four Months in Silicon Valley - Part 1
A little background information
In December of 2018, I packed my car and set off on yet another adventure. This time I wasn’t going on some crazy 200 mile hike in the mountains or flying to live overseas. I was heading to startup central, otherwise known as Silicon Valley.
The school I attend, Northeastern University, had just launched a new program which was very originally titled “Semester in Silicon Valley”. It gave students a chance to go to San Francisco and build a startup in one of the best places to be an entrepreneur. On top of all that, it was no ordinary semester. Our professors were all entrepreneurs who had both sold and were currently running successful businesses. We were based out of a WeWork instead of being on a campus, which allowed us to be right in the heat of things with other startups building products in Silicon Valley. Finally, instead of taking four classes, we had the opportunity to take three classes and for the fourth we could take an internship at a startup. I ended up working at a Y-Combinator funded company called lvl5, which made maps for autonomous vehicles. It was a really interesting experience and I’ll talk about it with more detail in a future piece.
You see, two years prior I had caught the entrepreneurial bug and built my first ever ‘company’. It was called Harambe’s Candles and as the name implies, sold small scented candles adorned with pictures of Harambe (may the Lord bless his soul). While I didn’t end up becoming a millionaire off of the idea, I did learn a ton. I had to figure out everything from building a website, to running social media ads, and even how to manufacture scented candles. While the last one may not be too useful in every day life, the first two helped me in every venture I’ve built since then.
Most importantly though, building Harambe’s Candles made me realize that I could actually bring ideas to life. I just had to find something better than putting pictures of a gorilla on scented candles.
Over the next year I participated in Northeastern’s Husky Startup Challenge (HSC), where I worked on building a social networking app called Value, which you could read about here.
Now it was time to put everything to the test in Silicon Valley.
Building the team + Choosing an idea
Before the start of the semester we were told to think of several business ideas that we would be interested to work on while in Silicon Valley. I brainstormed several on my drive from Boston to San Francisco, which I’ll write about in more detail in a separate post, but none of them made me truly excited. The one which I was pondering the most involved using renewable energy to mine cryptocurrency (this was when crypto was HOT).
As the semester began, it became clear that my idea regarding clean energy crypto mining would not work. The semester was four months long and at the end of it our teams had to hand in a working product for one class and pitch our idea to real investors in another. I needed an idea that was more practical and, more importantly, I needed a team.
There was around 20 of us in the Silicon Valley program. We covered several different majors, with students studying computer science, biology, and a wide mixture of business concentrations.
Over the first two weeks we all mingled and shared various ideas as we tried to find teammates for the semester. Eight of us ended up deciding to work together, only to be told the teams could be no more than four people. We had some discussions and split into two final teams. My team ended up consisting of two biology students, Amy and Chris, a computer science student named Jules, and myself (a business student).
As we searched for an idea to work on, we all thought about everyday difficulties that affect us or someone we know. After all, I had always been told that the best businesses solve a problem that one of the founders had. Unfortunately when you start looking for problems, it suddenly appears that we live ideal lives where everything is always perfect.
Eureka Moment
In one of our discussions Jules mentioned how hard it was for her parents, who own a hair salon, to find good workers. Somehow that conversation led to Amy mentioning that her family is in the restaurant industry and faces very similar problems. Suddenly we were having an animated discussion about all the problems that the culinary industry faces when it comes to hiring. After doing some initial research, it became clear that hiring and retaining talent is one of the biggest problems in the space and is costing restaurants billions of dollars every single year. Additionally, we didn't find any good solutions on the market that were solving that issue.
After some more research into the topic and agreement in the group, it was decided that we were going to go down this path.
We were going to build a platform that would help restaurants optimize their hiring process. I didn’t know the first thing about the culinary industry and we had less than four months to bring this idea to life.
The race was on.
Part two of this piece will go over how we built our company in four months and were able to get over 20 restaurants to sign up for it.
