Berkeley Step Week 5 Update!
What happened during Week 5?
This week we had Abhishek Nararaj and Mateo Bueno as speakers.
Abhishek Nararaj is a researcher focused on innovation, entrepreneurship, and the digital economy. He is an Assistant Professor in the Management and Organizations group at Berkeley Haas and earned his PhD in Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His expertise and research interests include:
- Innovation
- Crowdsourcing
- Mapping
- Entrepreneurship
- Big Data and the Digital Economy
- Copyright and Intellectual Property
- Open Innovation
Abhishek gave a presentation on Entrepreneurial Strategy, here’s the recap:
Balance the conflicting advice of Action vs. Planning
Entrepreneurial Strategy Resolves the Paradox of Entrepreneurship
- Entrepreneurial strategy is the sequence of choices a founder makes to test specific value creations and capture hypotheses when entrepreneurial experimentation requires partial commitment
The Three Principles of Entrepreneurial Strategy
- Choice matters
- These choices matter — to understand your choices, make a choice card. Choose your competition, customers, technology, identity (founder, internal capabilities, external position, ecosystem), internal capabilities (who do they hire?), external position (qualities that you show your partners), ecosystem (where do I need to be located?)
- These choices matter together — Intellectual property, architecture, value chain, disruption — this explained through Abhishek’s matrix
Other points:
- Hard work is fundamental to any business and payoffs to hard work are higher when guided by strategic priorities and internal conspiracy.
- Strategy can be defined in terms of: Value creation and value capture hypothesis + four choices (customers, technology, identity, competition).
- The 4 go-to market options are IP, Disruption Value Chain, Architecture strategy.
Our second speaker was Mateo Bueno, a full-stack marketing and brand strategist with 15 years of experience building brands, teams, and campaigns that bring brands to life. As a founder at Brandmates, he helps early-stage companies find their purpose, voice, and identity and helps them execute marketing objectives by connecting them to designers, developers, growth hackers, filmmakers, and product marketers.
Here are Mateo’s tips on Growing your Company:
- Find any talent
- Hire in minutes (not in weeks or months) to optimize speed
- Hire around the globe to optimize selection and price
- Hire great talent at lower prices
- Hire from the largest pool of talent
He also touched on Segmentation Methods:
- Total spend
- Duration of hire
- Number of freelancers hired
- Largest single job size
How to talk to customers: Primary and Secondary Research
Primary Research
- Interviews
- Focus groups
- Surveys
- Social media
- Online communities
- Online panels
Secondary Research
- Industry Research
- Case Studies
We were lucky to have Mateo give us an example of all this through his brand’s approach. Here’s the recap:
Conduct In-Depth Interviews
- 5–20 interviews, 45–60 minutes each
- Offer something to the interviewees if possible
- Focus on 2 person teams
- Try to find a diverse customer set within the target
- Include the entire organization if relevant
Interview Format
- Avoid using scripts
- Don’t ask follow-up questions
- Remember the objective: to get to know brand deeply
General Interview Themes
- What brought you here?
- What keeps you returning?
- What would life be like without it?
Mateo’s Key Findings
- Platform size doesn’t matter
- Finding the perfect freelancer can be daunting and time-consuming
- Finding the perfect freelancer is the best feeling one can have
- Productivity is the #1 benefit
Thank you to both Abhishek and Mateo for your advice and experience. Your support is helping us foster the UC Berkeley entrepreneurial ecosystem, and we couldn’t be more grateful.
StEP Updates
VC Mentorship and Demo Days are coming up! Here are the details:
VC Demo Day:
Date: December 3rd
Format: Speed-dating structure
Purpose: Present your company to VCs and get feedback from different people
VC Mentorship Day:
Date: December 6th
Format: Ask VCs questions and discuss positioning
If you would like to gain more information on each team, you can…
- Visit our website where all the Fall 2019 StEP teams are listed!
- Read our Medium posts where two teams will be highlighted and interviewed each week
Throughout the next 3 weeks, we will be following each team and getting to know them and their ideas better. Stay tuned to learn more with us through…
- Medium Publications
- Facebook and Instagram pages
- The StEP Website
Again, thank you so much for supporting Berkeley StEP and the entrepreneur ecosystem — stay tuned for updates in the coming weeks!
