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A thousand NOs for every YES

Álvaro Sanz Pérez
Cleverea
Published in
4 min readDec 9, 2019

(We’ll try to improve a bit that ratio though…)

Welcome!

This is the first post of what I’m afraid will be a looooong history of failures (some call it learning!). They say that in life, but specially in the launch of a start-up, one must face (and admit) endless setbacks and bad news.

In these posts we’ll be letting you in to some of our failures, our “meteduras de pata”, our mistakes and our frustrations. We’ll try to make a bit of fun about it all and we do hope that it will help others (and ourselves) in understanding that failing is the necessary step towards success 💪.

Let’s start with a big one: Hangar 51 by IAG Group

Let’s put some context to this story:

  • Hangar 51 (https://www.hangar51.com/) is a 10-week accelerator program from IAG Group (holding company of Iberia, Iberia Express, Vueling, British Airways, Level and Aer Lingus). They are BIG.
  • Over the 10 weeks, selected Start-ups (you guessed it: not us 😭) get to run a joint proof of concept of their product / service with IAG teams.
  • This year close to 500 start-ups from around the world (literally, start-ups from NY to Tel Aviv; from Sydney to Toronto) submitted their application and sent their proposal to IAG for review (see some of them below).
  • Out of those 500 start-ups, 36 were selected to deliver a 5-minutes pitch in Madrid. We were one of them (#fuckyeah!).
  • Ok, that’s enough context…
  • …and bullet points.

From the moment we knew we had been pre-selected, we shifted much of our attention to ensuring this was a success. We hired a designer to make the perfect presentation (thanks @Marc), we spoke with a founder that had participated in Hangar 51 in a previous year (thanks, @Fernando), we got in touch with a professor from IESE (thanks @Conor), we drafted, re-drafted, destroyed and re-created the script and practiced it 100 times (thanks @peoplewhowerekindenoughtolistenpatiently). Everything was ready.

Aaaaaaaand so we arrived in Madrid. Excitement. Nervousness.

The day was packed (30+ start-ups doing a 5-minutes pitch + break time + networking time) and incredibly fun. We had the opportunity to watch all pitches and find some amazing ideas! From drones, to a moving body scanner, to machine learning reading, to airplane cleaning, to a new cool smart tray for aircrafts… There wasn’t a moment to rest! 😅

Our pitch went fine 😁! Hangar 51’s team has been kind enough to share a piece of the video, so feel free to have a look:

Funny story: at the beginning of the presentation I said AIG instead of IAG (not in the video, apologies…). Even though I did practice that particular bit, it is like a tongue-twister. Apologies IAG 😳.

We do want to give a huge shout out to IAG Group and specially to Iberia and Vueling as this year’s main sponsors of the program for an outstanding event and initiative. There are many companies out there with their mouth full of “Innovation” but very few take themselves seriously enough to actually do something about it.

Even though we didn’t make it into the program (competition was amazing), we did give it our best. And it did pay out. Huge experience, lots of new contacts and interesting meetings ahead! 📅

We are, of course, looking forward to continuing our conversations with the Group, and will work our asses off (excuse the language) to turn this small failure into a huge success.

PS.: if you see one of us, say “NO”, hehe, that’ll make us closer to the desired YES (#fuckstatistics)!

PS2.: if interested, we’ve listed below some of the other 35 participating start-ups. They did an amazing job and whether they got selected or otherwise, we are sure the experience was awesome for all of them. Who knows, we might meet again!

Insurtech
Travel
Disruption
Innovation
Accelerator

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Álvaro Sanz Pérez
Cleverea

Written by Álvaro Sanz Pérez

6 Followers
Editor for

Creating a neo-insurer from the gorund up at @Cleverea. Ex-strategy consultant at Oliver Wyman

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