LISA Cohort 2 Top 10 Movers & Makers Pitchfest
LISA Top 10 Finalists :
EKGInsight | Humanity Arcade | Boxmix| AIMATCHHR | AMICUS| Propel | AgileMindsets | DataRight | CeresFood | BackfeedApp
presented in front of investors at LISA PitchFest on May 27th, 2021.
When game-changing Leaders and Innovators band together, they’re practically unstoppable. Nothing can cancel founders and the Stanford GSB LEAD community lifting one another up. After months of prep and planning, re-adjusting and re-planning, reviewing loads of incredible entries, and testing out all the affiliated gear, the wait is finally over. We are proud to announce the 10 finalists for our 2nd COHORT of Movers and Makers at LISA Pitchfest.
LISA Lead incubator and start-ups accelerator founded by Stanford GSB LEAD participants for the LEAD community is a hybrid platform for incubating ideas to MVP and scaling ventures globally. LISA also aims to empower the LEAD global community of disruptive technology and product founders to solve the pressing challenges of the world.
LISA Cohort 2 participants have been incubating their ideas to MVPs across 16 different industry categories from Stanford GSB LEAD and MSx, which is a significant increase from LISA previous cohort. After a thorough and rigorous review process lasted 4 and 1/2 months, the top 10 finalists were selected out of 25 +participants and went on a video pitch competition.
LISA Founding Partners — Deepti Pahwa, Edward Mundt, Hira Dangol, Pavel Azaleytski, Misha Bykov and Joe Anthony offer their heartfelt gratitude to the cohort members who were not selected for the Pitchfest. Limiting the field to 10 finalists was an agonizing process, given the quality of ideas and efforts made by all founders. LISA will continue to support their efforts in their entrepreneurial journey.
Talk to any of the 50+ founders at LISA and they will tell you how close they were to giving up, closing their doors, not taking their idea forward, or not winning a client or even knowing where to start. The list goes on. Some of them are repeat founders who have already experienced a failed venture before making it into LISA Incubation services. LISA's mission is to support and nurture stories from underrepresented founders, particularly those willing to be open about their journey.
The common thread in all our top 10 startups is that they are true collaborations with the communities they want to serve. We offered them design thinking facilitation, to ensure that they began with listening to the needs of the community and they aren’t prescriptive with their solutions based on unfounded stereotypes. LISA startups didn’t begin by making assumptions but listened intently and emphatically.
Program Details:
Keynote and Guest Speakers|
Keynote Speaker:
Carole Robin, Ph.D., Co-Founder, Leaders in Tech
Formerly Dorothy J King Lecturer & Director of Arbuckle Leadership Fellows Program, Stanford University Graduate School of Business
Investor Panel Judge Intro and PitchFest |
Investors:
Hem Suri, Founder and Managing Partner, Spark Growth Ventures
Manny Fernandez, Co-founder and CEO, DreamFunded
Raphaël Auwerkerken , Founder and Investor, Webgroup
Brittany Walker, Venture Capital Investor, CRV Venture
Karly Wentz, Investor , B Capital Group
Guest Speakers:
Marineh Lalikian, Director, Stanford GSB LEAD
Singari Seshadri, Head, Stanford Venture Studio
Davina Drabkin, General Manager, Stanford EmbarK
Carole Robin: Why someone should follow you?
For more than 30 years, I have taught leadership and have coached executives — and that is the question I have always invited them to sit in. Why would anyone want to follow you?
No matter how great your idea is, how fabulous your product market fit is. How solid your strategy and plan are, but if you don’t pay enough attention to the people part of your business as you’re growing it, you are unlikely to build something sustainable.
If you’ve decided to start up a company, you undoubtedly have a lot of passion for something you want to bring to the world, and I don’t think you can get there unless you learn how to bring other people along with you.
People do business with people. And yet I have seen many entrepreneurs forget that time and time again as they get caught up in certainly a lot of the other things that are important to make a start-up go.
Interpersonal skills and competences are a determinant of both professional and personal success. That is how you build strong functional relationships in which you can both feel more known. Be honest and tell the truth. Give feedback and resolve conflicts productively. Help learn and grow. Learning these skills helps you build deeper, more meaningful relationships at a time when you are likely to need them. Use emotions to connect and inspire, and learn how to build deeper and more functional relationships, especially with people that are different from you.
Marineh Lalikian: It has been almost one year since we launched a programme that would connect the entrepreneurs and LEADers one to another to help them move their ideas and their ventures forward.
It is pretty incredible to see how far the programme has come, how it blossoms, how it has grown to include Mx experts and how it serves our entrepreneurship community so well by leveraging what this community does best which is really empower one another by offering all of your experience, expertise and support.
I want acknowledge the hard work the founding team has put into Lisa over the past year and their continuing effort to drive forward and continuously develop and enhance the programme. I hope that all you that will be listening to the pitches today will be really encouraged by such great work.
Singari Seshadri: It is just amazing to see how you LISA as a start-up have managed to prototype this MVP. I think you can say you might have reached product market fit.
I think of entrepreneurship really like a journey. Sometimes the road is smooth, but there are usually lots of bumps in the road. However, all of you have embarked on that journey. So just focus on just the accomplishment of taking that first step and taking that leap. I hope that all of you reach the outcomes that you are hoping for, but even if things don’t pan out, just know you are already winners just by being here showing up today and taking that first step into entrepreneurship. You have built a muscle and a mindset that you can use in whatever you do.
Davina Drabkin: Years ago, while we were developing the Stanford Embark we were interviewing entrepreneurs and those in the entrepreneurial ecosystem — I spoke with an entrepreneur who was working in Pakistan. One of the questions we asked as part of our due diligence was: “What is your biggest mistake? The biggest failure that you have had on your entrepreneurial journey?” This gentleman took a moment to think, and he said: “I haven’t had any. Well, None of them were failures or mistakes. I have had lots of learning opportunities. I have had lots of feedback about things that didn’t go the way I thought they were gonna go and where I needed to change”.
That struck me as such. The embodiment of a growth mindset.
So keep that in mind, especially as you have one of those “This wasn’t at all what I thought was going to happen or what I wanted to happen”.
You are getting the gift of feedback and I am really excited to be here and see everything you have learned along this journey.
Hem Suri: I am a second-time VC founder and Managing Partner and am looking to democratize venture capital.
Spark Growth Ventures is based out of San Diego with a Pan American focus but also does select international investments. We typically come in at late seed to series A investments but opportunistically deploy all the way up to series D. Our typical first check is $500K-$2M but we can go all the way to $5M+ as our starter check for high conviction deals.
We do all sectors outside of pharma, biotech and life sciences and focus on capital efficient models and real problems looking for solutions. We officially launched 10 months ago and already have 10 companies in our portfolio and will add at least 5–6 new investments every year from hereon, beyond follow-ons as they come up.
We invest in people first — their value system, missions, personality traits and expertise. Strong alignment with the founding team is the biggest driver of our investment decisions. Founders are the center of our universe and I think entrepreneurship is the pinnacle of self actualization. So what you guys are doing and the experiences you will have as an entrepreneur will make you a richer, a better person and hopefully, a big contributor to society.
Manny Fernandez: I am a serial entrepreneur, Angel investor, founder of SF Angels Group, a network of angel investors to help tech entrepreneurs in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founding SF Angels members included early investors in Google and Paypal and a former partner of Ron Conway.
We initially started off as an equity crowdfunding site and now we’re just a traditional venture firm. Our checks are quite smaller in the range of 50 to 100,000 USD . My expertise is investing in real estate related companies but in a broader sense Dream Funded capital focusses on the Internet and software and that is what I am looking to reach out here.
Raphaël Auwerkerken: I’m a portfolio entrepreneur and also an Angel investor. I started off at 21 my first company and today I am at investment # 11. I am looking for motivated, special people trying to solve problems.
My passion is all about multi-sided platforms and specifically in growing niche markets in the pre- seed and seed stage — so pretty a good fit with LISA members who are now at MVP stage or or a little bit later.
One of my latest ventures is Drawify . I think it is very interesting to have a look at it for inspiring the pitches as Drawify presents another way of pitching business ideas: it is kind of drawing tool without having to draw anything.
Brittany Walker: I am an investor with CRV. CRV is an institutional early stage $600 million fund, based out of the Bay Area with an office on the East Coast in Boston as well. We focus largely on seed stage — some A and B investments in the enterprise SAS sector, as well as in some enterprise Fintech in healthcare. We are geographically focused in the United States, with some exposure to Europe and Israel.
Karly Wentz: I am an investor with the B Capital Group. B Capital was founded about six years ago in partnership with Boston Consulting Group. We are an institutional venture but have a close partnership with Boston Consulting Group, we work out of their offices and more importantly create relationships with their partners who are really valuable for our portfolio companies in industry expertise and relationships. We have offices in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, India and China. Half the team is in the US. The other half is overseas. We invest from seed all the way through pre IPO across three different funds. I have close relationships with the early stage fund as well focused on tech. I specifically cover enterprise software and I am a GSB alumni graduated a year ago. Not too long ago I was starting a company at the GSB, which was a peer to peer event apparel start-up, which is, as you can imagine, tough time getting COVID to be sharing dresses, but I’m really excited to hear your pitches today and hope I can be a resource guide board.
LEAD Incubator and Start-ups Accelerator (LISA)
More info on LISA — GSB-LEAD-LISA
Contributed by:
Martina Nicodemo, Deepti Pawha
Read more about LISA PitchFest 2021 Winners
