Resilient Start-Up’s — 2021 and beyond. LISA Session: Resilient Start-ups from LISA — Mexicrowd success story
Me2We 2021 Nex2Us — Connecting LEADers to accelerate positive impact
March 9, 2021.
Me2We is a special 3-day annual event, volunteer driven, organized by and for alumni and participants from the Stanford Graduate School of Business LEAD program.
Stanford GSB supports the event and its management closely works with the organizing committee to plan and facilitate it. The event brings together a variety of thought leaders including renowned Stanford GSB faculty, key industry leaders, researchers, authors and artists.
Stanford LEAD is a year-long, fully online executive program from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
LEAD is designed for mid to senior level professionals who are looking to become principled and purposeful leaders of positive change in their organizations, industries, and the world. The program enrolls cohorts of executives from diverse personal and professional backgrounds, and to date has enrolled over 2,400 participants from 30+ industries and 95+ countries.
The LEAD Incubator and Startup Accelerator (LISA) is an ecosystem for Innovators and Start-ups founders. It is platform designed to incubate Ideas to Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and then to scale these ventures globally.
Fireside chat with Alvaro De Murga Pardo, Mexicrowd Hosted by Deepti Pawha; LISA Founding Partner.
Deepti : It has been an exciting journey for LISA that has grown so much in just 6 months time. Our first cohort that we started with Stanford Rebuilt incubated about 26 ideas from innovators and founders from all over the world with the belief that entrepreneurship and innovation is crucial to a more resilient and equitable post pandemic world.
In LISA Cohort 1 we encouraged to face those challenges that are around us and in particular those challenges that affect a larger part of the population and that have the opportunity for impact.
Mexicrowd, that went through LISA 10 weeks Innovation Discovery Sprint, emerged as a clear winner for us and that point in time. Faithful to its belief of giving back to the local community today it is disrupting the leasing sector in Mexico. LISA Cohort 1 winner raised so far 1.2 million USD in total through its leasing crowdfunding platform.
Alvaro De Murga Pardo is one of the founders and also a LEAD community member and we would like to talk with him about its entrepreneurship journey so far.
Alvaro: I have been in the leasing sector for 14 years now with our leasing company — Más Leasing — that made 3 securitizations and secured a line of credit with the IFC. We asked ourselves how we could do business differently, paying our clients a better rate putting aside the big financial institutions. This made sense from a social and economical point of view.
Originally, we wanted to disrupt the original funding system with our resources — which we did for some time — and then we decided to professionalize it through a crowdfunding tool. We wanted to change the dynamics of the economy by offering better rates to middle-low income class like workers, students, retired people, and — on the other side — to borrowers small and medium sized companies but also small banks in Mexico now that now joined the platform.
Borrow money from a bank is too costly — but at the same time people’s savings on the checking accounts pay nothing. We are a platform that links unattended savers and companies in search of a better alternative to maximize the productivity of their operation, through the use of assets and liquidity for working capital. We are disrupting the market; our competitive advantage is our market knowledge from the leasing company.
Stanford LEAD Program helped us in may ways. First of all, it helped us giving structure to our thinking and to develop a sound business plan without leaving any important detail that helped us to become a much stronger company. We also enjoyed the feedback and comments from professor, CFs, mentors and peers. We took Mexicrowd through the LEAD program. In almost all LEAD courses we used Mexicrowd example for my assignments, and this helped us to further develop and refine the original idea and make it more specific.
I lived my LISA program as a Master thesis. I put everything in a coherent and logical way. The mentorship program was always very helpful, I loved the showcases. The check-ins on a regular basis where extremely useful to refine our pitch and gaining confidence when talking about Mexicrowd business.
LISA was also a powerful community supporting each other — the Stanford Embark curriculum helped as to take a step by step journey and also helped us to become a more disruptive company.
With LISA you never feel alone as an entrepreneur — you make use of the ecosystem that LISA has , go step by step — you don’t have to aim for perfection — your first MVP will help to show your idea to the public . Take the value of all the design and mentorship sessions and have to do something bigger and greater that you would like to.
Deepti : As a start-up your journey can be very lonely — you have to be very resilient. What advice do you have?
Alvaro: I would advise to trust LISA process. Things in general do not go as fast as we would like — but you have to go step by step. Patience and resilience are one of the most important traits for an entrepreneur operating in a more and more competitive landscape. Trusting the process will allow us to be more resilient
More info on LISA — GSB-LEAD-LISA
Contributed by:
Martina Nicodemo, Deepti Pawha
Read other stories from LISA session at Me2We 2021 Nex2Us Stanford LEAD event :
Resilient Start-Ups — 2021 and beyond: How to include storytelling to reach the right audience
Resilient Start-Up’s — 2021 and beyond: Investing in resilience
