Resilient Start-Ups — 2021 and beyond. LISA Session: How to include storytelling to reach the right audience

LISA - LEAD Incubator & Startup Accelerator

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GSB-LEAD-LISA

6 min readMay 4, 2021

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 a platform designed to incubate Ideas to Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and then to scale these ventures globally.

LISA presented Resilient Startups at this year's Me2we 2021 Nex2us as one of the CORE participants. This year's theme being the belief that effective collaborations are the primary key to impact our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world and to build a new stronger inclusive common ethos. The event put together by an excellent and thoughtful committee — Luis Fernando Guidorzi, Philippe-Alexandre Grard, Daniel Radach, Angela Hands

The session from LISA comprised 3 parts —

Part 1: Investing in Resilience — LISA globally empowering ideas to incubation and identifying opportunities for acceleration. LISA’s value to the LEAD community — Hosted by Edward Mundt (LISA Founding Partner).

Part 2: Resilient Startups from LISA Cohort
Fireside Chat with Alvaro De Murga Pardo(LISA COHORT 1 Winner — Mexicrowd)
Hosted by Deepti Pahwa (Founding Partner LISA)

Featured Story on Mexicrowd

Mexicrowd were selected as winners for LISA’s first cohort,- and faithful to their belief of giving back to the local community today they are disrupting the leasing sector in Mexico. Their crowdfunding leasing platform reduces the gap between savers and investors providing better interest rates for both. In the early 9 months of operations, Mexicrowd connected 191 savers and founded 35 projects raising 1.2 million USD in total.

Part 3: Learn how to include storytelling to reach the right audience (Communicating with Impact) that was a Live session on pitching with Feedback during Stanford LEAD Me2We 2021 Nex2Us Event.

Moderated by Deepti Pawha and Edward Mundt, with Feedback by The Story Club

The Story Club is a Stanford LEAD community-driven platform that empowers prospective entrepreneurs with the ability to transform their investment pitches into authentic and compelling stories. Arun Sitaraman, Chetan Valia, Amitha Pulijala have been running for a very long time The Story Club successfully within the LEAD community.

Arun: We launched the Storyclub at Me2We2019. The tagline we used for our launch was:

“The best innovations may not rent but the best stories will always”.

We all love stories because they evoke emotional responses based on values that are embedded within them. Can anyone be a master storyteller? The answer is yes. Some people have those innate qualities to bring together key principles such as optimism, empathy, purpose, contextual awareness, humor and put them together to tell great stories — and some need to practice. Some of us were so impressed by Prof. Aaker’s LEAD “Innovation Playbook” course that the call to action was so big that we funded the Story Club as a platform for practicing and providing actionable feedback from a passionate CF panel to the participating LEAD Community.

The Story Club also provides key learning experiences in the form of keynote segments where we invite key industry leaders and we can all be listeners and learn from them.

Our contribution to LISA comes in a form of LISA story template that can evolve in a LISA specific blueprint — we have proposed a Critical Analytical Argument for Investment packaged under the theme:

‘Facts Tell, but Stories Sell’

Amitha: I joined LEAD in 2016 part of the Catalyst cohort. Professionally I practice my storytelling skills everyday and I also consult helping start-up's build compelling stories and develop thriving relationships with their clients.

Chetan: I am part of the Venturer cohort along with Arun. I enjoy and learn from storytelling rather than the feedback we get from the course facilitators who come to our storytelling sessions and the feedback that give. Structured feedback is very crucial in becoming a master storyteller, so those are the things I’m learning along our journey.

Libby Robinson: Backfeed + brings neuroscience backed real, actionable feedback for the whole enterprise

Corporate Employee feedback is broken, in the corporate world, you have got 1:1, 360s, Annual performance reviews, etc.

Neuroscience proves this.

Leading companies are moving away from this but not fast enough. Most interesting thing is that Corporates feedbacks haven’t changed for over years. Why is that?

It turns out that based on the neuroscience of how our brain responds to feedback — we have been doing feedback wrong in the organizations. FOREVER.

Creating a continuous flow of feedback BackFeed+ is a community platform that streamlines the peer review process and offers teams a safe space to request and provide feedback. Backfeed+ enhances employee engagement through regular check-ins that boosts performance and creates a culture of collaboration.

Yaroslav Shakula: aiMatchr is a AI-Powered CV ranking and screening interviews.

Volume hiring is a complicated process with the following risks:

Quality: Scouting personnel doesn’t have enough time to go thoroughly the excessive amount of candidates
Price: The more people a company needs to hire, the more scouting personnel a supplemental infrastructure it needs
Time: Speeding up the process implies again just spending more.
Mood: Scouting staff can experience a bad mood, or simply be reluctant to work efficiently at the current moment.
Bias: People tend to be biased which is still a problem in 2021 despite all the efforts to support diversity.

aiMatchr solution provides AI volume scouting and screening assistant. Fine-tuned for a particular job opening. This result in: 1) money benefits for the company — due to the lowered employee acquisition costs 2) increased recruitment staff morale — getting more time for meaningful work and 3) elimination of personal bias ensuring fairness and diversity of recruitment process

The session was brought together by LISA