Resilient Start-Up’s — 2021 and beyond. LISA Session: Investing in resilience
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.
Investing in Resilience session is hosted by LISA Founding Partner Edward Mundt. He will be talking about LISA value to the LEAD community. Open to all current and past LEAD participants — LISA supports either to craft their own MVP’s or to serve as a mentor, partner, or contributor.
Edward Mundt: In early 2020, I helped facilitate a meeting between Capstone Projects and Silicon Valley Design Thinking (SVDT) Club. The goal of this meeting was trying to find ways for LEAD participants and graduates to stay engaged with the Programme and continue the journey of a long-life learning.
LISA resulted from bringing together ideas, concepts and experiences from Capstone Projects and Silicon Valley Design Thinking (SVDT) Club.
We asked the community, consulted with experts, brainstormed and identified the needs and gaps existed in the LEAD community. We then designed a solution that we can collectively think the community needs and can benefit from LISA.
LISA Cohort 1 was launched and fully validated through Stanford Rebuilt Program in summer 2020 as an accountability partner.
The core was expanded to include Deepti Pahwa and Hira Dangol and today incubated more than 60 ideas from the global Standard GSB LEAD and MSx community.
LISA had soon a Cohort with more than 30 ideas at different stages of start-ups lifecycles leveraging on the Stanford Embark platform and curriculum and Stanford Rebuilt Program itself.
Throughout our first cohort LISA acted as a trusted advisor and accountability partner with by-weekly showcases that were basically pitching practice sessions as well as regular office hours and this all featured inputs and advice from established entrepreneurs and VCs .
We had our first Podium X Series — which was curated and championed by Hira Dangol — it is our engagement platform that is focused on founders, VCs, industry thought leaders, and emerging tech. LISA first Cohort coordinated with the Pitch fest judged by VC firms and Stanford leadership.
Our collaboration was not limited only to Capstone Projects and Silicon Valley Design Thinking (SVDT) Club but included also The Story Club. We soon realized that we had great founders with amazon ideas that needed to transform their investment pitches into authentic and compelling stories.
Connecting LEADers and Accelerating positive impact stays and remains LISA mission together with bringing together current and former students together with and faculty, university leaders and the global start-ups community for the benefits of each others as well as the greater world.
Our expanded Cohort 2 curriculum not only features Stanford Embark core curriculum, but we also added several workshops and modules that includes financial model creation, legal and start-ups fundraising, as well as logo design and web development and hosting.
Thanks to Silicon Valley Design Thinking (SVDT) Club we have the support from Design Thinking veterans supporting the MVPs development. Once again, the Story Club is back to help founders voices and share their ideas.
LISA also recently released its first inhouse developed digital platform offering an end-to-end journey as well as all the services provided for our current cohort participants.
We also have a team of mentors off the LEAD community that are helping participants with their ideas. In addition to LISA´s founding partners, we got this Exec/Ops team of 11, we have more than 20 design facilitators, and we had over 42 external speakers sharing their insights.
Our current cohort of 23 founders is currently working on MVPs on 16 different idea categories.
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: Resilient Start-ups from LISA — Mexicrowd success story
