ihateit & The Founder Institute — Part II: Introducing Team Grey
From left to right: Mark Ashton from Autographic; Caroline Aguesse from LunchMe; (middle) Hilary Cao from SecondTake; (up in the middle) Matthew Bailey from Fresh Plate; (down in the middle) Nicolas Dao from ihateit; Mandar Max Jadhav; Abhi Bhatia from Inductd.
At the time of writing our previous post where I talked about the Founder Institute, and the reason ihateit joined the program, I didn’t realise the core benefit of FI. In a nutshell, the best benefit is the picture above: Team Grey. Though FI provides mentors who present a specific topic once a week (each Tuesday night in Sydney), to be honest, so far, I haven’t found those presentations extremely useful. Unless you’ve never read the Lean Startup, The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany, or if you’ve never heard about the Lean Canvas, then you might learn a lot. Otherwise, you’ll just be waiting until every one pitches, which is really when the fun begins. But Tuesday night is not the only time when you get to share or learn new interesting stuff.
Each FI Class is Broken Into Teams
During the first FI night, all the founders (38 in our case), are grouped into teams of 6 on average. The purpose of those teams is to help each other, and share experiences. On the first night, a president is elected by the team. The role of that president is to report to FI about the progress or any difficulties that his/her team is facing. In our case, we quickly elected Caroline as our president. Each team is supposed to gather twice a week outside of FI, and make sure that nobody is behind his/her assignment.
I Love Team Grey
Team Grey is by far the best thing that FI has offered so far. The assignments are not hard, but they require a LOT of work, and when you’re short on time, receiving a lot of mental support makes a huge difference. On top of that, it helps a lot to be surrounded by people from different professional backgrounds. That helps both in terms of professional networking, but also in terms of seeing your problems under a different light. And that’s without mentioning that they’re all ridiculously nice, driven, and passionate people. Being surrounded by such people makes you want to deliver and execute even faster. I finally understand why the Silicon Valley must be the best place to create a startup. It’s less about the resources and more about that crazy spirit.
Slack Is Amazing To Enjoy The Rest Of The Founders
My team is not an exception. On the first night, we created a Slack Team for all founders. The level of support and collaboration on those channels is just fantastic, and I highly recommend all future candidates who are reading those lines to use Slack.
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Part I: We’re In ← P R E V I O U S
N E X T → Part III: First Pitch
