The 5 Most Valuable Tools Next 36 Gave Me
Sage Franch is Co-Founder and CTO of Crescendo — Inclusive Workplaces, a 2018 Next36 company. Crescendo is a training chatbot for diversity and inclusion that detects unconscious bias in workplace communication.
When I was in undergrad, I started a company making pre-packaged recipes for 3D food printers. It failed. Big time.
I’ve always had a passion for creation, and I think that’s why I ended up in computer science; I like to create things that other people use. That first startup of mine wasn’t a tech business, but it was a great experiment in innovation and market validation (or, in that case, invalidation), and it led me to discovering the Next 36. When I first saw the program I knew right away it was for me, but it wasn’t until two years later that I ended up applying.
Over the last eight months, I’ve been on an incredible journey. This January, Next 36 took me out of my corporate job and gave me a safe environment in which to start my company, Crescendo. Through this program Crescendo has gone from a back-of-the-napkin idea to an accelerator-backed company with two employees, and because of the NEXT tools and community we’ve been able to grow faster and stronger. It’s impossible to compress the breadth of learning and development I experienced through Next 36 into one single blog post, so I’ll share the 5 most valuable tools Next 36 gave me instead.
1. Amazing co-founders
The #1 most repeated piece of entrepreneurial advice I’ve received is to find a well-balanced and trustworthy team, because poor team dynamic is the leading cause of startup failure.
Going in to Next 36, all I had was an idea and my technical skillset. I knew I needed to find non-technical co-founders, because I could build the tech myself but had no idea how to wrap it in a venture and sell it. Usually entrepreneurs know each other for years before co-founding ventures together, but in my case I met my co-founders at the Next 36 Selection Weekend. Stefan found me through the candidate Slack channel — after a series of brainstorming phone calls we decided to go in to the selection process as co-founders. By the end of the weekend we’d met our third co-founder, Tuba, and around a table at the hotel is where we first brainstormed Crescendo.
Crescendo is a tool for personalized diversity and inclusion training in Slack. Company leaders care about diversity and inclusion, but there’s no real way for them to measure it — this is where Crescendo comes in. Our tool learns about employees over time and sends them bite-sized content every week to help them empathize with their peers who have different life experiences. The goal is to help people discover and learn about their own unconscious biases so that we can make the working world welcoming for everyone.
It was a big risk to pick a founding team within a few days of meeting each other, but we got really lucky. Our dynamic works because of a few key factors: we all share the same values, our goals align, our skillsets are complimentary, and we have a lot of trust and mutual respect. When all the Next 36 entrepreneurs moved in to grad student housing together, we decided as a team to live in the same unit, which gave us the environment to get to know each other not just as co-founders, but as friends. Now even after Next 36 is done, we’re still living together at our new place in Montreal.
2. Recipes for venture formation and growth
There is no single formula for a successful startup, at least not one that exists without the magic elements of good timing and a strong network. However, there are many smaller recipes for the building blocks of startups. Through the fast-paced classroom environment of Next 36, I learned a lot of these recipes. Professor Ramana Nanda from Harvard Business School (HBS)taught us how to negotiate VC term sheets; University of Toronto Professor Mara Lederman taught us how to experiment and make data-driven decisions, and HBS Professor Hong Luo showed us how to evaluate customer willingness and bake value capture into our products.
Coming from a technical background, I had very little prior exposure to these concepts, but coming out of the Next 36 I feel very comfortable using these recipes day to day and even now I often return to my sketchbook of class notes.
3. Honest mentors
As Next 36 entrepreneurs, we have access to an amazing network within the Canadian startup ecosystem. When Team Crescendo was preparing for our first investor pitch, we cold-called about a dozen people in the network, who listened to our pitch over the phone and gave us critical feedback on how to improve it based on their own experiences on both sides of the table.
The support system within this network is so powerful, and what’s really special about this community is how willing people are to share their vulnerabilities and failures as well as their successes. As an early-stage entrepreneur, the most valuable stories you hear aren’t the ones where everything went right, but the ones where challenges had to be overcome. Throughout the summer, NEXT invited many speakers to address the cohorts, and I was surprised by how many of them — Jordan Banks, Kirk Simpson, and Mike Serbinis, to name a few — shared their personal experiences and let us in on their realities.
4. A safe space to fail
Ask any veteran of the Next 36 to share a memory and you’re almost certain to hear a story about Reza Satchu, the high-powered entrepreneur and co-founder of NEXT Canada. Of all the people I met through NEXT, Reza had the most impact on my approach to entrepreneurship, because what he teaches is a way of thinking. Next 36 is famously characterized by the pressure cooker environment of his classes, and this was what I was most looking forward to before the program started — let me assure you, it does not disappoint.
From the first day of class it was clear that we would be challenged, put on the spot and forced to step outside our comfort zones. Reza created an environment where we could get used to taking risks in the safety of the classroom, so now we are better prepared when selling to real customers and pitching to VCs. His classes are a mix of real-world cases, guest speakers, and personal anecdotes from his own experiences growing his four successful ventures, and through all these components we learned how to evaluate opportunities strategically and make decisions with imperfect information.
5. Lifelong friends
Coming in to the Next 36 I expected the cohort to be a good networking environment, but I didn’t expect to make some of the best friends I’ve ever had. Entrepreneurship can be a lonely and isolating experience, especially for those who don’t have a network of fellow entrepreneurs to share successes and failures with. However, living with the other Next 36 entrepreneurs, we always had people to talk to who were also going through the startup rollercoaster and facing a lot of the same challenges at the same time. That’s when I realized that being part of the Next 36 means being part of an entrepreneurial family.
After Next 36, Team Crescendo moved to Montreal to be part of the inaugural cohort of Techstars Montreal AI! Next 36 was where it all began, and I will be forever grateful to have had the experience of being a Next 36 entrepreneur.
