S1W12: Backwards to go forwards?

This week started of with a bit of a spaz attack…guilty as charged, I haven’t been going to my elective subject’s lectures the last few weeks because:

1. I get very little content knowledge or discussion out of the lecturers or my peers by going to the lectures and tutorials
2. They are from 6–9pm on a Wednesday evening where I just can’t concentrate
3. They are video-taped so I can listen to them later (if I can ever be bothered)

So when I got an email from our lecturer reminding us that we had an individual assignment due in two days time I kind of had a bit of panic attack. What assignment? When’s it due? Why did I not know about this? Crap, Crap, Crap. A perfect example of me making my own life more difficult than it has to be…and probably the laissez faire attitude I have to this subject in particular and ‘academics’ in general.

One thing you get from working on your own startup is a pretty good appreciation of the limits you can push yourself to and I am well within those limits in an academic environment (something which gives me more freedom to push myself into other areas). Plus you can’t learn anything meaningful about ‘Project and Change Management’ in an IT context without actually practicing it (which we’re not, we’re just talking about it). In any case, I figured out what needed to be done, devoted a day to completing it and got a good mark for it despite flouting the suggested word limit.

In between this on Monday I got the opportunity to sit in on a Social Traders meeting with one of my colleagues in Wade for their Social Enterprise Accelerator Crunch program. It was really interesting to ‘sit in’ and see how things are conducted through that program. For the most part I was just there as support but I learned a lot about how at least one of these accelerators look at supporting and testing entrepreneurs in their ideas. This particular meeting was partly a feedback session on ‘what was good, what was not etc’, the other part was a practice run of the final presentations due in a weeks time (where this girl gets the time and energy to do all these things who knows?). She did a great job as I knew she would.

In any case, Tuesday I went to a MAP event with a couple of Wader’s to see a couple of my friends from MAP who were presenting — Ivan Lim of Brosa and Kish from HIRED. It was awesome seeing my peers with their success, both of them were funded by VC’s now (Hired being an acqui-hire) and growing strongly. It was great to meet Ivan’s sister (the Lim’s are Bruneian so we have something in common there) and clearly they both come from a fantastic family with real life perspective and drive both being highly successful and ambitious achievers. Kish who I’ve spoken about previously is just a boss and was looking to potentially move to NYC to start a new startup adventure as he was already getting bored of HIRED. Introducing the Waders to these two guys was great, they both got a lot out of it, and I got a lot of enrichment from catching up with my friends and really just revive our friendships as it’s hard to keep in contact when you’re so busy as they both are.

Speaking of social, things were starting to tick down to the two main social events at the MCR which I’ve been the catalyst of and need to get my skates on for: Wade Drinks and Wade Sleep In. Both are really to encourage integration between the Waders and the rest of the graduate community through drinks and just spending time with one another in a social environment. The timing is not ideal for guests or for me as everything is starting to ramp up with exams and assignments coming thick and fast but it’s really only as fast as these things could have happened.

This is the first time I’ve had to organise something like this within the context of a larger organisation and it’s interesting having to firstly find out about and then jump through all the hoops to make sure everyone is protected and feels like they’ve been included. Following best practice is really good for me but needless to say when running a startup it’s unlikely you’re going to be doing a ‘risk register’ around possible hazards of having Friday drinks. However in order to satisfy the university I had a few meetings with the Vice Master to explain how the event was going to be run and its scale and he was incredibly enthusiastic and supportive of our work. The second part of all of this was organising the logistics of the events and working closely (thankfully) with the Chair of the MCR I learned the inner workings of funding and organising all the drinks, bins, beanbags, glassware, cleaning, food etc for the evenings and getting other people to help too.

Tying our Wade Drinks event which was on the Friday into a combined event with the MCR Cheap Eats event (also on the same day) was a masterstroke as it allowed us to de-risk the event and improve participation in the event. I think the event itself was a really great success with almost full participation from everyone at Wade and then a great event for the MCR afterwards. It was a real relief to get that event out of the way for me, I really can’t relax through these events unless everyone else is feeling comfortable and it’s ‘finished’ in totality. It just leaves the Wade Sleep In the next week to do and then all my event hosting and delivering duties will be over for the semester. Having someone with more experience and knowledge showing you the ropes and the heads up on all the important people and documentation which to satisfy really helps you enormously and I can’t thank the team on the MCR enough for making my life so much simpler with their help on that.

We also had a council meeting with the Master and Vice Master during the week which served as a good ‘check-in’ for the group, talking about issues that we were dealing with and just generally catching up as a wider team. Most of the discussion was around the Town Hall the week before and issues raised there and how we were going to deal with it. Mid-week we also got to visit the Corrs Chambers Westgarth offices in the city and got the tour of the space, invites to work from there and a basic 101 in a number of legal issues to do with raising money, employment etc. It was very high level and I think to someone who didn’t have any background in it it would be ‘interesting’ but I wanted them to go a lot deeper and really nut into the details which is where the real dangers are. They also introduced us to their new product suite Corrs Edge which is a really great start in terms of enhancing the eco-system with standardised legal documents which are helped prepared and tailored to your business. I’d been told a lot about this as they are my scholarship sponsors for the Master’s and it certainly is a very good product — something I wish I had access to when I first started my business as it would have saved me thousands and got me better results!

The big thing that got me to stop and take stock this week though was a meeting I had with David Mah from Kepler Analytics. I’d organised a chat with him many weeks before (which got somewhat hijacked for Garage Project work) and I finally got some one on one time with him talking about his business and Rozibaby. He really had some fantastic pearls of wisdom and he suggested that I start up Rozibaby again as all the problems I had were solvable (I know this) but that I had learned so much through that business and that industry and if I was going to move into a new space I’d have to do that all over again.

He gave me a new perspective and it was really the first time that I have considered looking at starting the business up again, prior to this point I was very much in the ‘no thanks, chapter closed’ camp. But he gave me some new ways of looking at it, other methods of getting started and working and I came out of our meeting quite excited. Not committed on doing it yet but it did set my mind whirling around a bit.

Chatting the David I was also able to get his opinion on what consitutes a strong foundation for building a good team and his opinion was that it boiled down to having 3 things:

all team members having strong and complementary technical skilssets and ability to work with each other

a clear shared vision towards the same goal

passion/desire to have the resilience and staying power to get through the tough times.

I will never forget those lines. It’s burned into my brain as I totally agree and it’s so simply articulated.

At the end of the week I also got to burn off some steam with some of the Ormond grads playing a intra-college mixed netball competition. We made it to the semi-finals as a rag tag group of grads who had never done anything together but had a heap of fun. Never mind that I was procrastinating from doing a Design Thinking video that was due the next day. This was much more important!