My CDL Experience: Meeting startups, and what I learned from entrepreneurs
This month I got the amazing opportunity to attend a Creative Destruction Lab session, where I got to meet tons of successful entrepreneurs and investors.
CDL gave me a unique chance to sit in on meeting with startup ventures as they gain the advice and funding needed to further their business, through experienced entrepreneurs and investors.
A bit about CDL
Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) is an organization that focuses on helping seed stage, scalable, innovative ventures solving problems with exponential technologies (such as Blockchain, AI, and Quantum Computing). CDL is a kind of marketplace for feedback, they help startups with feedback from experienced entrepreneurs and angel investors through a 10 month period. Ventures are also given the opportunity to raise capital, along with receiving mentors who are invested in their growth and can give ventures the support they need to achieve their objectives.
But wait… where do I tie in?
Well, CDL did something extraordinary, they opened up a possibility for young high school girls to sit in on these important interactions and learn from successful mentors!
CDL recognized the importance of youth in the future, and provided a chance for us to see the entrepreneurship world, and prepare for the changing work landscape!
I shadowed Eric Hixon (an Investor and General Partner at Mighty Capital) throughout the session and attended one on one meetings with the ventures. We had quick 20 min chats with multiple ventures and not just typical businesses, but ventures with innovative solutions. More specifically, ventures utilizing blockchain in combination with other exponential technologies!
They went over the progress of the venture, broke down challenges they were tackling, and determined three main objectives to focus on in the meetings.
Then we had a CDL wide highlight discussion of select ventures with multiple investors, and CDL associates. Where innovative ideas leveraging emerging technologies are evaluated, and the best forward course for the business determined by a combination of inputs from various experienced investors.
Afterward, we gathered in our specific streams (blockchain) and discuss each of the ventures, re-align objectives, and re-evaluate if the venture can make it to the next stage.
Points to be successful
Here are a few common patterns I noticed…
Startup Advice
Starting Out
- Find a focus, such as an opportunity for growth or a pain point and focus on it!
- Being focused on providing value will help open doors!
- Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there, make your minimum viable product!
- Know your target audience — ideally, you're a part of it, so that you can use yourself as a starting point and grow from there!
Being Flexible and Learning from Failure
- Be open to feedback and improvement, seek advice and data in order to adjust to needs and provide more value.
- Believe in your mission and what your trying to do, but be open to new input! Your product can never be perfect but will get better as it develops over iterations!
- Products can have different applications. Not all companies today started out offering the same thing they do now, they adjusted over iterations and saw a new perspective. The technology that you develop can have different usages in a separate field!
- Failure is one of the best ways to learn, it tells you which path not to take and points you in a new direction!
Thinking Long Term — Scalability
- Scalability is an important aspect to consider! A strong business model has a large potential for scalability. Look years into the future when making decisions to reduce the risk of value loss when scaling. (e.g, hosting everything on Amazon servers only to be paying a huge percentage of revenue to Amazon)
- Be aware of the trends in the world around you. The world is changing at a faster pace than ever before. Leveraging emerging technologies to your advantage will help you get ahead!
Communication Advice
- When communicating be concise and clear, don’t waste time!
- Do your research beforehand, be realistic and clear when deciding your objectives!
- The best discussions covered both the technical and business side while being engaging and through with the content.
- Be genuine, authentic, and open to feedback. Remember you have room to grow!
- Show your passion for the topic!
The Importance of the Team
- Teamwork is crucial — ideas can change, but good team dynamics are irreplaceable!
- Many teams had a good balance of business and technical expertise. They choose members that hold the same core values, and believed in what the venture was doing, while also bringing different specializations in different fields.
Having a Growth Mindset
- Life long learners are valuable — they hold a growth mindset and are always open to learning and adapting!
- Antifragility — better than just resilience, you need to be able to learn and bounce back from harsh feedback! Being openminded to good suggestions and implementing them, a dismissive attitude kills growth.
- Be open to new ideas, demonstrate growth, and a willingness to grind and get work done!
Interesting startups
All the companies were implementing emerging technologies in interesting and innovative ways, but a few specific companies really stood out to me! Alexsei is a company combining the fields of AI and Law, lawyers and legal professionals can simply ask Alexsei precise questions, and receive precise legal answers in memo format.
Another venture names Grassland processes camera feed data from 4K cameras to create 4D (3 dimensions of space, 1 dimension of time) Physical Continuity Graphs. Using the tracking and feature identification aspects of computer vision, this technology had various applications, especially in recent times.
In the field of healthcare, we could use the technology to monitor disease transmission and set thresholds and probabilities for obtaining the disease based on monitoring contact.
In Australian fires, the technology can notify firefights where citizens are and help them to safety using the virtual map.
Valuable Advice / Key Takeaways
- When you have an opportunity to try new things and connect with new people, go for it! In most cases, the worst that could happen is the current status quo. Just from the potential value, you could possibly receive it’s a better choice to simply start and do it!
- Do your background research before conversations. Set out the purpose of the conversation, and have a framework or guide of where you want the conversation to go such as, what points to cover, and what the end outcome should be. Make sure both of you are getting value out of the conversation, so you’re not just wasting time!
- There’s always room to improve! Be careful of who to listen to, its a fine line of knowing which aspects to change and which to keep. A combination of being open to feedback but also believing in what your doing will help you improve!
- Aiming for “omniscience”, always be open to learning more and becoming knowledgeable in valuable areas. Teams should have a balance of business and technical challenge, look for people who specialize in different areas than you, and grow from their knowledge!
Overall, I really enjoyed and learned lots from my CDL experience!
Thank you to CDL for the chance to learn firsthand about entrepreneurship, and connect with interesting people working on all kinds of innovations!
I loved attending this program, and I hope you enjoyed learning about my experience! I encourage you to try out CDL and if you attended CDL as well I’d love to hear about your experiences!
