Architect Gone Rogue - Zinc Week 14

For myself, friends, family, former colleagues, future colleagues, clients, collaborators, acquaintances, investors, interested bystanders picked up on the way and other generally nosey people...

This is the journey of an Architect gone rogue and trying something different.

Week 14

Having gotten the 'Love Island' part of the Zinc programme out of the way by matching with stayce cavanaugh in week 13, our - no longer 'my' - goal for week 14 was to plan for our stocktake with the Zinc team in week 15.

The stocktake is the part of the Zinc Venture Builder programme that gives us an opportunity to put what we've been working on in front of the Zinc team in order to gauge their opinion on whether or not we're onto something.

This translates into a pass or fail and detailed feedback about what risks they think exist and where they think our efforts should best be focussed moving forward. If it's bad, we just have to go away and try again ??

Tangibly, this meant distilling our ideas into a pitch deck ready for presentation. Stayce shared celebrated pitch decks of some well and lesser known companies as an example of what good looks like, and we were off and running...

Forward Planning

Concurrent to pitch planning, we started this week properly trying to build a community around us and developing a broader company strategy. Aware of the lack of a formal scientific research background between us, we started talking to other people who possess these skills in the relevant fields to see what we could learn and who might be up for joining us on our journey in some capacity.

Firstly, we spoke to former Harvard Healthy Buildings Program Associate Director and Zinc fellow Piers MacNaughton, ScD , who has most recently been working for smart window manufacturer View, Inc.

Closer to home and sporting a familiar looking Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London backdrop to our call, we met with Ian Hamilton , whose work sits at a fascinating intersection of energy, environment and health.

Aware that our Investment Committee is now only 2 months away, we also started reverse engineering that small space of time vs our aspirations for where we want to be by then. This led to a wide-ranging forward planning meeting agenda consisting of lots more user research, a full-loop prototype, a period of pilot testing, legals, banking nonsense and Stayce's visa juggling ???? -> ???? -> ???? -> ????

Health at Home / Home Health

We woke one morning this week to find that Donna Egan had shared a piece of eye popping research from 麦肯锡 focussed on the wellness market. In first place was Health at Home. Apparently "consumers want effective, data-driven, science-backed health and wellness solutions". This report validated a number of our hunches to a small degree, and gave us a real mid-week boost.

Up-skilling

Prior to joining the Zinc programme I knew that it would mark the beginning of another new, perhaps never ending, steep learning curve. In truth, the process thus far has been enlightening, fun and exciting. This week was probably the first time I sat down and repeatedly felt confused, which coincided well with Alex Whitton 's talk on tackling imposter syndrome. Perfect timing ??

One of the main challenges for me moving forward, albeit hopefully I'll learn quickly, is working with a tech-focussed and startup-seasoned software engineer. This comes with amazing learning opportunities and is exactly the scenario I had hoped to find myself in ahead of joining the Zinc programme, but it also comes in the medium of a completely different language at times. As a trivial example, this week I agreed to Geekbot daily standups in Slack, which apparently is similar to getting home from school and telling your mum what you did that day, only via a chatbot in a dedicated Slack channel. Probably very normal for those in certain roles or industries, but for the rest of us, who knew? ??♂?

A big thank you to Stayce for helping me with some of her product / engineering workflows, explaining what startup pace looks like and most importantly, helping me get pocket money out of Revolut ??

Other areas I began learning about / up-skilling myself in included trademark law, pitch practice (although I'm semi used to this from 5 years of architecture crits), creating MVPs and editing Inspect Element code to preview web pages, amongst others.

Thanks

To the 50+ of you who filled out our survey and sent direct messages, especially those who don't interact with these posts, but clearly read them.

In case you missed it, please take our Home Health survey here ??

Piers MacNaughton, ScD for the scoop on the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Healthy Buildings programme and chatting green buildings ??

Oli Barrett for tips on making things happen and finding serendipity ??

Hannah Abdel-Hadi , Bernadette Behnke and Paul Kirby for the office hours feedback ??

Ian Hamilton for introducing us to his work at the intersection of energy, environment and health at UCL Energy Institute ??

Mr Vikram V for the memories!

Kathryn Gordon for advice on our new relationships and having healthy conversations ??

Thought of the Week

Other Zinc VB7 Bloggers

Donna Egan - Late Career Entrepreneur here

Louise Thomas - Air Aware Labs here

Natalia Baltazar - A Founder in the Making here

Pavandeep Rai Ph.D - The Road to Entrepreneurship here

Marjo Palanee - HealthTech Founder's Story here