Architect Gone Rogue - Zinc Week 9

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 9 ??

Matching ??

Week 9 at Zinc felt realer still as we gear up for the Christmas break and people sought to organise their affairs by populating the matching board at pace. It's been eye opening to see and hear the different strategies and attitudes towards the Love Island aspect of Zinc.

As the Venture Builder 7 Investment Committee is in March, there is a deadline to match with a cofounder by the end of January, in order to benefit from a sustained and focussed period of time working on the idea we will be taking to IC. No match? You're out! ??

Some have approached this element of the programme by finding a person and working with them on one idea or pivoting through a variety of them until things break, whilst at the other end of the spectrum some are going solo and progressing their burning idea until the right person comes along. Already there have been a couple of breakups, which have helped normalise what is a really weird aspect of the cohort's new profession lives ??

My approach has been to try and find common ground with the VB7 cohort members that I click with on multiple fronts, exploring ideas that compliment both of our skillsets and create working relationships with intrinsic motivation to work with enthusiasm and dynamism over a sustained period of time. There are a lot of factors to consider, and we're encouraged to use the 50 cofounder questions to check compatibility ????

At moments my approach, as well as tendency to be skeptical until I can see the big picture, has felt like it's caused me to miss the boat, with some people being taken 'off the market' and committing to others. At other times it feels sensible to take my time. Knowing myself, I would much rather dedicate myself to something I am passionate about and have held a long term interest in, than jump on a cash-led bandwagon for the sake of satisfying a short term need to succeed. Am I going to miss out because of it? Will I nail it and be someone else's last rather than their first? Only time will tell. I'm thankful that the process is not televised though.

Ideas Ideas Ideas ??

A big shoutout this week to Marianna Alshina and Torbj?rn Maaherra who pitched in short format the plant subscription service idea they've been working through. They did really well, but I'd imagine for most people this would be a nerve wracking component of the programme. With 5 years of architecture crits (critiques) under my belt, this seems pretty normal. The benefits are inviting comments and probing questions, forcing thoughtful responses, getting valuable suggestions of what to consider next and getting a few warm leads. I immediately could see the value in introducing 'The Gardeners' to Deborah Spencer of Planted Community .

Home Health

My first long 'working sprint' built off of the work stayce cavanaugh and I had done together previously, entailed more cofounder questions and a deeper dive into the subject of building intelligence and health. Having analysed the market, we concluded that the easiest route to product market fit would be a business targeted to commercial entities to improve workplace healthiness, mainly because a form of this is already being done. But who wants easy?

More enticing was the confluence of the strands we have been exploring for weeks and speculating on what a potential zero-to-one business could offer at the intersection of health and environment, in the notoriously competitive market that is home electronics and IoT devices. This also led to talk about whether or not our combined skillsets would be sufficient, and if not, if we considered a third person in the team, what would they need to do to be valuable enough to merit further company equity dilution.

Without giving much away, this working sprint and idea area has got me excited but also asking questions about scale, ambition and difficulty of the challenges ahead. Naturally the higher the ambition, the higher the difficulty ??

Wa$t￡ ?????

Concurrently, I can't shake the idea that waste is potentially big, impactful and circular business. Historically, the idea of processing waste 'on site' or 'at source' was not feasible. Emerging technologies, however, enabled by modernising investment appetite for hardware in the climate-tech space, may prove to be a game changer.

Guy Naor and I built off our user interviews with General People and University Hospital Southampton NHS FT amongst others, by deep diving into some new IP that may well facilitate said change.

Thanks

Hannah Abdel-Hadi for the advisory chat ????

Apoorva S. for an insightful conversation about IP ??

stayce cavanaugh for the perseverance and focussed long working sprint ??

Guy Naor for convincing me that science isn't always prohibitively hard ??

Thought of the Week