A dream coming true. Enyi’s LISA Journey. #14

I have always dreamt of starting my own company. I've had not one, but two valiant attempts that could easily qualify for the "How Not to Start a Business" manual. After my second fiasco, my family, in their most supportive tones, hinted that maybe I should stick to a job. But when you've got that itch for entrepreneurship, it's like a bug in your ear saying, "Remember that cool idea you haven't done anything about? Why not give it a go?" And this time, we lucked out with the perfect platform to help us along - Stanford LISA!

What an amazing journey it has been! The past three months have been exciting, eye-opening, and humbling. Stanford-LISA was founded by Deepti Pahwa, Edward Mundt, and others from the Stanford LEAD Community. It is an ecosystem for innovators and startup founders where ideas turn into real things, and small businesses grow into big ones. I have never met a group of people who are so selfless, giving, and invested in our success.

Every team that participates is assigned a mentor and a Design Thinking(DT) strategist. Just our luck, we landed Ron Lerma and Amy Pragel – basically like winning the startup jackpot without even buying a ticket! When they saw our first pitch they must have thought, "Yep, these rookies need some serious help." When we started, we were like kindergartners in the startup world. Ron and Amy helped us in defining the problem, user interviews, storytelling, identifying the market gap, value proposition, product placement, competition and polishing all the rough edges. They made sure that we got it right and at the end of 3 months, we felt like we had our Ph.D. in pitching.

LISA's main challenge? Squeeze your startup idea into a 3-minute pitch. Crazy, right? We are talking about ideas, gap and market analysis, solutions, competitive advantage, go-to-market strategy, investment ask, financial projections – oh, and sprinkle some storytelling magic. It's like fitting a giraffe into a VW Bug.

And while all teams were balancing this see-saw, we were also cheering each other on like teammates. We were sharing tips, helping with user interviews, and even matchmaking for customers and collaborations. It's like a startup reality show with a twist: everyone wins by pushing everyone else to greatness.

The Stanford Embark curriculum proved to be an invaluable asset, guiding us through the intricate process of applying essential concepts to our ideas. With meticulously crafted templates, illustrative questionnaires, and in-depth videos by Stanford professors, the curriculum made each learning phase very valuable.

The pitching sessions were flawlessly conducted, providing us with the platform to showcase our evolving ideas. All credit goes to Stanford-LISA members who volunteered their time. Thank you? Poornima Gopi , Andres F Marquez, Qadir Nawaz, Valerie Andrey, Chris Vogt, Julia Jaysan, Petya Rasheva

We were blessed to have Alina Adams, and Stephen Aporta as judges, who generously shared their insights and provided invaluable feedback. This experience made us realize that we were privileged and fortunate to have this set of amazing people rooting for us to succeed.

Being the winner of this cohort is a dream come true. Enyi is a solution that helps dementia patients and their caregivers detect cognitive decline, plan for the future, and?manage isolation and forgetfulness.?Our vision is to use technology to help people live with dignity and keep their memories alive. And thanks to Stanford-LISA, we've got just the perfect avenue to turn this vision into a resounding success.

Contributor to this edition:

Neelam D , Co-founder of Enyi-My Companion, Final PitchFest Winner of LISA Cohort 6