Perfecting your pivot

On Thursday night Prepare 4 VC hosted a workshop on "perfecting your pivot" at Venture Café Cambridge . The workshop was led by Jason Kraus and Rhoda Serafim with an audience of entrepreneurs, startup community members and several investors. We're excited to share content and lessons from the event as well as opportunities to follow up and engage further.

As the session kicked off, Jason shared his experiences going through venture pivots of his own in a previous fintech that started in the #crowdfunding space and ended in the #crypto and #fintech markets, as well as touching on the experiences of working with dozens of startups through his advisory and investment endeavors that have gone through pivots large and small to get to where they needed to be. He also shared the pivot stories of companies like Instagram , Pinterest , Slack and Twitch that all started out on vastly different pathways before finding their niche and unique value proposition they were able to hone in on.

Rhoda continued the discussion diving into the strategies and elements of recognizing the need, desire and opportunity to change. She discussed applying the scientific method to your venture journey and thinking about your solution from a critical point of view to falsify your hypothesis.

Rhoda and Jason led the audience to take a few minutes and discuss their solutions for their startups with their neighbors, looking at the ultimate goal of uncovering the pushback on their hypothesis. The goal, if you can prove your hypothesis is wrong, you may have an opportunity to pivot and change to a direction that has the potential to be right. If not, it is time to continue on the path and keep testing as you gain traction with your venture.

The group came together to help each other with the exercise. From medical startups to technology ventures and food and beverage ventures, there was a diverse array of startups and several shared their findings with the group as we gave feedback and pushed deeper.

The presentation continued with examples from more ventures that have pivoted and how they applied the opportunities they found for future success. It wrapped up with several calls to action to continue engaging and learning from Prepare 4 VC and Boston New Technology (BNT) events and opportunities. Check out the deck above and the form below to engage in opportunities like Prepare 4 VC Breakthrough Program, Prepare 4 VC Catalyst Program, Boston New Technology Precision Pitch Training, Flunk it or Pivot Program and Techstars Startup Weekend Boston