Startup Business Conversations on Venture Café Thursday Gathering

I've had some great opportunities to meet with young minds on Venture Café Warsaw Foundation Thursday Gathering every time I pay my visit as an Ambassador. During our discussion we came across ideas that needed a head start to move forward in order to bring young entrepreneurs together and find focus on the right resources when it comes to funding and ideation. In this article, I am sharing few thoughts to encourage a bunch of young students looking to get started by engaging in their first start-up venture.

Delegation with Motivation

Delegation

Delegation of responsibilities can have a huge impact when it comes to working together as a team at any stage of business life-cycle. It's important to focus on thoughts and ideas on a much deeper level than what we already know as individuals. It's more imperative to listen to others than yourself. So that when we try to think about the style and pattern in which the plan must be implemented on the basis of the ideas shared during the brain storming sessions among the team members, we ourselves should sense a level of satisfaction on the amount of work that has been put together by different teams towards the overall productive outcome that was desired from the mission.

Motivation

Motivation goes a along way to make things work in the long run. Appreciating the team at regular intervals for their diligent work and rewarding them for their dedication can become a key aspect in keeping the team engaged with the goals. This will also help improve productivity and delivering the right results at the right time.

Mentorship

How warm and how cold is the water?

Taking a preliminary opinion and asking for proof-checks are some essential ways that are extremely welcoming when you are trying to check how warm and cold the water is before jumping into the pool. It's always good to select a sample-set and wait till you observe the reactions. And the one way to protect yourself from early harms and failures is to seek "Mentorship".

Seeking advice from mentors is always desirable and leaves ample of room for taking corrective measures before the impact of loss can destroy the vibes. In other words, ask the experts and people who've dealt with products or services that might be overlapping in some aspects and take their feedbacks.

Predominantly, the focus should be on the needs of customers who would benefit from your products and services.

Secondly, try to seek mentorship at an early stage. So that, you can know how best can all the resources be pooled-in together with the help of the mentor's experience.

How can we do that? We should be able to know the following:

a) Whom to get in touch with?

b) Who would be interested in the idea? and

c) How can we invite relevant stakeholder and network participations?

To make sure that the ideas people are working on shouldn't be parching for critical resources in the most essential stages, it's always advisable to get coached yourself.

Learn from failures and get back into the game

Be it a local market or having product and services launched across the globe. Firstly, we need to create a space to instill the habit of learning from our failures and encourage people to have more open conversations among team members and outside the boardrooms. Give room to discuss and learn from setbacks on both start-ups and corporate levels.

Secondly, learn to breathe and pause. Have enough time to sit down, relax and have a cup of coffee. Be receptive in identifying the scope for improvement, rejuvenation and revival.

• It starts with gathering information and sharing it with the right person, group or community and focus on the analysis of the previous outcomes
• Being open for constructive feedback and letting go of any disturbance caused due to miscommunication or indifferences within the team
• Realigning the sources and stages of investments that needs to get secured on the basis of the lessons learnt
• Be proactive to gain investor confidence and re-build the trust of the relevant stakeholders even if it takes a complete revamp in the development process
• Maintain the synergy within the teams and not lose hope.

In other words, there must be a thought on how to keep the momentum going by perpetuating the flow even after facing setbacks. Re-start from the stage when the product is redeveloped, get ready to let the product undergo few essential changes before it is been finally re-test and deployed.

Thirdly, create an environment where you can not only be mentored and absorbed in incubators but also be able to enhance your knowledge on how to fund your ideas in a manner that all responsibilities are carefully shared and distributed among the teams within the appropriate tasks and mandates set forth in achieving the goals.

Networking

Today attending networking events such as Venture Cafe' Thursday Gathering, we've seen many entrepreneurs, start-ups, job-seekers, students, business, professionals, and investors find the synergy that's evolving significantly in the business community; in what we call is getting the conversation started. Having gauging the momentum we've encountered a proliferating impact by being with people who have ideas and those that are ready to talk about it. And this way, we can get our ideas exchanged with the right people in he right place at the right time.

The Outcome

During this short conversation, I was able to propose the team from Spark*Gdańsk to come and host a few sessions on Venture Café Warsaw Foundation Thursday Gathering along with Marianna Pilecka who leads the student startup community in Gdansk.

Vote of Thanks

I'd like to thank Bartosz Urbanowicz , Artem Kazantsev Krystsina Rzheutskaya for being part of our discussion.

For more details on who we can assist, please visit the Venture Café Warsaw website and let us know if you want to host any events and get connected.