Week 3 of Being a Founder

The Zinc Venture Builder is a full-time, 12-month programme where a cohort of 70 from across the globe unite in founding teams to build startups that tackle the biggest social challenges. This was our last week of bootcamp and marked the transition into the next 5 months of venture building.

Highlights from Week 3 ??

This week we had a mixture of talks and workshops, and then on Thursday began structured sprints. For the next 5 months, we’ll mostly have ownership over our time - choosing who to sprint with when and gradually we’ll see people begin to choose their cofounders (one or maybe two!)

My highlights this week were as follows:

Getting to know people ??

This has been a highlight throughout the programme but this week especially has allowed us more time to really get to know people. The residential last week I think sped up this process and now with more flexibility of time, drinks and coffees have felt more relaxed.

Community Building P2P Session ??

I’m not sure you’ve ever seen someone so ecstatic to talk about community building?

I really loved sharing my experience of building communities with the cohort. I talked about the two ways I’ve built communities; content-focused and people-focused. DM if you’d like the slides ??

Potential Customer Interviews ??

Despite no solutions being fully formed, we’ve started involving potential users in our building process. Specifically, this means working to ensure the problems we think exist, actually do exist. The small number of user interviews we’ve done so far have been incredibly valuable and are ensuring we’re keeping our minds open. Looking forward to doing more of this in the coming weeks. 

Quote of the Week from Paul Kirby ??

(and Reed Hastings)

“Netflix CEO famously said that his biggest competitor was sleep”

I put this as the quote of the week because 1) It’s insightful and useful and 2) it feels that currently in this process my main competitor is sleep ??

Thoughts from Week 3 ??

On Wednesday of this week, everyone shared their “Founder Strategies” which broke down into the following:

• Problems you’re looking to solve
• What you bring
• What you’re looking for

This helped me clarify my own thoughts but also ensured you knew everyone who had some overlap with you - there were lots of people interested in working on similar problems and I’m looking forward to speaking to them this week.

Something on my mind this week, however, is… am I (mentally) narrowing too soon?

Last week I started working on a solution for the future of community and this week have spent some time validating the problems in community building. This has been really invigorating but the founder strategy presentations were a reminder of all the other problems I could potentially tackle. On the other hand, it’s been repeatedly emphasised to us that Founder - Market fit is important. As you can tell, I’ve been confused! ???♀?

On a similar note, I’m finding myself regularly questioning the problems I’m drawn to - “is this what’s comfortable or is this actually what I should be working on?” - I think at this stage, questioning and experimenting is good (and normal) but the aim is to be a little clearer on the problems I want to solve next week.

Finally, I think running on mostly adrenaline (and coffee) has been starting to catch up with me and on Thursday this week I had to go home early for some rest. I ended up having a little lie down in Victoria Park to enjoy some fresh air and sunshine (see below). I’m glad to have had the bank holiday this week and after a lot of sleep and good food, I’m feeling a little perkier ahead of next week.

A big part of this process is learning to find balance in a drastically different lifestyle. At The Funding Crowd, the majority of my day was executing alone but now most of my day is creative work and problem-solving with others. I’ll be working on improving my daily schedule and incorporating better rest to make sure I keep bringing the energy to the office ??

How You Can Help ??

I’m focusing increasingly on tools for community building, information discovery, and network discovery online. However, I am sprinting this week in some different areas so my “how you can help” this week is a plea to help open my mind!

What do you think I should be working on? DMs are open!

Thank Yous for Week 3 ??

• Big thank you to Maddy Bergen for joining us at the Zinc Offices and providing a huge amount of insight on community building for Web 3
• Bev for the conversation and for buying the babaganoush for our catch up on Tuesday ??
• Huge thank you to Ashley Recanati (Author of AI Battle Royale: How to Protect your Job from Disruption) for providing his thoughts on key problems to tackle - highly recommend his book!
• Those who attended the Community Building 101 session! Lots of amazing questions and good discussions after the session
• Sarah for being my first sprinting buddy - was the best start to sprinting!
• Thank you Kyrill for being an interviewee (despite sprinting at the same time) - you rule ??

What’s Coming Up ??

Next week represents the first week of unstructured venture-building time. How we approach these next few weeks is now in our hands. Some are choosing not to sprint but instead do their own desk research. Others are doing coffees as opposed to sprints and others are full-on sprinting. I’m currently doing a mix of coffees and sprints but I expect each week will bring new plans and priorities. As one member of the previous Zinc cohort has been quoted:

"The start is fine, the end is fine, this is now the Hunger Games”