A long time ago, there was one very wise man who said that the best way to learn is to teach – “docendo discimus“. His name was Seneca and he lived in ancient Rome two thousand years ago. Have you ever realized how right he was? I have. And because of that, I’ve always been happy to help others. I can hardly say no when I’m invited to mentor startups at Startup Weekend or when someone just emails me and asks for an advice. I neither could say no to a friend of mine who runs a non-profit organization. Especially when he asked me to do two lectures about startups at the biggest university in my home country, Comenius University in Bratislava. It was a big challenge as well as an opportunity and I’m very thankful for that. Keep reading to learn what my lectures were about.
Startup Education Slovakia is a non-profit organization educating university students about startups and the possibilities a startup offers to students and recent graduates. Michal and his team have been doing great work with it as well as with all his other efforts with building the startup ecosystem in Slovakia. I was really happy that I could help. We have been talking about it a lot and realized that students and first time entrepreneurs need to see that investors are out there waiting for them. Those people need to believe that coming with new ideas and working on them gives them a real opportunity to find an investor and a chance to build their own company.
From Idea To Funding
We have therefore decided that I would share my own experience from fundraising for Mentegram. I wanted to give the students a simple playbook that maximizes their chances of getting their ideas funded. Not give yet another motivation speech, there are so many of them. I covered the whole journey that they are going to go through. From idea to funding.
The students were a great crowd and asked very good questions. They wanted to know what to do when they need a job to pay bills and also work on their startup. Many of them have trust issues and don’t talk about their startup idea before the product is built, they are scared that others are going to steal the idea. And of course, they didn’t know how to find investors and talk to them.
They have a long journey ahead. They are smart and I believe that a promising generation of people who are going to succeed is growing up. I, as well as other more experienced entrepreneurs are out there to help them and I can’t wait to see some success stories.
While preparing the lectures, I’ve also realized that having such a short and top level playbook that walks first time entrepreneurs through the whole process from the idea to funding would have helped me a lot when I had been fundraising for the first time. I’m not saying that nothing like that didn’t exist, but I didn’t find it back then. Therefore, I’ve decided to not to leave you behind and share my experience on this blog.
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When you do startups, you will have to get out of your comfort zone in order to succeed. So start now and leave a comment below and let me know what are you interested in the most.
