Tag Archives: Enterpreneur

Entrepreneurial Motivation

Posted by stuff4share on 09/04/2012 None comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the www.mituyuu.com team, formed by Carolina V. Rojas, Chandini Jeswani and Ángela M. Rojas

Embarking on your own business can have some very important advantages. You can choose your way and set your own pace with your own goals, this is the freedom of the entrepreneur; to make their own decisions based on their own judgments.

This takes you away from different pressures that sometimes generate a gap with the businesses objectives in the private sector. Having to always follow the boss´s decisions regardless of your opinion can be frustrating, making salary the only motivation. But at the time of launching a new business, especially at the beginning where money shines for its absence, the motivation to work on your ideas should be different. It must come from your ideology: to develop an idea according to your ideals. Facing a challenge you want to achieve, it is about a dream to fulfill.

Self-coaching is a booming issue that in some way tries to teach you how to think so that you are conscious of what makes you happy and helps you achieve your goals. In the business side it searches for ways to enhance your best skills and encourage you to develop your weaknesses. Apart from fashion therapies such as coaching, continuously reinforcing your interest in achieving the goals you set out is vital for the success of a project. Some methods that could be followed are related with the sources of motivation:

Think about the impact of the idea you want to develop, whether making money, making life easier for people or world peace, those will be your long term goals.
You already have a challenge for which to fight. Probably, as in climbing, when you face a great mountain at first you do not know where to begin. It’s time to split the final objective into well-defined small blocks that allow you to reach the top. This way you will define short term goals which are easier to plan and to achieve.
After that the effort will mark the result. Even if during working you only see the close results in time, think that your development will dictate whether or not you reach the goal. Plan your short term goals but work focusing on the final goal.

Although the road is slow and some times disconcerting………when you have an idea and a dream it is time to face fears, go ahead and think that everything is possible!

Tetuan Valley’s Chief WOWness officer featured on Radio 3 (RNE3)

Posted by fredrikhoel on 10/04/2011 None comments

On March 3rd, a familiar voice chimed through the radios across Spain as Alex, Tetuan Valley’s very own Chief WOWness officer, participated as an expert on Startups together with Emilio Julio Lorenzo, Professor at the Language and Information System department of UNED.

Did you know that a startup, by definition, has to be technology related?

A lot of us have a vague idea of what key-components a startup consist of, but the term has, as Alex explains a very specific definition.

“A startup is an interesting concept, that is used a lot in media but many people don’t know. A startup is made up by 4 concepts. The first one is, as many people are aware of, a newly started company, but what most people aren’t as aware of is that by definition it is a new company based on technology. It doesn’t mean that it has to be a computer company, it can be telecommunication, bio-technology, nano-technology, but it has to have a technological basis. The 3^rd concept is that it has to be, as the Americans call it; cutting edge. This means that one is working with a concept that implies a lot of risk. And finally, and maybe most importantly, the objective isn’t to create a business which happens with a lot of companies, the objective with a startup is to sell it, after 5-6 years. Fundamentally, the whole equation changes when you consider that in 5 to 6 years, your company will be sold because the idea isn’t to live by it. So there are those who failed. Google is a startup that failed, where they couldn’t sell it… I wish I could have failiures like that ”

Covering topics such as the amazing transformation of people that we’ve seen over the course of 6 weeks in Tetuan Valley Start Up School, the similarities and differences between being an entrepreneur in Spain vs. Europe, and University Spin-Offs, Alex delivers 30 minutes of diverse and interesting information about different aspects of the world of startups.

Check out the interview at http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/audios/uned/uned-el-mundo-de-las-startups-las-empresas-tecnologicas-del-futuro-02-03-11/1034236/

Proud to be there, lucky to have learned

Posted by labscope on 22/11/2010 2 comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the Labscope team, formed by José Ignacio Galarza, Carlos Hernando y José Antonio Leiva

The fact we hold in our daily life is far from the entrepreneurial way that some of us would like to experiment in our careers. Generally, in our jobs, they reward short term, the ideas thought for immediate results. “Everything is thought of here,” “is difficult to change the course of things that work” or “we already have the ideas too much clear to change now” are phrases that we face in the effort to change reality.

We met TetuanValley Startup School through www.todostartup.com a blog for entrepreneurs with awesome ideas and initiatives. altough it was not the only way and we had already heard of this initiative, if only for daring to mix a term as pure from Madrid and other such related to silicone. It so happened that at that we were starting to think in our own business idea and thought it would be interesting to experiment and learn all we could with them.

Particularly we decided not only to learn but to submit to his view all our possible ideas, alternatives and changes from Labscope, our project: every day we proposed a different view, with something fresh and different and we learned a lot more than we thought, improving and getting new ideas for the next time. Unfortunately, this strategy partly designed and partly run over by our daily led us not to move constructively every day and maybe turn the ideas too. The truth, we explored a good range of possibilities for our idea and we have submitted to all professionals with fresh knowledge and experience.

Have we learned? A lot! We learned how things happen, what to do to start and how to orchestrate a business idea for someone to understand it and be seduced. We were provided with practical tools for strategic and financial management and above all they brought the voice of experience, the voice of those who have been here before by their speeches or just be pure feedback to our proposals in form of painful lashes.

Getting back to pessimistic statements, there is one in particular that catches my attention from time to time: “The other day I had a great idea, but it caught me at work.” Well, for 6 weeks we have been able to share experiences with about 30 people who had an idea and the courage to face his reality to try to materialize it. We can not say for sure which ideas will mature and which will be forgotten, but all have been defended with great effort. Last weeks have been a hell for almost everyone. Now we can

look back and enjoy the time and lived experience or take the knowledge we’ve learned, lashes we have received and incorporated into our bags to move forward on the path by which we asked for help to @jmcobian, @abarrera, @joelovely and the other guys from Tetuan Valley.

In Labscope, we would like to use our last post to thank both the organizers of Tetuan Valley as colleagues who were there. Every comment, every idea, every criticism from TV, Kpad, Serendipio, Veloread, Control+Ad, Automatify, MyCompra, Locialia, Brucut, Magic Tales were all so welcome. Few times in life one has the feeling of being inside a real dynamic environment and generating ideas. This weeks we experienced one of them.

Thanks guys, hope to see you soon

Night coder

Posted by formacionamedida on 18/11/2010 None comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from formacionamedida team by Miquel Garcia.

Tetuan Valley Startup School has shown us how marvelous is to to be an entrepreneur. You will be an adventurer, an innovator, a superhero. I’m eager to finish Tetuan to tell my boss I’m leaving my job and starting a successful career as entrepreneur and I will be the next Mark Zuckenberg in a couple of months. I only need a few hundred of thousand dollars any VC will give me when they listen to my pitch.

Get real.

Maybe this is an option for people that just have finished college and have a McJob or no job at all. Maybe if you are already unemployed and you don’t have to make that decision because society did for you. But if you have a loan and/or kids and a safe pay, you will not leave your job anytime soon, and less in the days we are living. Loans aren’t paid with noodles. But I think there are alternatives. I’m only saying that before jumping the pool, be sure there is water.

My boss says that to be an entrepreneur you can earn much money, but the downside is that you are never sure if you will be paid at the end of the month. Rule one: in a couple only one of the members can work for himself, the other must stay with his/her safe salary. My boss is a former entrepreneur who decided many years ago to start a career as a corporate man, and while he put as many hours as he says he earn less money for hour than us, he has a life after work. My former boss was the opposite, a former worker that started his own business, and he had the big money, money to buy us an office or a new house for himself with cash.

I have always though that if you want to start your own business, stay on what you know. In the book El libro negro del emprendedor, Fernando Trias de Bes says that to assure the success of the entrepreneur is essential that he knew well the sector. I someone tells me that tomatoes are the next big thing, I can start a tomato selling shop, but I don’t know anything about tomatoes, and I will lose all my money and probably my health. But the next big thing are not tomatoes, are internet-based business (sorry tomato experts), and I know a couple of things about internet . For us that work more or less doing “web applications”, it’s very easy to make the jump, because we have already have much of the knowledge. And if you can design AND develop, you have much gained.

In his famous book Rich dad poor dad, Robert Kiyosaki says “keep your day job but start minding your own business”. In their new book Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson say: “You need less that you think: at first don’t buy anything not essential and don’t hire anyone. Don’t leave your job“. I find the story of Balsamiq particularly inspiring. He started the product as a second job. He has eventually started his own shop, and has a few employees now, but not before he had a successful product and earnings. He said in his blog:

So I started my “second job”: every night, after putting the baby to sleep, I would work for 4 hours in the kitchen (roughly 8pm to midnight). It’s amazing how much progress you can make, a little bit at the time, even when you are tired from a full day of work

If you work 20 hours a week you are investing on your business 1,3 * gross income / 2, that can be 25k – 30k a year depending on what you earn. Multiply this for each of the members. And you will not find a more motivated worker than yourself. And not only these hours count. When I read a news feed related to my business, learn a new design trick or witness a practice in my day job that “can be done better” but it’s not because of some organization / bureaucracy / asshole, and I think about how I would do it, I’m putting value in my business. In these first steps, my business is not an office, it’s a mindset. Also, one of the lessons I have learn on this school is that “don’t stay on your garage”. You have to show your work to the world, Is difficult to stay motivated if you cannot show your work to someone who can appreciate. Networking is crucial. I think people at Tetuan Valley do an amazing job for us wannabe-enterpreneurs in the path of seeing our dreams come true.

Before taking the red pill, I will prepare myself for the real world. My plan is leave my job only when my second-job earnings surpass my first-job ones. Meanwhile, I will stay with my Nescafé salary, and become a night coder.

Tips and tricks for the good entrepreneur: be memorable

Posted by rumor on 10/11/2010 None comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the Rumor team, formed by Xavier Burruezo & Sergi Consul.

Once you are out on the “real world“, looking for an opportunity, you can’t rely on a stellar résumé, great grades or a fantastic business idea to be successful out there. In today’s world, young, uninitiated and inexperienced entrepreneurs need to rely on something else, networking.

Networking is the art of using your contacts to generate other contacts; in other, more accurate words, it is the activity by which groups of like-minded people recognize, create, or act upon business opportunities (definition). If we keep it simple, it is the way a young entrepreneur has to find their dream career, a way to connect themselves to their dream job through people who can provide them a chance.

If you spend 10 minutes surfing the Internet, you will be able to find many blogs and sites (i.e. Wily Business blog) talking about the importance of communication, manners, and personal skills to succeed in personal and business meetings. They will also try to explain how much you can get by getting a nice presentation card and skills you need to develop to succeed in a networking business event (The Networking Gurus site).

To sum up, after some surfing and reading about this topic, we reached a simple article (Scott’s Allen Being Memorable article) that focuses on a key aspect you need if you want to succeed in networking: be memorable. In fact, when you are trying to do some networking in a business event, what you really want after the meeting is over is to be remembered by people you just met.

We have thought it would be a good for all of us, inexperienced (and not so inexperienced), entrepreneurs to take (at least) a quick look at:

Be distinctive. It would be a starting point, but which is the easy, simple way you first think of when you want to be remembered from a crowd of people? Some brightly-colored tie, a good cologne or even just impeccable grooming. “It’s not that you want to be identified for that, but anything that helps people separate you from the crowd…”.

Be fully present. “Be completely there”. Many people seem only to be “half-there”, that won’t help standing out. You need to listen well, respond promptly, maintain eye contact, … These are small pieces that would help people realize you were “fully there”.

Reinforce your keywords. Usually people can’t remember long descriptions or even that perfect pitch TetuanValley(@tetuanvalley) is teaching us how to get. We have to, al least, try to make people remember key things about us, like: name, company name, business, product, location. Does your project have an unusual name? What’s the story? What does it mean? (you can always make one up…), have it ready! Anything you say that helps reinforces one of the items mentioned before helps being more memorable.

So, a good CV isn’t enough, a revolutionary business idea isn’t either, networking isn’t everything…but good networking, a good CV and a good innovative business idea can get you through a nice entrepreneurship start. Just remember the key for good networking: be memorable.