Posted by Nast Marrero on 11/01/2012
Howdy guys,
I know I’m one month late with this post, but I had an epic fight against the video codecs and Vimeo. But I’m a stubborn jedi… therefore I won!
In this season finale session Cobi told us about some critical stuff to keep in mind for your startup, your career as an entrepreneur and for live: the startup mantra, how to optimize your work flow by maximizing not value, not revenue, but happiness.
Later on Cobi touched a subject I find of utmost interest: the shared valued mindset. The traditional business school mantra is: “the ultimate goal for a business is to maximize shareholders’ value”, but even Michael Porter (the Biz Management Guru and Harvard Professor) is working lately in another model to analyze organizations mission. By the Shared Value model, Porter implies that the ultimate goal of any organization is to “maximize stakeholders’ value”. Stakeholders is a much wider concept than shareholders, and it implies that companies should focus on create multilevel value for shareholder (of course) but also for their community and their environment. But enough with the biz school preaching!
Our rockstar mentor for the day was…
Jose Cabiedes (do I really need to tell you who he is?!), he’s one of the most active biz-angels in Spain. Gave a very interesting speech on how his lean venture capital fund works and what are the key issues entrepreneurs shall keep in mind when they’re raising money. After his speech he engaged in a very interesting Q&A with our tetuanees and then… Startup Pizza time.
Jose Cabiedes grabbed our clown hammer when he started the Q&A and was all the time helping him self from throwing a blow to the people seating in the first row… hehe
Peaching Preaching Pitching!
But the real rockstars here are our entrepreneurs. Once again they jump to the stage gave great pitches… Absolutely impressive how far these guys have made it in just 6 weeks. We even had an awesome surprise when TooRisk dropped they had raised founding to launch…
Referama even made a really funny prototype. Pen and paper one for everyone of us.
Guys, thank you for letting contribute to these amazing stories you are writing in the Book of Life.
Posted by Nast Marrero on 05/12/2011
Good morning, Tetuan!
Catching up with Tetuan Valley Startup School Vth Edition’s videos and materials. Here we are with the 4th edition. In this session we had Nathan Ryan as starring-guest-mentor, our own American superhero Katelyn Melan gave the Tetuan Lecture and facilitated the event together with me.
Kately’s lecture
K’s lecture versed on online marketing, how to use the digital platforms and tools, how to create value and build some traction around the founders’ personal brand and the startup’s. The second topic were some 101 pills on lean development process.
Nathan’s hacks
In the second part of the session, Nathan Ryan talked on development and how important it is for an entrepreneurial process to build code to be as pragmatic as posible. Playing with thousand variables that could go wrong in the different possible scenarios and building a god-mode app is imposible and it consumes the most valuable of your resources: time. If you’re facing some importan coding decisions, invest your time in the best possible way and watch this talk by Nathan.
We had with us one of our sponsor, David Bastida, founder of YoRespondo.com. David introduced in Spanish their useful service of virtual secretaries to our teams.
Pitches
Al last but not least we had 9 pitches from the tetuan teams. The missing one was Mashpan. They were working hard on IE Venture Day Competition.
And her you can access to the slideshare of our presentation:
PS: Uploading week 5 (30% complete)
Posted by P2P Solutions on 02/12/2011
These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Fall edition. This post is written by the P2PLending team, formed by by María del Carmen Mochón, Enrique Cárcamo and Raúl Sánchez.
Is there any humanity left in the finance industry?
Is our society so alienated when it comes to business, that we cannot see that in the end it all comes to people? Social entrepreneurship spirit, give us faith to believe there is still a drop of humanity when money is in stake.
As the organization Ashoka defines; “Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.”
To this definition, I would add that these entrepreneurs seek the success of their own business, this means; making money!! But they do it through a social benefit for the community. Money and humanity fit in the same sentence in these activities. When thinking of every single business, from the smallest shop, to the biggest corporation, we must not forget that there is always a person behind decisions, families behind that person and society behind those families. If we all realize this, we can start believing in change, and change will come to us.
Through our favorite example of social businessman, we want to encourage all those people with an entrepreneur heart, to do not forget their human nature.
MuhamadYunus is the founder of the Grammen Bank – the Bank of the poor. He founded Microfinance activities, which until this moment has proved to be the most efficient way to fight against poverty.
Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to those in poverty designed to spur entrepreneurship. These individuals lack collateral, steady employment and a verifiable credit history and therefore cannot meet even the most minimal qualifications to gain access to traditional credit. Microcredit is a part of microfinance, which is the provision of a wider range of financial services to the very poor.
The main lessons we have learned out of this Peace Nobel Prize banker are:
- Charity is not bad, but providing poor with the tools for development is what will make them become self-sufficient and escape from their situation.
- Business can have a human face, making your entrepreneur initiative profitable is not in dispute with making a social benefit.
- Everyone can make a difference, and one by one we can all make changes happen.
Posted by Nast Marrero on 28/11/2011
Good Morning, Tetuan! We’ve been working hard these weeks on a lot of different goodies and projects for you guys. And Vimeo have been walking on my nerves, and holding me back from uploading the Tetuan Valley Startup School’s Vth edition. But I won, a battle at least. I’ll briefly comment on session 2.
Session 2
We had a thrilling and drilling 2nd session at #tvssv. Primus inter pares, Luis Rivera taught the first session of Statup Finance 101. This session explains the use of Business Plans, what are they meant for and how to get the best out of them. Our mentor session for the night was lead by Guillermo Vicandi, founder of Arbitratio and Tetuan Valley Alumni. Guillermo cover some very interesting concepts on how to incorporate a startup and some of the key issues entrepreneurs must keep in mind to stay away from legal trouble.
