About the Ambassadors of Entrepreneurship Program
How did you find the position?
I was working on a similar project in my apartment when a friend of my roommate mentioned that his friends at MIT had very similar ideas to mine. A couple of weeks after I met the founders in Boston, the rest is history.
What was your motivation for working at a start-up this summer?
This is the real deal. No coffee chats involved.
What advice would you give to students interested in working at a start-up this summer?
Start looking early and believe on what you are doing is going to create a big change.
About the Summer Experience
Evidente.com is intended to be the first trading platform of binary political and financial events for Latin-American.
I believe we all have that “little voice” or entrepreneur spirit deep within ourselves and it requires just the right amount of energy, the right positioning (in the widest sense of the word) and a bit of irrationality (and luck) to jump into one of the most gratifying experience one could ever have. Of course it is always hard to get those three factors aligned but if you have at least two of those in place you are ready to go.
Reflecting on my summer experience I think is worthwhile sharing; a) how I got started, what made me jump on board the team of Evidente and b) the challenges I lived through the summer that made me understand what entrepreneurship really requires.
So, first things first. Ever since my years as a windsurfer, I’ve always had that irrational part on me, so I guess it was kind of easy to push on a project I had been working personally (on my free time) for almost a year before starting my MBA at Wharton. The ideas I developed and the research on trading mechanisms I started while I was working (I worked for three years in the energy sector in Mexico, which is 100% state owned, so I considered my self a boring public sector bureaucrat) got me into thinking the array of possibilities and opportunities that could be exploited just by implementing these concepts with the right tools and partners in an untapped market, in this case the one I knew best, the Latin-American market.
Finding a good idea is one thing (that anyone of us can do while reading the morning paper), believing it is a really good idea is another very different thing and finally convincing someone else that it is an idea worth investing in, is worlds apart. In the case of Evidente, I was lucky enough to speed through that process. I liked the idea and almost immediately after starting the fall semester of 2008 at Wharton I found the right people that had fallen for that same initiative and had already gotten some money into it.
While many summer internships are often lined up in the early winter, startups often have different mechanics to attract talent and sometimes they do not operate like a normal HR department would. My case reflects pure luck as I managed to meet the founders of Evidente (two MBA’s from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a software engineer from Venezuela) in the right moment and demonstrated that my previous research on trading mechanisms was what the company needed in order to move to the next level.
Reflecting on my decision, I could break it up into four aspects that allowed me to feel comfortable about not going to any Employer Information Sessions and gave me more much time to focus on the start-up. First, I had measured that a market existed for the type of service we were going to deliver. Second, I knew (and I had done the research) that the type of product was relatively new and could be the first of its kind (with the pros and cons). Third, the team dynamics in terms of the understanding, skills and willingness to commit was something you don’t see everyday. And finally the timing was unbeatable. I was ready to jump into the water.
I would like to share some of the actual work I did and how I encountered challenges and solved problems this summer in a start-up company with global ambitions employing less that ten people. Once I had signed in (with no actual payment nor real office, something common for early stage start-up’s) the project needed to achieve specific milestones that seemed logical if we wanted to have a product worth selling. When creating something (anything) its always tempting to forget the basics and move on to the complex “high-end” solutions that we think will ultimately change the world. But one VERY common sense I want to highlight after my summer experience is; focus on the basics first, get them right and set up the foundations for future growth. Whether that is; having the right product design or the company properly established, just make sure you have them covered.
Once you are in the mood of working 24/7 and you find yourself thinking of your little “baby” nonstop then you know you are on the right track, but this shouldn’t prevent you from getting the product out to your client. You need to let it take its first steps by itself and fast, really fast. You might think that the product is not ready yet, but forget about making THE perfect new product and test it. Test it and test it again with real people. In my case we took quite some time to actually have our first private Beta test. Had we done our real-life test a month or two earlier, the amount of feedback would have made a significant difference on the rest of my summer experience.
Finally, I noticed that the biggest challenge for our start-up was actually listening to our intended costumers and do the work with that focus. We knew we had tons of work ahead of us and that we needed to raise significant amount of money before moving to the next level, but we kind of forgot the core of our costumers in the middle. That was a big mistake and a waste of precious summer time.
Regardless of my humble experience, I would like to highlight the fact I haven’t found (yet) any professional experience compared to working on a project who’s lifeblood depend on the energy, expertise, capability and sometimes irrationality that each teammate brings to the table.