{"id":774,"date":"2020-10-29T11:04:56","date_gmt":"2020-10-29T11:04:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/?p=1326098"},"modified":"2020-10-29T11:04:56","modified_gmt":"2020-10-29T11:04:56","slug":"my-failed-startup-lessons-i-learned-by-not-becoming-a-millionaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/?p=774","title":{"rendered":"My failed startup: Lessons I learned by not becoming a millionaire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Let\u2019s start with the one minute version: I was part of the EF12 London cohort in 2019, where I met my co-founder. Together, we pursued an idea that I had for a while:<\/p>\n

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A privacy-preserving medical-data marketplace and AI platform built around federated deep learning.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The purpose of the platform would have been to allow data scientists to train deep learning models on highly sensitive healthcare data without that data ever leaving the hospitals. At the same time, thanks to a novel data monetization strategy and marketplace component, hospitals would have been empowered to make money from the data they are generating.<\/p>\n

We received pre-seed funding, valued at $1 million. Then the race for demo day began with frantic product building and non-stop business development. Unfortunately, my co-founder fell out of love with the idea after enduring months of business development hardship. Then we failed to pivot to something we both liked, so we split up and I went on my own way.<\/p>\n

The whole ordeal was an amazing mixture of fun, challenging learning opportunities, and uninhibited misery (but mostly fun). Make sure to check out the <\/span>demo of the MVP<\/a> <\/span>I built.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll go into the details for those curious about what you can expect from an entrepreneur journey. But if you\u2019re in a rush, feel free to skip ahead to bullet points of what I learned (just CTRL+F \u2018Takeaways\u2019).<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

How do you find a co-founder?<\/h2>\n

Back in early 2019, I left my job at IQVIA to join the London cohort of <\/span>Entrepreneur First<\/a>. EF is an amazing incubator \/ accelerator program that has given the world the likes of <\/span>Magic Pony<\/a> <\/span>and hundreds of other exciting companies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2018Entrepreneur\u2019 what?<\/h2>\n

The main thing that sets EF apart from the dozens of similar programs is they focus on the earliest possible stage of companies: sole founders. They take in a hundred talented and ambitious individuals in each cohort (actually almost 200 when you count the other European EF sites: Berlin and Paris).<\/p>\n

Then the good people of EF will make everyone go through a weird, speed-dating meets Love Island<\/em> type of co-founder finding process.<\/p>\n

In this phase, for weeks on end, you are simultaneously reading the CVs of super interesting cohort members and having ludicrously blue-sky chats with them, about potentially world changing companies the two of you could build. By the end of this process, you should end up with a co-founder.<\/p>\n

EF also gives you a stipend, a place to work and a ton of high quality material on the basics of entrepreneurship and startup building. But I think the real USP of EF, is the access to this pool of pre-screened, highly talented and motivated people, who all left their (sometimes lucrative) day jobs to become members of the cohort and build companies.<\/p>\n

From beers to business<\/h2>\n

As a naturally skeptical person, I wasn\u2019t sure what to think about this process. I did what was expected of me: read CVs, talked to people, came up with outlandish ideas. But I didn\u2019t really click with anyone.<\/p>\n

Finally however, after many beers and chats, I found my co-founder, with whom we just had enough in common (interest in healthcare and machine learning) to make our discussions fruitful, but with whom our skills were complimentary enough that we could take advantage of having two people on the team.<\/p>\n

This latter point is in fact quite crucial: too often, we\u2019re naturally attracted to people with similar interests, skills and thinking to our own. This is great for friendships, but can be devastating in a startup where you want the co-founders to cover each other\u2019s blind spots.<\/p>\n

Both my co-founder and I are \u201ctechies\u201d in broad terms. But it was quite clear from the beginning that I am more of a CTO type who loves to build, whereas he liked the process of selling and pitching, which is quite important because that\u2019s pretty much all you do as an early stage startup CEO.<\/p>\n

Fortunately (as this is quite rare AFAIK), we both had a good share of the skills of the other\u2019s role too. This really helped with both the technical and business discussions between the two of us.<\/p>\n

Do you have a $1 billion idea?<\/h2>\n

Something we all learned fairly quickly in EF was the economics of venture capital. It\u2019s really quite simple and goes something like this:<\/p>\n

Venture capitalism 101:<\/strong><\/h2>\n