Student perspectives: Three Days in the life of a Silicon Gorge Start-Up

A post by Mauro Camara Escudero, PhD student on the Compass programme.

Last December the first Compass cohort partook a 3-day entrepreneurship training with SpinUp Science. Keep reading and you might just find out if the Silicon Gorge life is for you!

The Ambitious Project of SpinUp Science

SpinUp Science’s goal is to help PhD students like us develop an entrepreneurial skill-set that will come in handy if we decide to either commercialize a product, launch a start-up, or choose a consulting career.

I can already hear some of you murmur “Sure, this might be helpful for someone doing a much more applied PhD but my work is theoretical. How is that ever going to help me?”. I get that, I used to believe the same. However, partly thanks to this training, I changed my mind and realized just how valuable these skills are independently of whether you decide to stay in Academia or find a job at an established company.

Anyways, I am getting ahead of myself. Let me first guide you through what the training looked like and then we will come back to this!

Day 1 – Meeting the Client

The day started with a presentation that, on paper, promised to be yet another one of those endless and boring talks that make you reach for the Stop Video button and take a nap. The vague title “Understanding the Opportunity” surely did not help either. Instead, we were thrown right into action!

Ric and Crescent, two consultants at SpinUp Science, introduced us to their online platform where we would be spending most of our time in the next few days. Our main task for the first half-hour was to read about the start-up’s goals and then write down a series of questions to ask the founders in order to get a full picture.

Before we knew it, it was time to get ready for the client meeting and split tasks. I volunteered as Client Handler, meaning I was going to coordinate our interaction with the founders. The rest of Compass split into groups focusing on different areas: some were going to ask questions about competitors, others about the start-up product, and so on.

As we waited in the ZOOM call, I kept wondering why on earth I volunteered for the role and my initial excitement was quickly turning into despair. We had never met the founders before, let alone had any experience consulting or working for a start-up.

Once the founders joined us, and after a wobbly start, it became clear that the hard part would not be avoiding awkward silences or struggling to get information. The real challenge was being able fit all of our questions in this one-hour meeting. One thing was clear: clients love to talk about their issues and to digress.

After the meeting, we had a brief chat and wrote down our findings and thoughts on the online platform. I wish I could say we knew what we were doing, but in reality it was a mix of extreme winging and following the advice of Ric and Crescent.

Last on the agenda, was a short presentation where we learned how to go about studying the market-fit for a product, judge its competitors and potential clients, and overall how to evaluate the success of a start-up idea. That was it for the day, but the following morning we would put into practice everything we had learned up to that point.

Day 2 – Putting our Stalking Skills to good use

The start-up that we were consulting for provides data analysis software for power plants and was keen to expand in a new geographical area. Our goal for the day was therefore to:

  • understand the need for such a product in the energy market

  • research what options are available for the components of their product

  • find potential competitors and assess their offering

  • find potential clients and assess whether they already had a similar solution implemented

  • study the market in the new geographical area

This was done with a mix of good-old Google searches and cold-calling. It was a very interesting process as in the morning we were even struggling to understand what the start-up was offering, while by late afternoon we had a fairly in-depth knowledge of all the points above and we had gathered enough information to formulate more sensible questions and to assess the feasibility of the start-up’s product. One of the things I found most striking about this supervised hands-on training is that as time went on I could clearly see how I was able to filter out useless information and go to the core of what I was researching.

To aid us in our analyses, we received training on various techniques to assess competitors, clients and the financial prospect of a start-up. In addition, we also learned about why the UK is such a good place to launch a start-up, what kind of funding is available and how to look for investors and angels.

Exhausted by a day of intense researching, we knew the most demanding moments were yet to come.

Day 3 – Reporting to the Client

The final day was all geared towards preparing for our final client meeting. Ric and Crescent taught us how to use their online platform to perform PESTEL and SWOT analyses efficiently based on the insights that we gathered the day before. It was very powerful seeing a detailed report coming to life using inputs from all of our researches.

With the report in hand, several hours of training under our belt, and a clearer picture in our head, we joined the call and each one of us presented a different section of the report, while Andrea was orchestrating the interaction. Overall, the founders seemed quite impressed and admitted that had not heard of many of the competitors we had found. They were pleased by our in-depth research and, I am sure, found it very insightful.

Lessons Learned

So, was it useful?

I believe that this training gave us a glimpse of how to go about picking up a totally new area of knowledge and quickly becoming an expert on it. The time constraint allowed us to refine the way in which we filter out useless information, to get to the core of what we are trying to learn about. We also worked together as a team towards a single goal and we formulated our opinion on the start-up. Finally, we had two invaluable opportunities to present in a real-world setting and to handle diplomatically the relationship with the client.

In the end, isn’t research all about being able to pickup new knowledge quickly, filter out useless papers, working together with other researchers to develop a method and present such results to an audience?

Find out more about Mauro Camara Escudero and his work on his profile page.

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