I’ve been back in the U.S. for almost four weeks now. And to think, this time last month I was getting ready to close my project at the European Innovation Academy, preparing for my next big adventure through Europe.
My last post about EIA was a rushed reflection – an update for the sake of updating – rather than the intended in-depth introspection I wanted it to be. But now that I’ve had some time away from Europe to really think back, review some of my blog posts, as well as some blogs from my fellow study abroad classmates, I want to try again to capture my experiences in words and tell a good story.
It takes time to tell a story
– Alex Barrera (@abarrera) at EIA
This particular story actually starts half a week before EIA. After spending a couple days in France, my traveling companions and I arrived in a town called Biot, home of the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, in the South of France. It’s a town very far away from Nice, unfortunately. (We thought we’d be by the beach, not by a golf course. What gives?) These few days before the start of EIA were solely for the Berkeley students. With lectures and activities led by our program coordinator, Ken Singer, we Cal kids got a head start learning team building and finding your role within a team. Additional activities included a afternoon session of rejection therapy, making embarrassing “silent” YouTube music videos (here’s mine – can you guess what song this is?), and scavenger hunt throughout Nice.
Picture Credits: Jenelle Matthews. Check out her blog on EIA!
My traveling companions and I actually showed up half a day late on the first day, so I thought I’d have a hard time catching up, learning about my classmates, and making new friends. Not the case. My unease was quelled soon enough, but it gave way to the real reason to my discomfort – that I would not adapt well to being outside my comfort zone. Indeed the first few days of “Berkeley time” pulled me horribly out of my comfort zone.
And Ken made it clear that it would only get more challenging. But that’s what I was there for right?
The First Week – Team Building and Ideation
The general pace of a day in EIA involved lectures and keynotes in the morning and workshops and activities in the afternoon.
After opening remarks on the first day, which included an “Art Hackathon”
and words from people like the President of EIA, our very own Ken Singer from Berkeley, and the creator of Angry Birds, Peter Vesterbacka
all 300+ participants then split into different cohorts based on industry interests. Entertainment, Finance, Education, and Travel, were just a few of the cohorts.
We spent that first afternoon and the afternoon of the following day pitching startup ideas and working in team building activities within our cohorts. I appreciated hearing and assessing each person’s “grand idea”, but the team building part felt repetitive after what the Berkeley students went through the previous week. Even so, after all the lessons learned about finding the right team, and after hearing so many cool ideas, I was still iffy about what team to join. I wish I could have taken more time to get to know the people and their ideas better. But that soft of time doesn’t exist in the real world, and I suppose that’s what the program was trying to emulate. Only two days to find a team? Not fair.
It also didn’t help that most participants came to the program with teams already formed. Finding good team members was an incredibly competitive process.
I had trouble deciding between two teams. One team comprised of four other Cal students and one student from Estonia. They pitched a mobile application for finding good deals on wine. The second team was a little more diverse. Their idea was a mobile application similar to Duolingo that would help users to learn to play a new instrument.
I liked the latter idea more. However, the EIA mentors were constantly telling us that we should form teams based on how well we will work together, and not how much we all like the same idea. Perhaps I misinterpreted it, but the mentors seemed pretty confident that most if not all teams would pivot from their original idea. So to avoid animosity between team members later on, when the company is no longer the same company it was when the team came together, and when conflicts are sure to rise over what new direction to take, we should make sure we all “like” each other enough before that happens.
Therefore, I ended up going with the wine team. The team chemistry there seemed much more to my liking. Our strengths complemented each other, our individual roles meshing well from the very beginning. But I realized later that this choice was a subconscious choice to stay within my comfort zone: working with people I knew I could work well with (Berkeley students) rather than working with people I knew I would butt heads with, even though it would be a field I am passionate about.
Still, I think we were a very good team 🙂
And we did end up pivoting after all.
After forming teams, the rest of the week involved developing customer personas, customer validation, and paper prototyping. But somewhere between personas and validation, we realized the wine idea just wouldn’t work. We frantically iterated through a lot of other ideas, but it wasn’t until the night before the second week started (after an awesome weekend in Monaco!) did we find the idea we would stick with for the rest of the competition. A mobile application that would allow restaurant customers pay the bill for their meal without having the waiter bring them a check. We called it CheckMate.
The Second Week – Developing CheckMate
The program was divided for the second week. In the morning, the software developers on each team would meet with IT mentors to check in with app development. All non-developers would attend lectures on customer engagement strategies, gamification, Big Data, distribution channels, and revenue models.
After lunch, teams would regroup back at the “startup garage” to work together to solidify their business model and strategies, and continue developing a working prototype.
It was like an intense week-long hackathon. Teams worked hard to finish the app by Friday in hopes of placing in the top 15, the reward for doing so being a chance to practice their VC pitch and demo their apps in front of the other teams. And to gain serious bragging rights. And a fancy dinner.
My team didn’t place in the top 15 though. I happened to be with our team developers at Friday morning check-in to demo the app (I helped a little with some last minute front-end web dev). They assessed our app, deeming it a little more technically developed than other teams, having a website interact in real time with the mobile application. However, they were very critical about our design. I was hurt by the comments the IT mentors gave, but they were right. We spent all our time with customer validation and business validation, but we didn’t do an UI validation. Of course that would be the one thing that would bite us in the butt.
We should have foreseen it though. None of us on the team were really designers. And as an engineer myself, I was more concerned with functionality and scalability. Still we were very lax about finding a design mentor. Just a lesson learned. It’s very easy to overlook something when running a business.
Not making the top 15 was only a mild disappointment though. As soon as we found out we were not in the top 15, we headed to the beach to get a head start on the weekend, relaxing before our early morning trip to Cannes.
And I still very much enjoyed the second week. In fact, I think I liked it the best overall. It had the best lectures, and the work we did seemed most representative of how working in a startup is actually like. And just being with my team for hours end in the startup garage was a lot of fun.
The Third and Final Week – Pitching to VCs
The final week was crunch week, solely devoted to learning the ins and outs of VC funding and formulating pitches for the VC competition. I kind of checked out during this week, eager to start traveling again. More so, the low morale of not making the top 15, and the realization that the cards were already stacked against us from the beginning, did not help to motivate our team. The mentors of our cohort selected teams whose business models had already been well established – with their prototypes already built – to move on to the finals.
What an incredibly negative attitude, huh? After all, startups always have the cards stacked against them. That’s no good excuse to check out and give up. If you can’t handle it, then leave.
Indeed, I realized then that maybe I wasn’t cut out for the startup life.
At least… not yet?
Maybe it would have been different if I did go to the team whose vision I felt more strongly about rather than a team I felt would be easier to work with. Maybe not. Who knows.
Still, our team worked hard and managed to pull a pitch deck together for the VC competition. And I think we performed well 🙂
Teams would take turns playing both sides of the negotiation table, trying to seal a good deal. It was a fun and entertaining role-playing game essentially. But it was also serious. We were judged on how well we negotiated terms as the VC and as the startup founders, and the results would be factored into the final competition results.
On the last day, the FINAL top 15 were selected to pitch in front of the whole program. It was very cool to see what other people were working on, how they presented their products, their origin stories, how well their team worked together. Inspiring, to say the least. I really couldn’t be mad that my team didn’t make the top 15 if there were teams doing great work solving important problems in finance, media, healthcare, commerce, and education.
After the pitches, the judges went into deliberation and the rest of us prepared for the end of program banquet in Nice.
The program was essentially over by then. We all dolled up and headed to Le Palace for hors d’oeuvres and wine. The winners were announced – a Berkeley led team called MashWithMe (naturally the rest of the Berkeley students were ecstatic about the results!) – and we partied it up the rest of the night. It was a magical way end to end this grand escapade of entrepreneurship on the French Riviera.
I spent my last weekend in Biot packing and preparing for my trip through Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. My friends and I enjoyed some last minute exploring of Nice. We said our goodbyes and made promises to meet up back in the states, but I couldn’t help but think how very odd it would be to see them anywhere besides here in France.
Learned so much here. It was truly a once in a lifetime experience. One month out and I still miss it.
Nicole Fronda 
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