CityU HK Tech 300 - Training Tips for SEED Fund

 City HK Tech 300 - Face-to-face meeting named “Training Tips for SEED Fund” was held on 12^th Jun 2021. Mr. Raymond Chan, Dr. Victor Lau and Dr. Trace Cheng are the speaker and lead the sharing. All participants took a group photo for memory.

I was honor to lead two mentees (AP undergraduate) from College of Science Mentorship Programme to join HK Tech 300 program.

Mr. Raymond shared his talk entitled “Pitch like Steve Jobs!”  He asked us to think about startup and shared how to pitch your idea.

Then he introduced the startup cycle from “Design Thinking” to “Lean Startup” and “Agile”.  He said we focused on the customer problem at this stage.

And then Raymond shared the winning formula that were Why (Very good reason) + Money (Very good business model) + A Team (Convincing people it is the best).  He also quoted Steve Job that “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.  The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.” 

After that Raymond use Google as example to show us how to use one sentence to explain good reason (Why) that “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” He also use Apple again to identify your enemy (e.g. IBM, keyboard, etc.)

Victor also discussed and added “How much better the iPhone is?” Steve Job gave a number that is “40,000 songs in your pocket”. 

Finally, Raymond explained the golden circle again from Why, How and What.  He reminded us that we are not pitching a product. We are pitching your dream and passion!

And showed Steve Jobs speech video “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”

Lastly, Raymond recommended us to view the video named “Guy Kawasaki: The Top 10 Mistakes of Entrepreneurs”.

1.      Multiplying big numbers by 1 percent

2.      Scaling too soon (Company grow too fast!)

3.      Partnering (Partnership is bullshit and it means nothing. Sales fix everything.)

4.      Pitching instead of prototyping (Key is prototype.)

5.      Using too many slides and too small a font (10 slides, 20min, 30 fonts)

6.      Doing things serially

7.      Believing 51% = control (Once you got outside money, you loss control of company)

8.      Believing patents = defensibility

9.      Hiring in your own image (Engineer person should hire Sales person, or reverse)

10.  Befriending your VCs (VC and investor are not your friend. They are in the business making money. Just to meet your projection.)

After the presentation, we had a small group discussion and asked some question about the seed fund interview issues.  Finishing all issues, my team had lunch in canteen and discussed our project continuously.

Reference:

CityU HK TECH 300 - https://www.cityu.edu.hk/hktech300/

Knowledge Transfer Office (KTO) - http://www.cityu.edu.hk/kto/

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