Week 13 - Entrepreneurial Journey

I am very happy I took this course because it served as a great introduction to "how to start a company". I loved learning about patents, how to patent, and what is worth patenting, about how to create business models, how to conduct market research, how to incorporate, amongst other aspects of starting a company. Although it was a bit crammed in terms of information, because since everything was new to me, it takes longer for me to register the new information than maybe it does for someone who is already a business major.



I'd like to start with a little disclaimer: My entrepreneurial journey in this course only represents a fraction of what I feel it would really be in the real world. The reason I say this is because if I were working on Ocitor (our company) in reality, I would be dedicating almost all of my time to it, because there is so much that still has to get done in order to move forward and pitch to an investor.

My journey started off with learning about patents. Why they are created and when you should create one. Then I moved on to learning how to add value to an object and potentially sell it. Then I moved on to digging into Berkeley owned patents and meeting with inventors and getting a glimpse of what they believe were good ways or ideas they already had on building a business around their invention. This was an awesome section of the course because I met so many interesting professors and grad students who are working on such cool things! It made me realize how much I'd love to get into research and potentially help theses brilliant people invent awesome things.

Then my team ran into obstacles: Not being able to use a patent because it was already licensed, some inventors not being able to meet with us, some inventions were really hard to build a business model around because we either simply didn't understand it enough or it was maybe even uninteresting for us.

When we finally secured our patent and inventor, we moved on to interviews, which was a total failure. We barely were able to talk to any hospitals, insurance companies, or medical manufacturing companies. We got some reply and some help through there but it was very limited and definitely not enough. In a real world scenario I would have personally gone to these people/companies and gotten the answers I needed. But of course, in the context of this class, having to dedicate my time between many other classes, this wasn't an available resource for me.

Finally my team got the answers we needed, and started building our pitch deck. I honestly wish we had more time to discuss with the inventor herself every aspect in our pitch deck because I believe she would have good comments, feedback and maybe even corrections to some of the assumptions we made, but of course with time being the constraint, we moved forward with what we had.

Now I am excited to present our pitch, and we will be inviting our inventor to come watch, and hopefully our business model and pitch can help her push the invention forward.

Course General Feedback:
One issue with this course was that it was for 3 hours, once a week, which meant that half way through the class I was already too tired, and the rest of the week I wasn't too focused on the class. I believe this class would have been better structured if it was taught twice a week, for 1.5 hours each class. This way I believe our projects would have moved quicker. I also think that students should have been groups based on their time availability, or given time in class to work as a group. Since my group was composed of people with very different schedules, we only had the time in class to actually meet all together, and that definite made our project move slower.