Beginning Node Entrepreneurship Academy
Meet some of the future shapers and leaders of the world.
We had a great session focused on the skills founders need to develop to lead their teams and companies beyond the product, and were blown away by the thoughtfulness of the questions posed by the participants of the Baslangic Noktasi (Beginning Node) Academy program.
Some key points to emphasize:
Entrepreneurship is not a career path, it’s a mindset focused on solving problems. You can be entrepreneurial while at school or working in corporate, by solving problems to remove/reduce friction, increase opportunities and create value for others.
Having an idea is not the first step to becoming an entrepreneur, finding a problem worth solving is. It gets tough, there's inevitable self-doubt and roadblocks, especially if you're disrupting a space. You better find something that you deeply care about so you can get back up when you are knocked down, get creative and push hard to solve for.
Surround yourself with people who share a similar purpose and values, people you love and believe in, people who love you and believe in you because you'll need them on this journey, for the good times and the challenging ones.
Curiosity is an underappreciated and profound quality that underpins the range of skills and the mindset for developing founders into leaders throughout their entrepreneurial journey.
Leadership Resilience has four core pillars: Self, Attention, People and Outlook. These pillars cover a range of qualities including understanding and honoring yourself, having a clear individual purpose and an alignment of vision in your organization, building resonant relationships, and developing a growth mindset. In addition to mastering technical, business and product skills, it’s important to practice Leadership Resilience skills, and work these muscles to build lasting companies where people love to work.
There are five components that determine the trajectory of a company: idea, team, market, timing, funding. The idea is the least important. Team is the most important. A great cohesive team will find new ways and new ideas to solve the problem, they will build, release, get market feedback and rebuild. They will pay attention to the market dynamics and timing of their solutions. Once you get these first four (idea, team, market, timing) then funding should be easier (not easy).
