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As an ambitious overseas student, with over 4 years of corporate experience and a not so great financial background, I left my homeland to learn Entrepreneurship. To pursue a Master’s Degree from the top school for entrepreneurship in Europe, I had to burn all my 4 years savings and took a hefty student loan. I had and still have no regrets for the huge money that I had bet on myself.
Firstly, it’s the peer group. I had the luxury of co-living with a knowledge pool from different nationality, academic, cultural, color, race and talents. Besides, I also had the privilege to solve real time complex business and entrepreneur’s problems along with a squad of skilled aspiring entrepreneurs. The cultural shock that I’ve experienced by moving around with global citizens, by learning and solving problems together, has helped shaped me as a well-rounded person.
Secondly, the unprecedented opportunity offered by the university. The course was designed in a way, where entrepreneurs/investors/accelerators/start-up enablers/mentors from different industries across the world visit our classrooms. They either pitch their problems to get a solution through us, or narrate their experience with respect to starting up, fund raising, team building, growth hacking and also failures. The best part of these sessions are the aftermath, the networking session, where we hit the local pub where all the students get to have a friendly casual chat with the guest entrepreneur/investor. I’d found myself pitching my then startup idea to a potential investor over a pint of freshly brewed Guinness. Moreover, we tend to have a lot of coffee dates around the Dublin city center to help and get help from multiple levels of people around the city. Dublin is a home to many tech giants – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Accenture, LinkedIn have their European Headquarters situated right around our university campus. The best thing about it is, we sometimes had our classes scheduled at their offices. For instance folks from Google had invited us over to their HQ, made us experience their office culture and taught us on their novel technologies/products that weren’t introduced into the market then. I had consulted and solved various problems for startups within logistics to biotech to tech startup founded by ex-Google folks. These unmatched opportunities provided by my college, had significant impact on me. The way I approached problems, people and business have changed significantly and was at par with global standards. I realized that I started to think and process the same way, an innovative entrepreneur from the valley does.
Thirdly, experience working with a serial entrepreneur and investor. A highly influential serial entrepreneur, investor and an INSEAD grad, who is also the ex-CEO of an Irish health insurance company and also one of the directors of the German automobile manufacturer, visited our classroom as a guest lecturer. He pitched a genetics based start-up he had been working on to our class; thanks to my background in biotech (I pursued my undergrad – B.Tech in Biotech), I seized the opportunity and soon we shook hands and started working on the start-up together. Working with him is nothing but a heaven-sent learning experience where he directly or indirectly impacted my character. He refined me and made me a person who can strategically sell futuristic science to the elites and the high-networths. The deepest of my inner talents came into the limelight and the entrepreneur in me sought and identified a huge opportunity within deep-tech space to tap on.
Finally, it’s the deep-tech startup experience. Genebloc is a deep tech start-up within genetics, Ai and blockchain space. From conceiving the idea, naming the company, finding the co-founder, building the MVP, pitching to investors/accelerators/incubators, raising the funds, forming the team, branding, building and launching the product to winning the customers and partners - I’ve demonstrated the “art of entrepreneurship” more effectively with an extremely low resources made available to me. However, I’ve had my own share of failures during this process and faced struggles that most entrepreneurs would encounter. Nevertheless, my achievements like being one of the very few bold startups in the world in the deep-tech space; one of the best-startups in Asia; and grant rewards from a global accelerator and from the Govt. of India will always keep me motivated to do more, give back and pass on the learning to the young and budding entrepreneurs who needs support.
For an in-depth analysis of your start-up idea using multiple combinations of idea validation frameworks, book an appointment with the author or visit https://www.rolandlam.com/
About the author
Roland Lamuel - https://www.linkedin.com/in/roland-ed-lamuel/
The hard part of starting up turns out to be the most passionate one for him. Yes, its the "Execution"
He is a well-qualified Entrepreneur who holds an MS in Entrepreneurship from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He has multi-level business consulting and co-founding experience within global tech & deep-tech start-up ecosystems. He'd be a good match for founders who are looking forward to engage with an all-rounder who has more wisdom about starting up.