Having attended the seminar on entrepreneurship I learned how a few examples came up with the concept and the finished product for their business’s. The strongest message I gathered from the seminar was that anybody and I mean anybody can be a successful entrepreneur providing they work hard for it.
Firstly, we met with Philippe Brodeur, the proud founder of the digital storage company OvercastHQ. Having very little expertise in the digital world Philippe ventured into an unknown market but after identifying a problem he knew he could make a very successful company if he could develop a solution. This desire for success pushed him to work endlessly on the concept of a cloud based storage platform before his competitors would do the same. Philippe successfully found a gap in a very niche market that had a great potential demand, now all he needed was the technology to do it. As Philippe said make great friends out of “techies” as they are the ones who make your ideas possible, Philippe also pointed out how no matter how good the product/service the one thing a company needs to get investments is traction (sales, views, orders etc..) without traction no investor will be interested in your business. With Google listing them as “one of 40 Irish start-ups capable of changing the world for good”, Philippe is clearly on the right track.
Philippe knew that he wanted to be an entrepreneur and so found it that bit easier whereas later we heard from someone who was not so set on the fame and shame of the start-up world, Elva Carri founder of Girlcrew came across her idea by accident and casually followed it along as it grew, Carri was looking to go dancing one night but with no friends to go out with she took to Tinder, the online dating app to find new friends by masquerading as the opposite sex asking in her dating profile that she was just looking for a few friends to go out with around the same age as herself. Within a few hours Carri had over 40 women asking what to do and so by complete accident set up Girlcrew the place where single young women go to set up plans with similar minded women in their local area. With Girlcrew now in ten countries it is expanding vigorously and showing no signs of it slowing down. Having been flown over to Silicon valley by Facebook to meet Mark Zuckerberg, Carri and the rest of her team are on the ground floor of a very successful business plan. This was an example of need, idea, action, where there was a need which caused an idea to be generated along with an action to fix the problem.
Lastly I would like to talk about Gavin Walsh who’s motivation came from wanting to achieve, the founder of the online taxi company iCabbi. Gavin shared a great story from his childhood where he used to sell Christmas trees for pocket-money in the winter but he describes the journey back from collecting them with the van full of trees and all his savings spent on trees as the point of no return. This describes the moment in an entrepreneurs life whereby they are fully committed to the business and must devote themselves to it for any hope of a return. This is why each and every entrepreneur must be fully confident in their concepts. From the words of Christopher Columbus “you can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore”.
While Philippe with OvercastHQ was an entrepreneur to make money, Elva with Girlcrew an entrepreneur to fix a problem and Gavin with iCabbi an entrepreneur to achieve there is a fourth reason to become an entrepreneur. Iseult Ward set up the food donation organisation FoodCloud after realising how much food is thrown out on a daily basis by the supermarkets. With three hundred meals being thrown out on average every week there was a real chance to cut the waste and help those who need it most, this organisation collects good quality food that would have been thrown out and donates it to shelters and the less fortunate. With retailers like Tesco and other big names FoodCloud is hugely impacting the hunger problems of the less fortunate. Iseults team has now been approached by Tesco to expand to their English outlets to clear their excess food stocks also. From a small donation in a farmers market to the huge deliveries from one of the worlds leading brands the organisation has grown to one of the largest of its time and with only good intentions. As Iseult said in her talk FoodCloud are connecting those who have too much food with those who have too little.
Each entrepreneur encountered different obstacles while setting up their businesses for different reasons, but the one thing each entrepreneur had in common was none of them gave up, none of them quitted when it got tough, each one strived to achieve and in doing so each entrepreneur set up a successful global business capable of great things. In the words of Mark Twain “The secret of getting ahead is getting started”.
Beginning entrepreneurship 