Katherine Olives
This past weekend our Zahntrepreneurs began their Lean Startup Bootcamp journey with a two-day retreat at General Assembly's coworking space in the Flatiron District. The weekend was jam-packed with fun workshops, break-out sessions, team building exercises and tons of pitch practice. Here's a quick recap.
On Saturday, Zahn Prize Alum Shawn Augustine welcomed the 2016 cohort with an inspirational speech. He spoke about the importance of the pivot, and reminded teams to take advantage of every opportunity afforded to them. Then, the cohort took the opportunity to network across tracks by competing in the Spaghetti Marshmallow Challenge (the winning team built a 26.5 inch tower!). It was awesome to see the teams mingling with each other. Check out these action shots!
Later that afternoon, representatives of Standard Chartered Bank led a Team Dynamics Workshop, where our semi-finalists learned how to manage a team of peers. They practiced good management techniques by acting out conflict scenarios. Afterwards, Lindsay, Kesia and Professor Punit Arora led a discussion on value proposition. For the rest of the afternoon, teams worked on defining their value propositions and creating pitches to surround it.
That Sunday, teams arrived early to hear from alum Carrie Fils-Aime talk about her Zahn experience. They then dove right into a fun, creative prototyping workshop led by Lee-Sean Huang. Teams were challenged to completely re-think their prototypes, user experience models, or wireframes and instead, expressed the story and passion behind their ideas using construction paper, pipe cleaners, and other random objects. You'll want to see some of their creative “prototypes” on our Instagram.
After a morning of creating, the afternoon was dedicated to presenting. Amy Fowkes led a storytelling workshop where teams got the chance to learn invaluable presentation skills. Then, they put these skills to the test and presented 3-minute pitches to the entire cohort.
We cannot express how thrilled we are to work with this group of bright, eager, creative individuals. And we're so happy to learn that they're already making so much progress. Take it from PluginBlocks, who looked at this weekend as an opportunity to re-evaluate and grow:
“To be honest, we hated the idea of giving up our weekend. However, we had fun and we appreciated the learning experience. This event made us change our approach; after learning some new facts about the competition and our strong competitors, the importance of the presentational skills–both personal (body language) and design aspect–and most importantly, the trust equation. Initially, we cared more about our product/idea, but now we know it's as important to care about the team structure (as we learned from Standard Chartered's presentation) and also to come up with a solid plan.”