Ideas from Keynote by Sarah Biller at RISE 2018
The RISE is an annual research presentation and award event to celebrate the work done by student research community at Northeastern University. The RISE stands for Research, Innovation, Scholarship and Entrepreneurship awards are given in those four categories. This year, the event was organized on 5th April and one of my friends participated as a candidate for RISE-2018 award. I attended the event to accompany him in award distributed ceremony. The keynote for the event was delivered by Sarah Biller, the Fintech industry entrepreneur and Co-Founder/Board Member of a Boston based nonprofit organization called FinTech Sandbox. As a part of her keynote, she shared her experience as an entrepreneur and three take away notes from her talk. Unfortunately, I missed the first one but captured second and third.
1. Narrative matters when you are trying to solve the problem and build a company.
This is a very important idea when entrepreneurs are either pitching their ideas to VC for funding or selling their product to the potential customer. More often, people want to know, why you want to solve that particular problem and what level of commitment and passion you have towards solving it. Giving the narration or personal story makes it easy for people to connect with the problem and understand why it matters. Every founder should have narration behind the company he is trying to build.
2. Failure is the badge of courage, don't afraid of it.
People are so much afraid of failure that they never act on their idea. The entrepreneurship journey is not easy and it takes a lot of courage to leave comfortable life for uncertain future. The startup career does not always bring success but we should not be afraid of failure. We need to understand that failure is not something to be ashamed of. It also means that the one has the courage to take the path least followed.