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Week 13

The semester is coming to a close, and I have definitely built entrepreneurial skills that I did not have at the beginning of the course.  I entered the class without having taken any business course in the past.  It is impressive how much I have learned from the past few weeks on how to build a business, as well as some basic economics.  This course has also help me enhance my skills in public speaking, engaging an audience, networking to build the start-up, and teamwork.  I especially enjoyed that the class was structured around people from multiple works of life and really modeled a real workplace that would involve people of different backgrounds, work habits, and skill sets. I very much enjoyed the team building activities that we did with the Lego pieces and the plastic box.  The Lego game not only revealed the differing communication method business majors had versus engineering majors, but also allowed myself to recognize that I had to strengthen my co...
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Week 12

For this week, we worked on the pitch deck.  Unfortunately, I was unable to attend our weekly meetings, because of a housing/leasing situation I was in. I understand that our approach is to first present the problem to the judges - we were reminded that Rick had told us to make this as "painful" as possible to the audience.  We want the problem to hit close to home and then provide a solution to that problem.  We will start by introducing the patent and our potential market.  Then, we will explain our target market and present our research regarding that.  We will then move on to heavier topics - our financial forecast and our company timeline.  This builds up momentum to our main goal of the pitch - to request for funding. This pitch deck is attractive, because it first grabs the audience and the judges' attention with the problem presented.  Then, we present the more light-hearted material, while also demonstrating our strength through the extens...
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Week 11

Our group has been making significant progress, and we have been working efficiently and successfully with each other as well.  When we have different viewpoints, we are able to discuss the topic with ease and come to an agreement.  Our team dynamics are great - we had a meeting and went out for ice cream afterwards!  Personally, I have grown a lot from this class - I have never touched upon topics in business prior to this class, and it is definitely eye-opening to be learning how to build a startup in class while actually building a startup. We have changed our initial target customers from small and mid-sized businesses in the healthcare and financial sectors to startups with around 100 to 5000 employees.  We pivoted from our initial approach, because we aim to establish are reputation first within the industry with younger companies who have a high demand for cloud security before pursuing larger businesses.  Moreover, this will lead to a shorter sale cycl...
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Week 10

Our patent is on an ORAM technology that is the first of its kind to conceal access patterns to data on the cloud.  Often, individuals and companies' clouds can be attacked when hackers recognize that a certain data is accessed more often than others - this is an indication of important and frequently used data.  To protect those who use cloud services, this ORAM technology eliminates the encryption of a file and thus conceals the access patterns of it.  This technology will not slow down the system performance or take up extensive amounts of memory.  Most attractively, it is compatible with all the major cloud security providers. The technology is a method that shuffles data between the data blocks that stores all the information on the cloud, as provided by the first claim.  The shuffling of the data between the N number of blocks prevents the data to be encrypted and eliminates any sort of access pattern. The data is shuffled between P partitions within the...
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Week 9

For this week, I interviewed a risk management firm on their thoughts and needs for cloud and data security.  They were definitely interested in our product, as they collaborate with highly sensitive and confidential information from big clients.  However, they were still reluctant on sharing more information about their cloud security with me but were interested to speak further as our product and idea becomes more planned out in the future. Now, we are working on our budget and preparing a rough timeline of goals to achieve before our presentation to the judges.
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Week 8

For the past week, we have continued working on our customer interviews and finalizing the market that we will be targeting.  We are continuing to work on our value proposition. I have tried talking to a contact in the financial industry but was unable to get a conclusive response from her.  I am now awaiting a response from a risk management firm. I understand that it may be difficult to get a response from potential customers through our email and phone call channels, so we are working on finding other ways of contact.  I have spoken to others about new methods of getting a response, and they have suggested networking events or just spontaneous meetings with people around me.
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Week 7

We have started to fill out the Value Proposition Canvas and identified key points such as our target customers, our customer relationships, and our channels for reaching out to potential customers.  We found that it may be easiest to reach out to mid size firms that need our cloud security technology and those who have recently established their own local cloud-based storage.  After we establish these relationships, we may develop our technology to involve customers at a more personal level (e.g. app for a personal computer).  Moreover, we will develop a closer relationship with our clients by providing customer support and an online forum for them to discuss any shared problems.  We are in the process of reaching out to potential customers. Our group dynamic is great - we have been working well together!
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