54 hours for your startup!

The clock starts ticking... "T-54".  It's friday night and people start gathering around the amphitheater eager to begin with Startup Weekend. Local University of Aguascalientes (UAA) has lent their facilities in order to reunite 100 people with the sole objective of lauching a startup in 54 hours.  "Startup Weekend" from the Kauffman Foundation has arrived into town.

Diversity is the first aspect that is off the chart. I see a confident audience and spot in second row 70 year old Jorge Ruiz Rosales sitting down, waiting calmly for the activity to begin. He chats about his long extent experience working with entrepreneurs with Mony Kaia, 19 year web developer and blogger of Geek Army who has just met a couple of minutes ago. 

Some words are spoken before the action. Government authorities and university authorities along with representatives of the private iniciative sit on the presidium together to address a message for the participants. It is collaboration the center of the message. Teamwork is crucial for the development of a Startup Weekend. Teamwork is crucial for the economic and social development of an entire country. 

It is time to share ideas. 55 participants get in front of the auditorium and pitch their own in only 1 minute. After voting for the best, only 15 ideas survive and each member is recquired to join the team of the idea that he likes the most. And then it starts... plain simple: "no words, all action".

Teams get together and start figuring out how to make an idea come true. International and local mentors help the teams focus and make a viable product throughout the weekend. Lean Startup methodology is widely taught, since few of the participants know about it. Teju Ravilochan from the Unreasonable Institute (Boulder, Colorado) talks to the teams and questions them about relative aspects of their ideas regarding scalability. Garbiela Enrigue, the founder of social enterprise "Fundación Prospera" focuses on customer understanding. Claudio Cossio takes the time to talk about Business Model Canvas and technical web design techniques. 

Saturday night arrives. Only 24 hours left. It is the breaking point of the weekend, as teams start reinforcing their ideas or pivoting to the next ones. They had spent their entire day on the streets trying to validate their model with customers. A team even gets a first service paid. Even though they have been there since 7 am, energy still runs through their bodies. They are not willing to let go this opportunity. 

With a couple of hours left, Sunday morning is spent on fixing last minute details on their protocols and final presentations. The pitch in front of the judges will only be 5 minutes long with additional 3 minutes for Q&A.

And the winner iiiis...


3rd place: "Mercado en tu Mano" (Market within your hands): Web app for consumer price comparison between products and stores within a shopping mall. 
2nd place: Forgivers. The whole idea is to ask for forgiveness online through video, text or image... Web community then gets the opportunity to vote: "forgive him/her"... or simply... "DON'T"! 
1st place: MiBusOnline: Sms based system where users feed information regarding localization of public transport buses. 


The truth is that 100 people won from the experience of participating in a Startup Weekend. Working in teams, understanding your teammates and their diverse profiles and having a common objective makes the impossible become possible in only 54 hours. 


We are a step closer, on building the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Aguascalientes, Mexico!

Conflict? Naaah....

Conflict? Naaah... 

People tend to say that there is an explicit conflict between returns and social commitment of enterprises nowadays. We live in a world so competitive that all has become about the money. Success comes with the work “have”… if you have enough means you have succeeded. But what happens with the social responsibility that enterprises have with their workers, environment and society in general?

Capitalism has guided our corporate system for the last century and the natural returns that businesses create have kept the wheel of economics turning. Many downturns have occurred since then. On times, economy boomed into two-digit growth on industrialized countries; on the other hand, the crash in 2008 showed us the other side of the coin where thousands of companies shut their activities in a harsh recession.

All these matters keep on filling our newspapers everyday. People today are constantly questioning weather the “system” is correct or not. All those arguments against pure capitalism have derived in a lot of social initiatives in favor of the disfavored population, the planet, etc. Now we find social entrepreneurs trying to work on highly sophisticated business models targeting a specific need of a community. All great efforts… but still minor. What happens with the rest of the traditional entrepreneurs whose main focus is value creation through returns on their companies? Are they to be blamed for the economic catastrophe derived from capitalism?

The social component that enterprises give to their communities is sometimes unrecognized. Returns versus the duty to serve society seem to be faced against each other, when the truth is that they are both a consequence of the other when there is responsibility in between.

Let’s talk about high returns: as a company receives enough money for the value it is creating, it has the opportunity to pay better to his workers. This means that regular people will have more money on their pockets for consumption. Inevitably will buy more, creating a wealth cycle throughout the whole economic system. As these workers are allowed to have a better quality of life, means that they will have the opportunity to send their kids to better schools. The much more prepared society is, means that on the future more value added jobs will be filled with these talents. That is later traduced into even better paid jobs. The cycle re-starts.

On summary, as a good friend of mine said to me a couple of weeks ago: there is no better social entrepreneurship than job creation.

The key to making this a reality is the word responsibility. Not everyone is destined to being an entrepreneur and to have his or her own company. If you do, be aware that you are already contributing enormously to your society by giving employment. Be responsible enough to pay enough. This gesture makes you, just by that little detail… a world changer. Congratulations!