ABSTRACT:
Starting a company is a life-changing event that brings together a breadth of experiences and emotions. This talk overviews the 5 stages of startups and discusses why a good idea does not necessarily result in a good product, and why a good product does not necessarily result in a company. Here’s the deal: to succeed, a company needs more than a good idea. It must solve a real market need, and execute that good idea really well. To this, you need to add a great team behind the idea to ensure that the right decisions are made along the way. And let’s not forget capital, which is essential to make everything come together and push the venture ahead. Finally, the business must be able to scale up for the company to succeed in the long term. We’ll talk about all these issues and provide a hands-on example.
SPEAKER:
Carolina Pinart holds a MSc and a PhD in Telecommunications Engineering from the UPC, and has completed executive and business studies at the London Business School and New York University. She kicked off her career as a researcher at Siemens and a tech consultant at Altran before helping start up the CTTC as part of its Direction Unit, where she also got involved in research and published over 70 papers. After that, Carol joined Telefonica to lead the Connected Car strategy, now part of Telefonica’s global M2M business, and then led the development and take to market of global eHealth services for remote patient management, which yielded $20M in revenue. Once the business matured, she decided to trade the corporate world for a startup. She became the COO of New York City based startup ZabCab, an exciting mobile app company in the on-demand transportation space, and recently also a mentor and board member of Boonder, a Barcelona startup providing connectivity for the IoT. Relocated to Barcelona last summer, Carol has lived in 5 countries and plans to continue globetrotting until world domination.
CTTC Auditorium / 10.00