The FutureFounder Experience

The following is an excerpt from a June 2021 FutureFounder Innovator Diana Alves's blog post on her work experience as part of the FutureFounder StartupReadiness training. FutureFounder Innovators create a Digital Portfolio in efforts to secure a work experience at a startup. To see more of Diana's work or learn more about her experience working at a startup, check out her Digital Portfolio.

-FutureFounder Team

Introduction

After applying online, I did an interview, in which I was selected to be part of FutureFounder Brazil’s training program. This was 4 weeks of training, Monday to Friday, to help the innovator fellows selected to be prepared and help to get a placement at a startup.

StartupReadiness Training Week 1- The first week was about getting started on building our portfolio and strategic analysis. We had to choose a Brazilian startup to make an organizational framework, Steeple and Swot. With the analysis done, we have our in-class presentation to gather feedback from peers and integrate it into our strategy. The next step was to define the Objectives and Main Results (OKR), we had to come up with ideas to solve some of the company's problems, show how we would measure the result and what resources would be needed. You can check my blog post here. Week 2- After having a deeper knowledge about startups, we now had to apply Design Thinking. With a group of four members, we tried to help people with mental health problems during covid-19. Our team did research to narrow down the pool of people with mental health problems, and we found that college students were one of the most affected by these problems during the pandemic. To clarify this and gather more information about our persona, we created an online interview, with questions about mental health before and during the pandemic. Based on our results, we brainstorm to think of a good product to help our customers. After selecting the one that best suited the solution to our problem, we had our prototype. The final step was a test, we did another round of interviews with our personas to show our project.

Week 3- On this week we had to prepare for our Demo Day. We have presentations in our training to also collect feedback from our peers and integrate it into our latest prototype. After this process was our Demo Day. With Sam Magee, from the Lemann Center for Entrepreneurship and Creativity at Harvard, being one of the judges, we made our pitch to showcase our MOM project. They not only gave us points for our presentation, but they also gave us great feedback and tips to improve our app. This was an amazing opportunity to hone our entrepreneurial skills. You can find here a step-by-step explanation of our project.

Week 4- The match day was coming and we had to prepare for the interviews. We learned about the star method and had a chance to do interviews with our peers to practice. On Match Day, I had the opportunity to do four interviews with different startups. Key Takeaways

The FutureFounder program was a great opportunity to learn and develop. Those four weeks were intense, but they gave me the chance to build a solid network, learn from amazing founders and have the opportunity to connect with incredible startups. I'm grateful to have been a part of this training! Thanks for reading this post.

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FutureFounder is a social impact venture missioned to ensure that anyone, anywhere can become an innovator.

If you are interested in being part of the FutureFounder network, like Diana is, click on the following links:

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