LISA PitchFest 2022 & Top 3 Winners
LISA is thrilled to announce Cohort 3 Winners, courageous and original thinkers who embarked on their Idea to MVP Journey:
NetAnalytics | Deepak Kakadia (1st Winner)
PhoneXperts Africa | Franck Kadio and Abdoulaye Bamogo ( 2nd Winner)
Quickpenny |Andrew Hendel (3rd Winner)
Cohort 3 programme lasted 12 weeks from Mid October 2021 to Mid January 2022.
LISA Cohort 3 counted 28 between founders and co-founders incubating their ideas across 15 diverse industry categories from Stanford GSB LEAD, Stanford Seed and Stanford MBA, confirming the diverse and increased interest in the LISA Programme from founders and ventures outside the core Stanford LEAD Network.
After a thorough and rigorous review process, 14 new ventures ideas were selected and introduced to the Kick-Off event on Thursday 14th October 2021.
During this 3 month journey, participants leveraged Embark, the Stanford Entrepreneurship toolkit, designed by Stanford GSB’s world-class faculty and successful entrepreneurs, combining high-level insights on building ventures with tactical steps necessary for launching or validating a sustainable business. In addition, they received LISA-designed services that included Design Sessions with Facilitators, Storytelling and Pitching Sessions, Mentoring Sessions, Business and Financial Model Design as recorded workshops, and recorded panel discussions from Entrepreneurs, VCs, and industry Experts as part of LISA’s In-house built digital incubation platform.
LISA Cohort 3 participants have been incubating to build MVP and have reached to 8 finalists who presented in front of investors at LISA PitchFest on January 18th, 2022.
Program Details:
LISA Top 8 Finalists :
PhoneXperts Africa: IT/Telecom | EasyMoney: Fintech | Alliance: Edtech / HR |Hey You: Healthtech | Provide a Meal: Charity |CONNECT: Gaming | Quickpenny: Fintech | NetAnalytics: IT / AI
LISA Founding Partners, the Executive team, DT Facilitators, and Mentors offered their heartfelt gratitude to all the 18+ participants who went through this rigorous journey over the last few months.
Investor Panel Judge:
Leeor Mushin |Senior Associate at Floodgate.
Dan Matthies, CFA CAIA |Founding General Partner of Reaction fund.
Hem Suri |Founder & Managing Partner of Spark Growth Ventures
Leeor cofounded and is a managing member of the 20|20 Fund, a first-of-its-kind student community investment vehicle started at StanfordGSB and featured on TechCrunch, Business Insider, and others for its unique approach. He is also cofounder /advisor to Digital Stairway, an award-winning digital marketing agency.
Leeor Mushin: Floodgate is one of the funds that already back in the late 2000s believed that ventures do not necessarily need to raise 5 millions and sell 50% of the company to get started. Our mandate is to work with founders way early and invest across the B2B to B2C spectrum typically in the US and occasionally in crypto and with cloud-based go to market as well.
Dan Matthies, CFA CAIA |Founding General Partner of Reaction fund. Reaction was founded by a global community of Stanford Executive Program alumni and has a worldwide Founding Partner network. It has an impressive portfolio of innovations that offer the potential to solve complex global problems. Dan also spent 21 years at Bloomberg where he was appointed by the Board to build and lead Bloomberg’s Asset and Investment Manager (AIM) business.
Dan Matthies: At heart I am a builder having spent 20 years building fintech ventures within Bloomberg. Few years ago I had the honour to go to the Stanford Executive programme which is a 6 week programme that happens every summer. At that time I wanted to build a better world and create value — and with each of 150 programme class members we created Reaction which is a global Stanford community and venture fund. We like big hairy problems, the biggest problem of the world: health, climate change, innovation equity . We invest in growth stage companies and leverage this wonderful Stanford community to help these innovations prosper and create change around the world.
Hem is the Founder & Managing Partner of Spark Growth Ventures. SGV is a community driven technology VC firm focused on Pan American and select global early-stage investments and is at the forefront of democratizing access to the VC asset class. SGV is vertical agnostic, invests $500K-$5M in late seed to series D stage companies and adds value to its portfolio by leveraging the combined expertise and networks of its 650+ member global community. SGV’s current portfolio comprises of 12 tech startups from three continents, excluding one exit which was realized in 2021 — SGV’s very first full year of operation. Hem has served on over 20 startup and social enterprise boards across US and is heavily involved with several prominent incubators and accelerators in SoCal. He has executed 45+ VC, PE and M&A transactions with over $2B in total capital spanning thirteen years at Spark Growth Ventures, ClearVision Equity Partners, Deutsche Bank, a KKR private equity portfolio company as well as an independent board professional working with startups. Hem has an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, an M.S. in Industrial Engineering from University of Illinois and a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi. He is passionate about the environment, equality and education for under-privileged children and loves reading, traveling and active pursuits.
Hem Suri: We are doing two things to democratise VC: first, we provide access for accredited middle class and for the class investors who are typically excluded from the traditional fund model. Secondly, by creating a wide variety of domain experts and thought leaders form all over the world we enable our founders through engagement and access to a community-driven model. Our model has done really well both with the founders and with the community globally we have now around 700 from over all the 6 continents we have already bagged 13 companies soon 14 in just 16–18 months. By design and strategy we are staying fundless are running the equivalent of a 50–60 M$ fund.
Welcome message
Davina Drabkin | General Manager, Stanford Embark
Davina Drabkin: After all the hard work that you have put in, now is the time to celebrate. On of the thing we found when creating Stanford Embark is how overwhelming it is for aspiring entrepreneurs to find information and knowledge about entrepreneurship and to identify with information they need to take. Stanford embark address this need by providing a complete and coherent set of resources and tools from trusted sources that can help new founders succed. What we learn also is that just following the embark curriculum on your own time is not enough. So I am grateful about how LISA leverages embark and provide a full ecosystem. LISA provides cohorts, mentors within a full incubation program. You know it’s so important to the work you are doing. You know there are wins and celebrations and also the deepest lows. This is why it’s so important to have this community around you.
Guest Speakers
Jeffrey S. Prickett |Global Director, Stanford Seed
Supporting diversity in the entrepreneurial ecosystem — Jeff is Seed’s global director responsible for managing the execution of programs across all regions — West Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, and India — in addition to facilitating expansion into new regions.
Jeffrey S. Prickett: Stanford Seed was founded in 2011 with a vision of bringing what Stanford does well and to stimulate developing economies. This is done by leveraging entrepreneurship and general management expertise. Stanford Seed leverages partnerships and trainings with local entrepreneurs in emerging markets focusing on socially conscious businesses that bring a positive impact to the society. Stanford Seed uses Embark Curriculum and aims to participate in early stage businesses. So far, the programme has raised 421M$ and 60% of the participating company have reported steady growth in revenues and headcount along with the launch of new products and services. Participants network and do business with one another. Stanford Seed recruits regularly with the next applications planned in April 2022.
Jim Duhovny, President and CEO of the urban #aviation startup Armada Aeronautics. Jim received series of investments from the top SiliconValley venture funds. The main investor is Tim Draper. The startup is building new innovative aviation transport.
Jim Duhovny: I thrive on bringing investors in my vision of the world so they can understand how my new products will add value. Being an entrepreneur is about creating a product that people will want to use because it makes the world better. One key element is also to create a good business model of course. For example, even if Thomas Edison didn’t invent the television himself we would not have light bulbs and television without him. Entrepreneurs are here to make a better world. Also Edison pitched his idea like we are doing today. I also became very experienced at pitching having drafted more than over 200 pitch decks myself for different stakeholders and situations.
Special Keynote
Alexander Osterwalder | Inventor of the Business model Canvas, Strategyser
Alexander is a leading author, entrepreneur, and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. Ranked №4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide, Osterwalder also holds the Thinkers50 Strategy Award. He invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map together with Yves Pigneur — practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners from leading global companies. His books include the international bestseller Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want, Testing Business Ideas, and The Invincible Company, published in spring 2020.
Alexander Osterwalder: For people that want to go from having a simple idea to creating a real business impact whether you are developing new value propositions, entrepreneurship, technology innovation, or new market opportunities there are a couple of simple truths valid in different contexts: these are 1) business design and 2) testing and adapting them until you have a value proposition that the customers care about and a business model that can scale.
Business design is about getting two things right: the first thing is the business model canvas, which is a conceptual prototype that makes explicit how an idea creates value for your organisation. Second thing is the value proposition canvas which makes explicit how an idea creates value for the customer. Testing instead is about admitting that you have no assurance whether your idea is gonna work so your first task as entrepreneur is about reducing risk and uncertainty by talking to customers or using other experiments to test and get a deeper understanding of your customer pains and gains to build your MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
In terms of process, the first thing to ask yourself as an entrepreneur is which are your hypotheses, namely the things that need to be true for your idea to work. Only after you have prioritised your most important hypothesis, that is when you design your experiments and when you have collected data, evidence, insights you learn from that and you decide whether you are going to change your business model or develop your MVP . You always design as you were right while you test like you were wrong and you iterate. When it comes to innovation and entrepreneurship you need to acknowledge that this is a different profession than managing a business , a different art and you learn and get better just by practising over and over and always see it as day 1.
NetAnalytics | Deepak Kakadia (1st Winner)
When there is a problem in an IT network it could take hours or days by the time a customer would detect problems and notice they are having some issues or call-into their service provider log to ticket forward to a network engineer.
NetAnalytics wants to shorten this cycle which theoretically should not take more than a few minutes by automating network monitoring and management.
By using machine learning to monitor network anomalies — the software NetworkAnalytics is developing would be able to automatically detect these problems and find the root cause so as to dramatically shorten the cycle from days to hours to minutes . This would have an enormous impact in the industry providing an improved customer experience and a dramatic drop in operations costs for the service provider.
PhoneXperts Africa | Franck Kadio and Abdullah Ibamogo ( 2nd Winner)
With PhoneXperts Africa, Franck Kadio and , Abdullah Ibamogo want to digitize the African cell phone repair industry. After 5 years of operating the CPR Cell Phone Repair franchise in brick-and-mortar outlets in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso, they have decided to scale-up our business and bring solutions to the challenges we face daily. Hence, they have decided to create a 100% online line of products named “PhoneXperts” with three objectives. 1-Supply repair parts and tools nationwide via an e-commerce platform. 2-Provide online phone repair trainings. 3-Create an African phone repair franchise.
Quickpenny |Andrew Hendel (3rd Winner)
Quickpenny is an innovative API used by banks and credit unions to inexpensively provide peer-to-peer payments and to increase bank and credit union connectivity.
EAD Incubator and Start-ups Accelerator (LISA)
More info on LISA — GSB-LEAD-LISA
Contributed by: Martina Nicodemo, Emmanuel Moreira, Deepti Pawha
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