Harvard i-lab | Startup Secrets Part 1: Value Proposition - Michael Skok

Thanks, Jodi.

So thank you all for coming.

I will start with a very informal, uh, introduction, which is, you know, about half my lifetime ago, I would have been sitting in the audience probably trying to figure out what you're trying to figure out, which is how to start a company.

And, uh, having done it a number of times, I would just wish that somebody would sit down with me and share some of the things that you don't get taught out of a textbook that was held along the way.

It's hard to ever condense all those into a short-- a series or even four or five lectures.

Uh, so what we decided we'd do is try to make this more of a workshop so it's interactive.

So do not feel like, uh, there's any, um, hold back at all.

If you have a question if some of this doesn't make sense to you or you have some particular insight that you want to bring to this, that's great.

In fact, for me, um, the best thing I've learned as I got older is that the older I get, the more I have to learn.

And the best way to learn for me is to try to teach.

So this is a learning experience for me, is the way I would put it.

So I'm looking forward to learning from you just as much and hopefully you'll learn something from me.

So with that, um, I have one positioning statement for myself, which is sort of my value prop, if you will.

And that's, I like to give my entrepreneurs unfair competitive advantage.

Uh, so the idea behind this set of sessions is that if we manage to work together well, we'll figure out how to give you some unfair competitive advantage as you go out and start your business.

And that's really what the idea behind the Startup Secrets series was.

Of course, by the end of this, hopefully none of this will be a secret, and so it'll just be about how to get started.

And on that note, um, this is the series that, uh, Jodi and I worked out here as to how to break things up.

Um, if you want the big picture context of this, at some point, you're gonna have to put all this together to pitch it if you're gonna raise money.

Uh, and probably even if you're not, you're gonna put it in a pitch that's gonna be what you sell to customers and so forth.

And so on the website that, uh, is currently, I would describe it, in beta, uh, on Capitalist website, uh, you will find the pitch that, uh, was put together for the last set of sessions at Harvard, which is, you know, the perfect pitch.

And that actually contains all of this in a pitch form, uh, with some notes that are sort of getting behind the startup pitch, how do you put it together.

So that'll be a big piece of context if you want to get that.

That's on the On Capitalist site.

So that site's in beta.