Last week of Semester 1

Hello people, it's less than a week till Xmas and I can't believe the first semester has finished. Its gone way too quick.

This post is about the highlights of the last week of semester. I can say it was a busy and a lazy week. Busy because everyone was working hard on their group Strategy presentation and the business pitch for the E-challenge for some (will talk about that later). Lazy because majority didn't bother do any pre-reading for some classes or even turn up- only half of the class turned up on the last couple of days.

We were suppose to read a case study on Multimap in advance for the Finance class but I didn't read it. So I had no idea what was going on in the first hour. We had quite a lot of speakers this week for finance. Paulina Sygulska from GrantTree- talking about SEIS and other public schemes for funding your startup with public support-,Sean Phelan founder of Multimap and an angel investor and last but  not least Christian Jakenfields founder of Student Upstarts. Christian is only 21 and is already an investor, I also could  not believe that he is 21. He looks a lot older, I mean he looks more mature than his age. lol While all these were  going on I was falling asleep, my head was doing that fishing motion. I was so tired from staying up working on the Strategy presentation.

Oh! You know all those in-class Finance group assignments that we get every week. Well, Itaxso sent us an email saying that all those work counts towards our final mark. OMG!! You're telling us now! No disrespect but why didn't you tell us in the beginning, we would have put more effort into it. Luckily she is giving all of us a chance to improve them. And on top of that we have a group assignment to be completed over the holiday. Great! Not! But it's not hard I guess because it's basically repeating all those group assignment but for a different company. Itaxso has given a choice of 5 but we haven't decided which one yet. We want to enjoy Christmas so after that we will get back into that zone- hardworking zone. Lol

Tuesday was a hectic day; had a 30 minute group presentation in Strategy class and pitching Share N Wear to E-challenge judges. May not sound a lot but mentally it was exhausting.

There were 5 of us in a group for the Strategy presentation  and we chose renewable energy industry as our topic. We had to include the following content; overview of the industry, 4 pre-profit start-ups in that industry, our idea for a start-up that we think could succeed and conclusion. For each startup including our idea one we had to discuss about the strategy they used and had to reference the book by Mintzberg. I presented the overview of the industry and start-up idea, the others each presented a pre-profit company.

We had some problem with preparing the presentation on the day we were suppose to present and we were all stressed out about it. Well, a group member texted us in the morning (I repeat, the day we were presenting) saying he has not completed his part of the presentation, he is stuck and needs help.....@*!XX!*^$fhj CDTH F$%&$&^o&*(!"£$%  (I was angry lol)
We were suppose to meet at 1pm to put everything together and rehearse. We told him to just come in and we will help him finish it. He came about 2pm. 

Fortunately our presentation time was at 4:30pm. Unfortunately we didn't have time rehearsing as a group and just about had the time to rehearse our own parts because we helped him finish his part. Having saying that can't blame everything on him because we haven't finished the start-up idea and conclusion before hand but of course we managed to finish everything. 

The presentation went alright in the end. A group member went over time by 2 minutes with his part which meant others had very little time for their part and almost no time for conclusion. However it wasn't a bad thing in fact it saved us lol. Because I wasn't sure what to say for the strategy that our startup idea would be using. When Patrycja was half way through presenting her part (the last/4th pre-profit company), Chris, the lecturer, put his hand up and said we have 5 minutes left. It was getting very intense. I was thinking we weren't going to have time to present our startup idea and conclusion. So as soon as Patrycja finished her part, I just raced through my words talking about our startup idea and used one sentence to describe the strategy. Lol It took me about 30 seconds altogether. Then Patrycja quickly said the conclusion. I think she freestyled that as we didn't really prepare it before hand lol. Anyways we just made it on time. 

After the presentation I had to rush to UCL advances for the E-Challenge which was at another building, our pitching time was at 5:30pm. I didn't really rehearse as I was focusing on the Strategy presentation more. Not that it wasn't important but Strategy work counts towards our mark and e-challenge doesn't. (The next post I will tell you about Share N Wear, promnise!) The pitching sessions were running late so Nele, Roxy and I used this opportunity to rehearse. The pitching went well and finally some judges could understand the pain point that we were pointing out; that girls take too long to get ready/ dressed.

The E-challenge results were announced on the same night. We waited in the Engineering building for about an hour, and finally Tim Barnes (the judge/director of UCL Advances) came. He said normally they would pick 4 winners;1 runner up and 1 winner for 2 undergraduates team and 2 postgraduates team. But they have increased it to 6 as the business ideas this year were very good. I thought 'ooh we might have a chance then.' Unfortunately, we didn't win but like Tim Barnes said, 'just because you didn't win doesn't mean its a bad idea.' Chris Rayner, fashion starutp advisor at UCL Advances, told Roxy that he likes our idea and told us to see him after the New Year so he can advise us on this business idea.

To be honest I didn't think we were going to win anyway because our idea isn't very innovative in terms of technology. The runners ups' and winners' ideas were all based on building new technologies and software and I think that's what UCL Advances like. 

It was a long day, I was knackered when I got home. Anyways, thanks for reading and MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

2 busy weeks at uni

Hi everyone, thanks for taking the time to read my post. A couple of my classmates read my first post and said to me that they they like my idea of this blog ^^ thank you!

I was going to write one post for week 10 but was too busy so decided to wait for this week to finish. I have been quite busy in the past two weeks. Yes I know I say that every week lol but I have been working extra hard as deadlines are coming up. 

We have a 30 minute presentation for Strategy on 11th December and then followed by a 5000+ word report on the presentation due on 17th. But one of the group member is going back on 15th so we are trying to finish before 15th. Then it's the business plan for E-challenge's second phase which we have submitted on Friday- we have to pitch our idea on Tuesday 11th. I'm so excited!!  As for Creativity, we had to do the paper clip task during week 10. We then need to write a 2500 word report on it which is due on 21st Dec but a group member is leaving on the 14th so need to complete it before. One word. Madness.

Monday 26th. 

Source: Mint.com

At Finance we learnt about the Due Diligence process. I really need to revise Itxaso's lecture notes because I always tend to drift off and I've forgotten what she spoke about. I only remember the 3 Ts; Technology, Traction and Team. Second hour of the lecture, we were given a task to do in our groups, we have to write a Due Diligence that we will need to carry out for a company. She gave us a choice of 5 companies. We chose Mint, an online service where users can manage personal finance.(See the image above) We were so indecisive, first we chose Mint, then we changed it to Square, then back to Mint again. lol. 

Source: Yplan.com

The last hour of lecture, was the guest speaker part. Rytis Vitkauskas the Founder of Yplan App came to tell us about his new app. Before becoming an entrepreneur he was a venture capitalist. This app is like Lastminute.com. It presents all the events(gig, theatre, etc) that is happening that night. For example, majority of the time, 30% of the seats at a musical are empty, so Yplan will show these on the app. A pretty cool app. I couldn't download it though because it requires iOS5 and I still have updated my phone since 2011. I can't be bothered lol. My phone contract ends in January anyway so new phone for me! *BIG SMILEY FACE*. After the lecture I had a 2 hour meeting with my strategy group regarding the presentation. It was a productive meeting, no chit chat just discussion about work.  

Tuesday 27th

A couple of days ago, a classmate posted on the TE Facebook group telling us all that he has confirmed with Chris (our Strategy lecturer) that there are no pre-reading for Strategy this week. I commented on it saying 'wicked!' and guess who liked my comment? Chris. Lol! 

I didn't go to E-challenge this week because it was just about how to write a business plan and we've learnt that already. So Roxy, Nele and I just had a brief meeting regarding the name of our business and the fashion event. 

Wednesday 28th 

I went to Fashion Startup and P&G Leadership workshop. Click here to read.

Thursday 29th. 

Got my assignment back from New Technology Ventures and first time in history I got 86! I seriously was shocked! YAY!! Thank you God. 

Source: The London Academy Dance School

Guest lecture this week was the best so far. Greg Gillespie (that's him in the picture above) is a ballroom dancer (recently won a prestigious national award) and an entrepreneur- I like dancing which is probably why I enjoyed this one. He is the founder and principal of The London Academy of Dance based at the Reebok Sports Club in Canary Wharf.  

The most memorable part is when he said that you should look at your competitors to know your unique selling point. And differentiate yourself according to quality, price ad speed. Cheap is not always good. The academy was founded in 2007 and it is now already one of UK's leading professional dance institutions. The main reason his dance school is so successful because he is using the Blue Ocean Strategy. (I learnt this from Strategy class! I have learnt something lol) He is targeting the casual dancers and people who does it for fun rather than competing with other dance institutions who targets professional dancers. 

Friday 30th 

Met up with Creativity group before the lecture to prepare and rehearse a 3 minute presentation. A girl in my group had already created the presentation using Prezi, it was amazing. I volunteered to present it as I like presenting. During this week, we had to do the paper clip task. Did I say what it was? I'll explain it again. All groups were given 5 paper clips and we had to create as much value as possible from those. Our idea was based on the pay forward principle, do something nice for someone and give them that paper clip. That person with the paper clip will now need to pass it on by doing something nice to another person and it carries on. The image above is the banner of our blog. 

Before we came up with this idea. I had a "creative" idea. I said attached the paperclip to your earlobe and will have good hearing like a dog. LOL! I got this idea from a video I found on youtube. These guys also had to create value from paperclips and their idea was a 'get-chick paper clip'. It's designed for men as you can tell by the name. If the paper clip is attached to a girl's top, within seconds the girl will move to the guy who attached it. Because of this video I thought why not go wild with my idea lol. But when I told everyone, they just went silent. I was embarrassed.

Monday 3rd

Finance: 2 guest speakers from Total Access and another 1 from Cisco. The speakers from Total Access were terrible, their presentation skills were terrible. 

Tuesday 4th

In the Strategy class Chris discussed about our "favourite" book Strategy Safari by Mintzberg. That is the most boring book ever! It reminds me of the criminology books I used to read for my bachelors. 

Wednesday 5th- Day off

Day off but worked my ass off on the business plan as deadline was Friday 7th.

Thursday 6th

I had 2 meetings in the morning. First Nele and I met with Dave (our lecturer) to discuss our business plan. He gave us lots of useful advice. One thing I learnt that financial projections in business plans are nonsense but they have to be realistic. After an hour meeting with him, I met with my strategy group. The aim of the meeting didn't go according to plan but we still managed to do some work and gave ourselves a MUST DO task over the weekend as the presentation is less than a week. 

Guest lecture this week was John Bradford. He is the CEO and Founder of Springboard. "He starts start-up accelerators and loves to help start-ups and their founders achieve their true potential.  Over the last 2 years, Jon has helped to start 12 multi-company accelerators from Montreal to Moscow. "- Springboard.com

Before it started Dave came up to me and told me to pitch to John about Share N Wear after the lecture. Lol put me on the spot. He told John to make sure I pitch to him or I am not allowed to leave lol.  So while I was sitting at the lecture I wrote out the keys points of the pitch. 

So how did it go? John said he don't understand the pain point. Its not a bad idea but we just pitched to the wrong person as he doesn't have any fashion sense. His wife sorts his clothes out for him. lol 

Sorry guys I know I promised to write a post about the fashion business idea I'm working with my girls. Will defo do it very very soon. 

Friday 7th

We didn't have proper lecture at Creativity. We had a guest lecturer who has a branding consultancy firm, called Message Multimedia. Mike Villiers, he taught us how to form external relationship using creativity. He gave us lots of examples of re-branding that he has done for various companies across the world. 

Got my finance coursework back-79!! Not bad since I thought I did bad. There were 2 parts in this coursework. I got 59/60 in section A and 20/40 in section B. So yes I didn't do too good on B lol 

Business plan submitted!! Pitch on Tuesday. Stayed tuned! 

Startup Fashion and Proctor & Gamble leadership workshop

Hi everyone. First I would like to thank those who read my first post, although I only got 25 views within 12 hours but I didn't think I would get that much since its a new blog. Its a lot to me lol. And also, I got a comment from a class mate. ^.^ Thank youuu.
Anyways, today's will be about 2 events I attended on Wednesday. I went to Startup Fashion in London Bridge and then in the evening I went to a leadership workshop organised by P&G held at my university.

source: Startup Britian

If you follow me on Twitter, you've probably seen my tweets that I tweeted during the fashion event. ( please follow me ^.^ @missyungquainth).  In my previous post I mentioned that I'm working on a fashion business idea with 2 girls from my class, Nele and Roxy. Nele and I went to this event because we thought it was going to be useful for our business but no it was pointless. Glad it was free though. The event started at 10 am and finished at 5pm but we left early as it wasn't useful. So I'm just going to briefly talk about it.

Most of the things they spoke about we already knew, i.e. how to write a business plan, our course has taught us how to write one. Most of the speakers basically said the same things, like you must be passionate and be clear of your vision, etc. Nele and I thought it was like an exhibition where lots of retailers, new fashion designers and brands would be exhibiting and obviously thought it would be an opportunity to get contacts and find possible customers. It was just a lot of listening to the speakers.

Source: The Cambridge Raincoat Company

The best part of the event was when 3 fashion designers pitched their idea to major retailers, such as; Kim Humphries from John Lewis, Kevin Rogers from House of Fraser and Lucy Dunn from Zalando. To me the best idea was from The Cambridge Raincoat company established by Sally Guyer (their website here). They produce stylish raincoat for cyclists which would 'look good on and off the bike'. (see left)

The host of the event was Richard Hurtley, the Founder of Rampant Sporting. He started the event by introducing himself, his business and experience. Other speakers were, Alison Lewy, Founder of Fashion Angel, Joseph Wan, CEO of Harvey Nichols, Mark Hammersely, CEO of Zoggs, Richard Alvin from Angel Investor, Johnny Martin from Intuit, and many more.

Source:  savingmoneymom.com

I decided to go to this workshop pretty much the last minute. My lecturer Dave sent us an email about this workshop which is a fast track to their graduate schemes. In the e-mail it says that if we impressed P&G at this workshop, we will be given a "golden ticket". Well I can tell you now that they didn't give any anything apart from a feedback form. The email also mentioned that a current P&G graduate who will act as 'mentor' and will offer advice and guidance through the application and assessment process.There weren't any P&G graduate either. The 3 P&G staff did explain the process but not advice. The only fast track they mentioned was applying for the 48 hour commercial challenge, if you do well in this you will be guaranteed a place. We still had to apply for that so the workshop didn't offer any 'golden ticket'.

Anyways, I'll still tell you briefly what happened at the workshop. We were split into 3 groups and were all given the same task. The oral care brand Oral-B have dental floss, mouth wash, tooth whitening and electric toothbrush but just not toothpaste. They have now developed their own toothpaste and was introduced to the market recently- this was a real life launch. Our task was to prepare a 5 minutes presentation in 30 minutes for the UK & Ireland GM on how we will launch Oral B toothpaste. We had to create a 3 month sales and marketing launch plan which delivers the greatest sales at the best return on investment  and a financial analysis.

A few people from my class went and so we formed as a group- the TE group! (TE stands for Technology Entrepreneurship btw). Our main marketing strategy was distributing samples across all 3 months; getting dentist to distribute them to their patients, attaching samples in magazines and handing them out at the stations. We used others forms of communication channels like TV advert, print advert, PR activity, in store promotion, and internet.

After all 3 groups have presented, P&G didn't announce who did the best etc, they just told us their actual sales and marketing plan. They said we all touched on the essential points, sampling was one of them.  Yay!

It wasn't hard at all, it felt like doing the usual group tasks we are given in class. Still I guess it was a productive day. Went dinner with the girls and some drinks after. I deserved it!

An introduction & the journey begins

Hi everyone!

I'm Cilia and I am a student at University College London (UCL) studying MSc Technology Entrepreneurship. If you know me, you probably know that I have another blog (missyungquainth.com) where I talk mostly about beauty and fashion but I do also blog about food, events, etc basically things I find interesting. I've had that blog for almost three years so please do check it out and maybe follow me if you like!

In this blog, I'll only be blogging about things I've learnt UCL and things I've done that is related to my course and entrepreneurship, such as events I attended- networking, startup, guest speakers, etc-, progress of the business idea I'm working with my team and many more. (For more info about my blog and myself click here) I should of started this blog earlier really because the first semester of university is almost over, but late is better than never. Right?

I'll TRY to give a summary of the highlights in the 9 weeks (1st week was induction, 8 weeks of teaching) of university.

Week 1- Induction week
A very productive week. Met most of our lecturers; Dave Chapman, Chris Coleridge and Itxaso Del Palacio. Itxaso is pronounced as 'ee-cha-so'.

Source: Ted.com- Marshmallow Challenge.

On the first day, we were all assigned to groups and did some group activities to get to know each other- the groups were put together based on diversity, my group consisted of Indian, Polish, Chinese and Swedish/Chinese/British (that's me lol!) First group activity was to rank the severeness of some crimes that were given to us and later we did the marshmallow challenge (a team building activity). Our team won the challenge, we built a tower that was 20" high!


On the second day, we had a writing task for Dave to see our writing skills. Dave said that engineers are usually the worst writers, they cannot write to save their lives. We had a class discussion on a case study and a simulation session where we had to come up with a strategy for a game company to be making huge profits and own a big share of the market.

Third day was about networking, didn't do much just a lot of listening to the speakers.

Fourth day, we went on boat trip on the River Thames to Greenwich. We were given a task to do as a group, we had to use the video camera that was provided to us and make a video of a potential business idea in East London. Our group's idea was to bring back the Olympic equestrian site and make horse riding affordable for everyone. At 6:30pm, we were to told meet everyone at the Google Campus.

On the last day, we watched all the videos together- see below for our video. Followed by some alumni presentation on their business ideas.





Week 2- 1st week of teaching
Modules studying: Entrepreneur Finance, Strategy for high tech ventures, New Technology Ventures and Creativity and Innovation in organisation.

Studied about basic accounting- although its basic but for someone that has never done it before, me for example, it is advanced! An introduction to what is strategy  and discussed case studies on IBM & E-ink. New Tech Ventures began with entrepreneurship life cycle.I forgot what we did in Creativity class, lol!

Every Thursday evening, UCL has a guest lecturer who is an entrepreneur and talks about their experience. This week Rob Fitzpatrick spoke about his startups and experience, a very cool guy. https://twitter.com/robfitz

Week 3- My birthday week!

Source: ucl.ac.uk. E-challenge logo

Joined London Entrepreneurs Challenge (E-challenge)- "...a workshop programme and business plan competition open to all members of UCL, SOAS, the London Business School, the Royal Veterinary College, Birkbeck and the School of Pharmacy that aims to show participants the process of starting a business by helping them to do it themselves."(UCL Advances) It's on every Tuesday. I haven't teamed up with anyone yet at this time, was still contemplating whether I should do it or not.

Don't really remember what happened this week but I know there were class discussion on a couple of case studies- SMaL and USX. Didn't go to the guest lecture either. =p

Week 4. 

Teamed up with a girl in my class, Roxy, for the E-challenge. She has a business idea related to fashion and since I love fashion I thought this is the perfect opportunity for me. Didn't go to the guest lecture again =p

Week 5.
A girl called Nele in my class teamed up with me and Roxy for the E-challenge. Every team had to submit Idea Assessment form in order to enter Phase one. And nope, I didn't go to the guest lecture A-gain.

Week 6
E-challenge: We pitched our idea! We only prepared it a couple of hours before which was a mistake. We didn't win but it was good practice. The winner received £3000 ( I think it was £3000 sorry I have such a bad memory), and he did deserve it. His idea was creating a software that will read out the content of a webpage, different tone of voices for different sections. For example one voice for the title, another voice for the main body, and another for the sub heading etc. He even built a prototype so that must have impressed the judges.

I attended the guest lecture this week and the speaker was Jack Jackmann, the CEO of DRFP Holdings Limited.

Submitted first written assignment for Strategy. For Creativity class, we were assigned into groups for an Everest Simulation.

Week 7- Reading week
Worked on the Finance assignment. It wasn't easy. I thought I was able to complete it in two days but no ended up spending the whole week on it.

Week 8

Source: Knodium.com

Finance class is different now; accounting stuff are done and we have Itxaso teaching us about real finance and investment. The structure of Finance class is different too; one hour of teaching, followed by 1 hour of group activity and the last hour would be a guest speaker talking about their business. Each week Itxaso would pick a group to be the class reporter and another to be the CEO. This week the lecture was about Sources of Capital and following the lecture Itxaso invited a guest speaker, Michael Willmot. He is the CEO & Founder of Knodium- an online platform that allows student to study together and form groups called 'HUBS'.

Guest lecture on Thursday evening: Immaculada Martinez, Partner of Opus Corporate Finance LLP. The lecture was very inspirational. For more info on Immaculada Martinez, click here.

Week 9
The Finance class was about pitching to investors. This is one of the most interesting lectures I've had, not that the others are boring. During the 2nd hour, we had to prepare 5 presentation slides for a business idea and pitch to Itxaso and two other ladies which I have forgotten their names.Lol

Creativity class this week was just group work. We were assigned into groups and each group were given 5 paperclips. Our task was to create as much value as possible using those 5 paperclips. The instructions were quite vague as we were expected to use our creativity. Our idea was about helping people. Each person will hold on to a paper clip, the clip is a "symbolic representation to those who hold it to perform one random act of kindness and then encouraging the person/ group that we have helped to do their own good deed, passing on the paper clip in the process." (http://peopleclip.wordpress.com/  We create a blog for it)

That's it for now. My next post won't be as long as this. I will try to blog at least once a week.