Last week Stanford finished up their entrepreneur week on campus. It had guest speakers, workshops and social events which drew large crowds. It also gave Jarrett and I a chance to talk with students, faculty and other entrepreneurs about our project. One of the more interesting events I attended was the pitching workshop.
The workshop was about how to organize and present on your business. Initially I thought it would be specific to the topic of pitching to investors but they took a broad approach which could be applied to any presentation. The speakers reiterated a lot of what I heard when I saw Guy Kawasaki speak at the Plug & Play Tech center in Santa Clara but made several other points that were interesting. They focused on distilling the information down to a level that would convey the idea without any any details and to identify what you want your audience to walk away feeling or thinking. One way of conveying meanings or emotions was through graphics. Initially seemed obvious, being a marketing major but it did get me to think more about how to engineer those graphics in order to provoke specific emotions.
The most lasting thing I learned through attending E-week was how important your network is. Finding the right people to talk to can be challenging and it requires getting to know a lot of people. This event was a great way of getting to know what other entrepreneurs are working on. It also gave me some insight about what to expect the next wave of businesses coming out of Stanford were going to look like. Overall it was a great experience and I got lots of free pens from their sponsors.
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