StartupRealities

StartupRealities No 114 PhdEngine is a venture capital (VC) firm which uses a diverse range of social science PhD graduates to review and assess investment prospects and projects. The company maintains a large database of business-savvy PhDs and runs every investment project by at least a dozen doctoral graduates from a diverse range of social science areas, in addition to the regular quantitative, investment and industry analysts who carry out the basic eligibility review. The additional social science angles give the company's investments an edge over its VC competitors. CEO QUOTE "We all try to create a unique startup pipeline but it is clear to all that access to startup investments is now a commodity. Where we do make a difference is in subjecting these startups to review by such a diversity of minds that we get ideas about the development of these startups before their own founders have had these ideas. That's the advantage of diversity," said PhdEngine fo...

StartupRealities No 68 LockdownInterns is a staffing and recruiting company that allocates students and young graduates to work from home on paid or unpaid company projects during extended periods of quarantine and lockdown, such as the first half of 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. CEO QUOTE "When you can't leave your house, you become an underutilised resource. Multiply this by a billion and you get the full picture of waste of human potential. We stepped in to simply find some use and give some purpose to all those millions of young people who are not lucky enough to have an actual work-from-home job. Group projects done for a company are a great leg-in-the-door: a testing period that can lead to a job offer after the end of the lockdown. In the meantime, these projects are also great for socialising young people and channelling their energy into developing skills and creating some value for society. In a sentence: we turn #LockdownInterns into #FreedupProfessionals...

StartupRealities No 49 AppliedInPractice is a higher education institution with a unique pedagogy centred on the use of applied (real life) homework and projects. Students are not allowed to work on any assignment that does not have a direct practical application in real life: in business, government or industry. CEO QUOTE "Live projects have been around for quite some time but universities and business schools tend to mix such projects with other hypothetical assignments. AppliedInPractice stays away from such mixing: we have abolished hypothetism altogether. Any work done by our students is on practical projects, real-life consulting for existing companies or business plans for real startups. Our professors are not allowed to give students homework; it has to be #AppliedWork. Similarly, our MBA programme is called #AppliedMBA," said company founder and CEO Al Prats. "No one likes waste, yet schools and universities waste years of the life of their students on hy...

StartupRealities No 24 CreativePatchwork Limited is a copywriting agency that parcels out creative projects via its online freelancing platform among groups of authors, creative writing students, professors and practitioners. The CreativePatchwork platform resembles freelancing sites such as Upwork or Fiverr but is dedicated only to creative projects and ads (commercials), which helps focus and attract in large numbers both project owners (assigners) and creative professionals. The company uses two different approaches for allocating jobs. 1) COMPETITIONS: Competitions offer a prize for a single winner. Competing creative professionals are more often men. (Research shows that males feel more incentivised by projects of a competitive nature.) 2) GROUP PROJECTS Group projects allow groups of up to 5 professionals to be formed to carry out a given task. The platform allocates an additional coffee budget for each group project (reimbursed as expenses), which makes physical meetu...