StartupRealities

Startup No 199 - #StartupRealities 2020 series ApprenticeEntrepreneurs is an education and training company which runs rotational 5-year apprenticeship placements at startups for entrepreneurially-minded 18-year-olds. After 5 rotations at 5 different startups, the graduates of the programme receive a diploma which the company deems equivalent to a university degree. The programme duration varies in some cases: occasionally 16-year-olds get admitted into a 7-year entrepreneurship apprenticeship. For university graduates with an arts and humanities background the programme is shortened to 4 years; while university graduates in business and engineering complete the programme and receive the diploma in 3 years. The last year of placement is usually combined with a stint at a world-renowned accelerator, e.g. Y Combinator, TechStars, 500 Startups, SeedCamp or Wayra. CEO QUOTE "Learning by doing is our motto. Budding entrepreneurs are best taught by being put in the thick of it, rather t...

Startup No 196 - #StartupRealities 2020 series Applied Entrepreneurship Platform is a global university network which promotes the teaching of entrepreneurship to all university students, irrespective of their academic background and university major. The network is at the same time also a faculty platform for entrepreneurs who are interested in and good at teaching; and a membership platform for budding entrepreneurs and potential future startup founders.  South Korean TV series "Startup" (Image source:  Wikipedia ) The universities who are members of the network offer at least one Entrepreneurship course to every single bachelors and masters student and make it known to their students that they are expected to take one course, usually called Applied Entrepreneurship. CEO QUOTE "Clearly we don't believe that every single university student will become an entrepreneur. What we expect is that every single university student will develop an entrepreneurial mindset. We...

Startup No 187 - StartupRealities 2020 series  EntrepreneurshipScore is a rankings company that compiles an annual ranking of the world's 1,000 leading entrepreneurs and calculates a separate entrepreneurship rating to anyone who requests this service. The #EntrepreneursRanking is similar to the ranking of tennis players and is based on a range of factors in the following categories:  - profitability of one's startups/scale-ups;  - value of owned company stakes, shares and assets;  - dividends and salary income received;  - funding raised from investors and venture capitalists (VC); and  - positive media exposure during the year. The company shortlists fewer than 2,000 entrepreneurs globally for the Top-1,000 #EntrepreneursRanking and compiles the ranking free of charge for the ranked individuals. On the other hand, the #EntrepreneurshipRating is based on similar factors but is a paid service open to anyone. All ratings are made public once compiled and ran...

Startup No 179 - StartupRealities 2020 series ChildhoodEntrepreneurship is a school franchise that teaches school children and university students how to become entrepreneurs. Six different levels of the curriculum exist for kindergarten kids, primary, middle and high school students, and bachelor and masters students. The curriculum applies the Shang/上   methodology of developing a broad foundation, an aspirational specialisation and soft skills (social acumen) primarily through experiential exercises. Business Planning is taught from middle school onwards but basic concepts such as profit are developed from as early as kindergarten (nursery/daycare). CEO QUOTE "We sometimes get accused of inflating an entrepreneurial bubble by encouraging children and young people of all ages and backgrounds to start up companies. But this is far from the truth. We help children and young adults develop an enrepreneurial mindset, which would be useful for them in any vocation and industry. ...

StartupRealities No 134 CornerIP is an intellectual property (IP) agency that has developed proprietary image processing algorithms that integrate in strategic locations on photos and graphs the name and logo of a company, so that they cannot be cropped out without detracting from the value of the image. The name and logo blend in with the rest of the image by being organically incorporated into the original photo. CEO QUOTE "You know those stock images with the copyright holder's logos strewn diagonally across the entire photo? Well, we avoid this format like the plague. It's nonsense. Instead, we still position the name of the owner on the image but our AI algorithm picks for it a prime unobtrusive space next to the focus point of the image, usually on a corner billboard, door sign or plaque that appear to be part of the image (see photo below). Thus the IP is protected but the image itself is not mangled beyond recognition," said CornerIP founder and CEO Corn...

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 108 StealthDemystifier is an venture capital (VC) firm which invests in startups in stealth mode . The company has developed proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) technology to discover and analyse stealth-mode startups. The StealthDemystifier algorithm distinguishes between genuine stealth-mode companies and non-starters, based on analysing the CV and background of the entrepreneur, their network of contacts and social media presence. CEO QUOTE "There are four types of people who launch a stealth-mode startup or claim they are working in stealth mode: A) Experienced people who disappear from the radar screen and don't make any public statements for sometime. B) Serial entrepreneurs who announce that they are working on a startup in stealth mode and have solid rationale for doing this in stealth. C) Inexperienced entrepreneurs who believe they have something to hide but actually don't. D) People who are hiding the fact that they are unemploy...

StartupRealities No 100 StartupWarmup is an entrepreneurship education company which teaches children and adults Entrepreneurship using a series of startup fiction articles and videos. The company has a daily blog series of startup fiction articles which describe feasible and novel startup ideas that are yet to be implemented. CEO QUOTE "#StartupFiction is the best thing since sliced bread, buttered toast and morning coffee. It portrays an alternative reality of startups where every feasible and novel idea gets executed and grows into a company. Certainly, we know the difference between an idea and a revenue-generating company. We are not underplaying the importance of #execution in the #startup world. However, we are trying to draw attention to the initial spark of inspiration and creativity that leads to a startup idea. After all, #inspiration and #ideation are two of the three phases of #DesignThinking (together with #implementation)," explained StartupWarmup founder...

StartupRealities No 80 ScienceTransfer is a technology transfer and entrepreneurship promotion company that pairs up scientists, computer programmers and business people and encourages them to set up science-based startups. The company serves as an accelerator for such startups: it first identifies feasible scientific ideas through a range of competitions held around the world; then it matches the scientists and researchers with IT- and business-savvy co-founders to form a founding team; and then it helps the team scale up the idea into a business. CEO QUOTE "We match scientists with three types of people: hackers, hipsters and hustlers. Hackers are the coders, also known as computer programmers. The hipsters are the design people: those who tinker with user experience. And the hustlers are startup founders skilled in sales and marketing. Our motto is simple: SHHH! This stands for Scientists, Hackers, Hipsters, Hustlers," said ScienceTransfer founder and CEO Scirocco T...

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 37 AutismActivism is a recruitment and placement agency that places autistic people to work remotely in technical roles at startup companies. People on the autistic spectrum are often very quantitative but have challenges in personal communication, so remote work suits their lifestyle and best utilises their potential. CEO QUOTE "Giving autistic people technical roles at startups is a great win-win solution. Autistic people are an underutilised resource in society. They often have superb computer programming, mathematical and computational skills which are wasted if the person is not employed in a relevant role. On the other hand, startups around the world face a talent shortage exactly in these areas. We bring the two together and ... Voila!" said AutismActivism founder and CEO Antoine Acton. Autism awareness ribbon (Source: Wikipedia )

StartupRealities No 14 StartupFiction Limited is an event organiser of science and entrepreneurship journalism competitions focused on developing fictitious stories about fictional science-based startups. Several dozen national StartupFiction competitions are held each year across the world, with the winners going on to compete in an annual global competition. The only two rules of the competition are that A) the startup ideas developed in the story line have to be novel but not implemented yet, and B) science and recent scientific discoveries and advances should have some role in the business model of the startup. TARGET AUDIENCE The StartupFiction competitions target three main types of participants: A) Entrepreneurial writers; B) Ideation practitioners; C) Failed entrepreneurs (who often have clever ideas but are not keen on execution, i.e. the operational side of managing and growing a business). AWARDS & JUDGING The competition has global awards in a dozen...