‘Our focus is different’
TREPCAMP TEACHES ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSETS, NOT BUSINESS SKILLS
Danny Farah is a happy man. Industry experts approved of the young entrepreneur’s pitch in San Francisco last week — and also taught him a lot about what it means to be a successful entrepreneur.
Farah, an international student who just earned his master’s degree in engineering at the University of Toronto, spent three weeks at TrepCamp, a boot camp that grooms hopefuls for entrepreneurship.
TrepCamp is the brainchild of former McKinsey principal associate Fernando Sepúlveda. He started it after noticing that many entrepreneurial boot camps and t raining services f ocused on building companies rather than fostering the skills to run them. TrepCamp already operates in several cities around the U. S., and will start up in Toronto next summer.
“A lot of people are focusing more on the startup itself,” he says. “Our focus is different. Let us help you build your skills and mindset as an entrepreneur. Better entrepreneurs build better companies.”
Sepúlveda wants to encourage rock- star Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos types, rather than also- ran small business owners. Those high flyers have a unique set of skills, he says, and TrepCamp aims to teach them to would- be entrepreneurs. So, what are they learning?
Sepúlveda uses what he calls an “entrepreneurial competencies model” to school young students during the three- week advanced course.
This model presents t hree mindsets he says are vital to any high- impact entrepreneur. The first is having a sense of purpose. “If you’re doing it for the money, you don’t become a successful entrepreneur,” he says. “There are many other ways of making money that are far easier.” So entrepreneurs must be passionate about their vision rather than the payout.
Vision was at the forefront of Farah’s mind when his team formulated its TrepCamp pitch, for a social networking app that matches young and old people with common interests.
“We feel that older people lack social interaction on a daily basis,” he says. “We want to give them a way of meeting people and tell- ing their stories. We feel that this would add a lot of value to the younger generation.”
The second mindset focuses on growth and knowledge. A good entrepreneur should always be learning, says Bernhard Schroeder, director of the Lavin Center Programs at San Diego State University’s Lavin Entrepreneurship Center and an entrepreneur-in-residence for TrepCamp.
“The one thing that makes people stand out is their level of curiosity,” he says. The student that impresses Schroeder is the one who mails him at midnight, having researched something he said during a lecture, and then asks to meet before the next class to ask him questions.
“They will do the research, leaning in further and harder than everyone else,” he says. “It sounds like everyone would do that but they don’t.” In his experience, only one in 100 students has that quality in spades.
The third mindset is endurance, and it’s a key quality on Sangita Verma’s list. Verma, a serial startup founder now in her second year as an entrepreneur in residence at TrepCamp, says that tenacity — the ability to keep going in the face of a thousand rejections — is a vital quality in any high-impact entrepreneur.
“You’re building something that hasn’t existed before, so you’re going to constantly run into challenges and people telling you that you can’t do it,” she says. “That’s all just part of the process.”
Alongside its three mindsets, TrepCamp also promotes three skills. The first is the capacity to innovate. “Good entrepreneurs are problem-focused, not solution obsessed,” says Sepúlveda. In other words, instead of inventing a sexy product idea, start with the user’s pain and work backwards.
“It’s about the ability to stand back and look at a whole marketplace,” says Schroeder. “What I find is that most people don’t look at industries and marketplaces and think of ideas. They look at ideas first, and it’s wrong.”
Verma takes it further: “Whatever the problem they’re trying to solve must be one of the top three problems the user has, otherwise they’re not going to care enough.” That means researching the market, in depth. Extensive face- toface interviews with users in a potential market are crucial to understanding what problem an innovation should ease.
Research was just one of the skills Farah learned at TrepCamp. The other was confidence. “Before, I was very inexperienced. I would never have been able to just say hi. Now, I have more confidence in approaching people,” he says. “We had to do a lot of user interviews, and going up to random strangers was a good learning experience.”
If you make it far enough along to identify a problem, you’ll need a team to take the solution to market. That gives rise to another of Sepúlveda’s competencies: relationship building.
Few people will have all the mindsets and skills TrepCamp teaches. Instead, an entrepreneur needs to build a team of people that collectively has all those qualities. An engineer who can hack together a world- beating product may not have the marketing or community- building skills the business needs.
Farah is taking this on board. “Collaborating with people who are not very technical is really important,” he says. “They give me a lot of feedback from a non- technical perspective and that’s really important.”
Skill three is the ability to execute. Having a sense of accountability and the willingness to get things done is important, says Sepúlveda. It separates the entrepreneur from the “wantrepreneur” who would like to be on the cover of Fortune one day but can never quite seem to get started.
“Just actually dive in and try stuff. Don’t just read about it. Actually do it,” says Verma. It sounds simple, but it’s advice that thousands never follow.
What’s next for TrepCamp’s newest graduate? Farah will return to Toronto and pursue a project he was already passionate about — a system for connecting students on campus with others who share their interests. In the meantime, though, he has to find a job. After all, even the most passionate entrepreneur has to eat.
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