In this episode, I’m sharing my experience and takeaways from the Morgridge Entrepreneurial Bootcamp at UW-Madison, such as
- Why having an idea and passion isn’t enough to succeed as an entrepreneur
- How STEM and business go together
- What PhDs and entrepreneurs have in common
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Beyond Your Science podcast. This is episode 6. How are all of you doing? I know it’s been a long while and the summer just flew by for me. And there’s so much that has happened. And I definitely want to share all of that in the coming episodes. And so what you’re going to hear today is an episode that I wrote back in June about my experience at a STEM entrepreneurship bootcamp. And so I wrote this as if I wrote this back then so I’m just gonna share it as if it just happened. Okay, so here is the episode!
So this past week, it was my birthday. And to celebrate, I hosted a little murder mystery dinner party. And I’ve always wanted to do one, but I didn’t know how to until I thrifted, this murder mystery kit, and it was vineyard themed. And it was pretty old school because it still had a CD recording to go with it. But luckily, the creator of the game also made audio files available on their website, which is super helpful for adapting it for the present day.
And so my friends, and I dressed up as all the characters, and then we tried to give our best performances, little accents and things like that. And I’m really sad to say that I was not very good at this murder mystery, I did not get the killer correctly at all. And I just honestly, like, when we got to the end, I realized that like the clue was given, like really early in the game, and I just wasn’t paying attention. And I really love reading mysteries. And so you would think that I would be a lot better at it. But of course, it’s always like these little tiny details that they hide from you. And I just, I just didn’t notice it. But next time that I host a murder mystery party, I will definitely get it.
Anyways, what I’m super excited to talk about is my experience this past week in a STEM entrepreneurship bootcamp at UW Madison called the Morgridge Entrepreneurial Bootcamp. And it’s a one week intensive training program in technology entrepreneurship for graduate students in the sciences, engineering and math here at UW. And so in this case, technology means like research that can be translated into a product, rather than like an app or like software as a service.
And so during the week, we got a crash course for an intro into everything related to business, including creating a business model, imagining new products and opportunities, learning how to pivot a business, finding startup funding, understanding intellectual property, navigating negotiations, knowing how to create a team and a culture and a lot more. And it was a combination of lectures and group activities, case studies and simulations, which kept it really interactive and engaging.
And so we also got to hear from the founders, and all the case studies, or not all the cases, but some of the case studies, including the former CEO of Cisco, John Morgridge. And we also heard from program alumni who have gone into their own startup consulting or venture capital, and all of their experiences and learning from them. It was really enlightening to me, because I really love to hear about other people’s stories, and then find like those nuggets of wisdom that they share that I can apply to my own life. And so in this episode, I want to share my own personal takeaways and concepts that I have learned from this experience.
The main takeaway I want to share is that I learned that having an idea and and having a passion for your idea is a good starting point. But you really need to learn how to present it, well get support for it, and then also execute it well. And so even if you think that your idea is good, you have to find evidence that it’s something that people want, because if nobody wants it, no one’s going to use it. And I think as scientists, what we’re usually trained to do is like, once we discover something, we find them afterwards, we find out if we can make it into something useful. And we also may try to like show our work beforehand to prove that our idea or our application is useful.
But in business, there’s this concept called the MVP model, which is also also called the minimal viable product, also known as the minimal viable product. And so basically, it just means that like when you have an idea, you create like a demo or like a visual of, of something that is just enough to allow the person who will be using like to visualize using it, and then you kind of get feedback from there. So you’re basically building like the bare minimum of what you need.
And so you might be thinking like, this sounds kind of like, sketchy. Like, isn’t this what Elizabeth Holmes did with like Theranos and to be honest, I don’t, I don’t know like the entire story. And you can definitely like, look this up for more info. And I’m just like, simplifying it here for brevity. But basically, from what I understand, like Holmes over exaggerated what the technology of Theranos could do. And eventually the truth came out that her technology did not do anything close to what it said it could do. And eventually she was found out and there’s like a lot of fraud and it became this huge news stories and now she’s in jail. So her name came up a lot during our bootcamp. And it’s definitely a case study and what not to do.
But in any case, the main takeaway is that even though you might have like a good technology, product or service, the final form of it may not be what you initially expected. And to be honest, like a lot of our research turns out this way too, sometimes we get a result that we didn’t expect. And so we have to recalibrate what we do moving forward.
So I unknowingly created, done did all of this when I was an undergrad. And at the time, I was starting my own student organization called the Non-Music Major orchestra. And so our idea was pretty simple. We would be a community orchestra on campus for students who are not music majors. But in order to get support for it, we needed to show that we had some kind of plan for what to do. For example, we need to have like a conductor to lead the orchestra. And like a list of the pieces or the repertoire that we would play.
And so for the Student Organization Fair, we had to, we had to have all these things like ready, because it’s really unlikely for people to join an orchestra if there’s no solid leadership and no plan. And so even though we didn’t have any members yet, and we were really brand new, we just had a poster board, like the kind of used for science fair, the trifold with some information about like, who was running the organization, the conductors that we recruited and some ideas of what we were going to play that semester. And so this was our MVP.
And at the Student Organization Fair, I probably gave away hundreds of flyers for our first event. And in the first semester, we got about 40, people who joined, and it kept growing after that, and eventually grew to be about like 60 to 70 people per semester. And in total, that was maybe like 150, or 200. People like during the time that I was there, like different people. And as the members join, they suggested things like more frequent social events and voting for repertoire. So they really had a say, in making the product or the orchestra better.
And so even though these were not in my original plan for the student org because I really had just focused on like, what is like the bare minimum, we need to run an orchestra, all of their ideas were agreed to implement, and they really helped build a community in the orchestra. And if we had not implemented our member suggestions, it would be less likely for them to return the next semester, because they wouldn’t have been satisfied with their experience.
I learned that stem and business are both important and valuable. When I was an undergrad, I did not identify myself as a business person at all, because I thought that STEM was inherently better than business because in research, we do it because of like, curiosity or discovery or like our quest for knowledge. And that seemed more noble than just like making money for investors and capitalism and stuff. But that was all very foolish of me, I was very young. And a lot of STEM people kind of do act like Oh, being in STEM as being is better than being in business, at least as a college student, because like STEM classes are harder compared to like business classes in general, or at least it’s like the intro level. But that’s like a totally different topic.
But to be honest, I just really had no idea what business entailed. Because all I really knew about like business was whatever I’d seen on like, Shark Tank, or whatever TV shows that like had like business people in suits, and like doing presentations on I don’t know, whatever. But whatever I watched, I was always like really confused on like, how are they calculating equity? Like, what do all these terms mean? I had no idea. And so I just like avoided business things altogether. And, but what I didn’t realize was that, like I was doing some of these things, but just like in the context of my student organization, and we also do this in research as well. Like, obviously, we need like the business skills, or like the business functions like accounting and finance so that we can have money for STEM work, like buying reagents, getting equipment, services, and whatever.
But we also apply a lot of other business skills like pitching. Like when we are writing grants and proposals, we are like pitching our idea trying to convince a funding body that this is this is a good idea, like they should invest in it. And so you can have a business without involving stem, but you really cannot do STEM without involving like business skills and concepts and functions. That’s why it’s really important to be at least familiar with some of these business concepts, even if even if you end up being a scientist and industry because it helps you understand what the motivations of the stakeholders are. And fundamental science is necessary to understand what is actually happening. However, I’ve noticed that in scientific research, or maybe it’s just like the area that I’m in, sometimes possible applications are suggested, but it might be impractical to implement them on a larger scale. Either that or like, there’s really no market for this type of application.
That’s why it’s also important to have like an applications driven perspective so that you can transform the science into something more useful and bring it to scale. That’s what I really like about business and entrepreneurship, because of how it’s used to deliver a solution, and that it can improve people’s daily lives. And it’s not about which one is better or worse, it’s just realizing that every side has their valuable contributions depending on the development of the technology or product.
The last point that I realized is that PhDs and entrepreneurs both have this urge, or desire to build something of their own from scratch. One of the unique aspects of getting a PhD is that it shows you that you know how to learn deeply about a specialized topic. In the process of a PhD, we have to learn about our field first, then we learn a lot of like technical skills that are needed to carry out the experiments are tasks that we need to do, to progress in our in our research. And simultaneously, we are applying new knowledge and skills to to our work. Eventually, we become more independent, where we can like do things that are required of us on our own. And we also become autonomous because we learn how to make our own decisions about what to do next, rather than being told what to do. This ability to build something from scratch and figure things out does not come naturally to everyone.
I think this is probably more related to the fact that most people are not willing to persist as long as people who pursue a PhD, or or entrepreneurs. We know it’s a long process. And there will be times where it feels more tedious and grueling than others. But for some reason, we are all still here, despite knowing that we could quit or master out or even move on with our lives. So the PhD is the process of honing all those skills like building from scratch, figuring things out, and persisting even when things don’t go the way you plan them to.
These are some of the key attributes that I’ve also seen and the entrepreneurs that were at the bootcamp, the ones who were sharing what their stories and what they’ve learned. So if you’re in a Ph D program right now, or you’re finishing finishing up, or you’ve already have your PhD, you probably also have some of these traits that also can be transferable to being an entrepreneur. Of course, there are other skills that you’ll need to learn like marketing your business and things like that. But you’ve already shown that you’re totally capable of figuring it out.
So to conclude everything, I just want to say that I’m super grateful for this experience at the Morgridge Entrepreneurship Bootcamp. And I’m really glad for all the people that I’ve connected with, I feel that I’ve uncovered like another community of people that I could turn to. And I really appreciated meeting other scientists who are also entrepreneurial. And all of us were more or less on the same boat learning together and discussing our thoughts and opinions with each other.
So I hope this episode, maybe change your mind about the business world a little bit. And maybe you might also want to give it a try. Based on what I’ve learned this week, you can never truly know where your path will lead you. And you can have like a general idea or direction, but there’s like no guarantee that following certain steps will definitely lead you there. So it really does benefit you to just explore whatever it is you’re interested in.
During your PhD, it is that time to explore these different types of career paths. So if you find the opportunity and realize that you’re even one percent interested, just try it and find out for yourself. At the very least you’ll know whether or not it’s worth exploring more and as you keep iterating, you will gain more clarity on what you value, while honing the skills that you’re good at and enjoying using. Eventually that will lead you to where you want to be.