Entrepreneur Round Table: When Ideas Become Official
In our recent Entrepreneur Round Table, we invited five local entrepreneurs for a live discussion about when they took their ideas and committed to them becoming a real business venture. Of course, founders should go through customer discovery phases and beyond, but this discussion focused more on the mental and emotional side of making that transition.
The recorded discussion took place at The Clubhouse in front of a live audience made up of other startup founders, student entrepreneurs, and Georgia Tech researchers with pizza, wine, and beer to fuel some networking conversations.
While at The Clubhouse, we also asked attendees if they currently prefer Windows or Mac operating systems when they checked-in, and found that 70 percent of the attendees polled currently prefer Windows.
The discussion was moderated by Jared Serfozo of Tech Square ATL Social Club, and our panel of entrepreneurs included:
Blanca Catalina García - BCG Innovation & MBDA@ATDC Startup Catalyst
Greg Coonley - Wahsega
Tim Felbinger - StartProto
Monroe Ramsey - Virtual Air
Veronica Woodruff - Travelsist
You can listen to the full recording of the conversation on SoundCloud, with topics including:
What was the defining moment in each of your startups to where you thought “This is a real thing now?”
What kind of investment should be required for someone to claim that they are working on a startup idea? Amount of time spent, dollar amount, LLC paperworks, registering a domain name?
Do you remember the first time you were introduced as a founder of a company? What was that like?
“Bringing people on-board with your vision, that's when your ideas come to life.”
“Sometimes the idea chooses you, and then you have to learn to be an entrepreneur after that.”
“All those people who said they'd buy the thing, let's go try to sell it to them. Even when the business model didn't work out there, in that process we found what to pivot to.”
“Time is the most expensive thing. It can't be replaced, you can't get it back. So you definitely have to put sweat equity into your idea to make it work.”
“So after years of beating our head against the wall, we said forget this, let's compete with these companies.”
DID YOU KNOW?
There are 582 million entrepreneurs in the world. Read more facts, like this, about entrepreneurs here.
Did you have a pivotal moment when you took an idea and turned it into something tangible? Let us know in the comments below!
