Am I the Problem?

This question kinda came into my brain the other night as I was watching final presentations from an Entrepreneurship class I am in. Long story short, it’s a full (school) year long class where you form a team and learn how to build a startup from the ground up. Really interesting class and I met a lot of great people but, if I’m honest, I didn’t personally have the best experience.

Listening to all the other teams present, I realize how great they are. The product they built is so cool and their presentations are sound. So many teams have great design language, validation and a nice MVP.

I almost feel FOMO from these teams, and if you know me, I never really feel FOMO. The teams all get along so well, and it seems like they have such a great connection. I kind of feel sad in a way that I didn’t really have that.

To be fair, it’s my own fault. During the first two weeks of the class, I didn't really ‘network’ as much as I should have. I didn’t talk to a ton of people like I should have and investigate. I was also away for around 5 days, but I for sure could have made more effort. I did talk to a few, but they didn’t really seem interested.

I ended up with a team that was kind of a mish mash of people who also didn’t have teams. I ended up with a team of 4 Business Students and 2 Engineerings students (including myself). The other engineering student was in my program, which was great as being a man down from other teams (usually 3/3 split), our general program would be very useful.

We ended up with a half decent product, where people seemed generally interested in it. The team worked well enough, there were no big falling outs or troubles. Everyone was pretty chill, but it was too chill. One guy said today, “our company culture is last minute work” and I never felt anything more true.

It felt like everything fell apart last minute. I spent a week building the product before Demo Day, only to bring it over and it doesn’t work. (I take full responsibility, I used bad parts). Some people are presenting the same thing, some have no clue what is going on 1 hr before the presentation, some people don’t really understand the product - it was a mess.

I think a key lesson here was that there was no clear leader in the group. Should I have stepped into that role? Probably. Recently I have been so worried about not letting people speak their mind and reminding myself it’s ok to not be the leader. In turn, I felt afraid of not knowing when to step down, I forget to step up in the first place. Amendri told me I should be the ‘ceo’ from the beginning and I guess she was right.

See you next week,
Max