My Antler Glass is Half Full

As most people know I’m part of Antler #AntlerAustralia which is a fairly new global #startupgenerator that helps to create new ventures in about 10 weeks by supporting the founders through the process of finding a great problem to solve and start solving it. After 5 weeks, at the start of week 6, I’m trying to answer the question I get now often: How is it really? Why the [explicit] are you flying every week to Sydney and leave your dear family alone?

Dating on first impressions

First impressions count and I must say: Antler managed to collect an incredible bunch of people, all very capable and smart. I would say for the insiders: it’s the closest to INSEAD I have seen (and yes 5% of my Antler friends are INSEAD as well). (Well done Adele!)

Antler, in my view, tries to take away the 3 biggest hurdles on founding a business: 

1. Finding a co-founder (and giving them an academic framework on what drives success- thank you Andreas), 
2. forcing to iterate fast over different ideas and
3. provide signalling funding and support.

Finding a co-founder is a harrowing process. Visiting endless meetups, engaging in hundreds of fruitless conversations in the process. Why does it fail most of the time? A lot has to do with timing. A lot of people would like to try being part of a startups founding team, but it’s just not the right time: Finances, babies, partners, mortgages … a lot of life-things can get in the way. Antler really solves that by bringing a group of diverse people in a room who are in the right mindset and life-timing and facilitate the founder-dating process. Some people are very thorough with endless spreadsheets, others are going with guts, some might end up with shotgun marriages or exiting the program.

Iterating fast…. Really fast

Having started several companies myself I do really value this part. Often you start a company based on an idea and once you start, you set course and you look for validation instead of invalidation. That I have now radically changed. My Co-founder (Stan Steinwolf) and I burn through more ideas than a chain smoker through cigarettes and we are mostly ruthless. Except for one idea in Waste Management we love and stuck a bit too long with... (Waste is so-called “wicked problem”, never to be solved, only there to be improved upon).

The world of startups is super competitive when it comes to talent and resources ($$) and having an extremely hard problem to tackle is audacious but it will also disqualify a lot of talent and $$ and chances of success are lower.

So last week we went back to the drawing board and investigated other problems in life. We settled on a problem with “crushing demand” (quoting Bede), high frequency and with “real pain”: all working parents know that the more extracurricular activities your kids do the more impossible the transport arrangements become. “I have no time in the weekend, I’m ferrying the kids around”…. And besides that annoyance, there is the feeling of sheer panic that every parent knows when you are stuck in traffic and can’t pick up your kids from school and frantically start calling other parents who don’t pick up their phone….

Let’s solve that!

And there we go…. Running, flying, jumping, rolling, finding solutions and scaling the next hurdles: translating crushing demand in a venture that improves life and gives parents some time back! #nextwaveoftech