Ability to bring smart people together and work together as a team is one of the primary skill of a Big business owner #entrepreneurship #heartset

Design by Sou Fujimoto, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Jean-Philippe Delhomme, Nigo, and Nuru Karim and BTS, to name a few that contributed to personalising the iconic Louis Vuitton trunk for the exhibition 200 TRUNKS, 200 VISIONARIES
Image: Courtesy of Louis Vuitton

BTS in front of Antony Gormley's New York Clearing. In 2020, Daehyung Lee orchestrated CONNECT BTS. This global initiative brought together 22 contemporary artists in five cities around the world to artistically convey the essence of diversity and global solidarity

Me thinking about the suffering of Nigerians...

The insults those who are squatting with friends and relatives in big cities are enduring because they cannot yet afford their own space...

The shame of hiding from your desperate landlord because you haven't paid rent...

The pain of the parent whose child was sent home from school because they haven't paid school fees...

The tears of the family who lost their loved one to an AVOIDABLE death...

The confusion of the business person who borrowed money to start a new venture and watch that venture collapse....

The fear that a richer and more powerful man may sleep with your wife in exchange for upkeep money for your family...

The madness of congested cities...

The greed of the ruling class...

And yes, the sting of religion and tribalism.

I wake up thinking about Nigeria - my Nigeria.

I wake up thinking about what the poor Nigerian goes through in Nigeria and the insecurity the rich also fear.

And I know that IT TAKES A KIND HEARTED, COOL HEADED, NON RADICALIZED, COMPASSIONATE Leader to do the right things for the humans of Nigeria.

Save a thought for your nation today... Are you Kenyan, American, South African, Basotho, Ugandan etc.... Learn how to SPEND QUALITY TIME thinking about your nation..... Carry the burden of your nation... It's called National Responsibility. That's how leaders are born... Leadership comes from within, not without. You birth leadership inside by bearing the burden of your society despite the weight of your personal burdens.

God bless Nigeria 🇳🇬.

God bless Africa.

God bless the nations of the world.

#charlesawuzie - a brother on the other side of life.

Maranatha.

Credit Facebook | Charles Awuzie

Call For Applications: Jim Leech Mastercard Foundation Fellowship on Entrepreneurship 2025 For Africans



The Jim Leech Mastercard Foundation Fellowship on Entrepreneurship gives African students and recent graduates the opportunity to access training, resources, financial support and a network of mentors to develop their entrepreneurial skills and start building their own venture. The 8-month program develops the exceptional entrepreneurial skillset and mindset of leaders to drive social and financial impact.

The Jim Leech Mastercard Foundation Fellowship gives you the confidence, resources, knowledge, network, and financial support to build a startup with an impact. For African students and recent graduates with a desire to solve pressing problems and bring entrepreneurial ideas to life, the program is split into three online courses where you will learn the foundations of entrepreneurship, receive virtual coaching, develop your own business idea, and demonstrate your commitment in order to advance to the next course.

Benefits


They provide participants who demonstrate a willingness to learn, take risks, and commit themselves fully with the best that the innovation centre has to offer.

Best-in-Class Training
Business bootcamp delivered by Queen’s University faculty and industry leaders who bring decades of combined entrepreneurship and C-Suite experience.

The Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework, a proven step-by-step framework for scalable startups developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Pitch coaching and mastery
Live workshops on marketing, goal setting, and recruiting are held throughout the program
Opportunity to earn micro-credentials on Entrepreneurship awarded by Queen’s University for successful completion the courses.


Mentorship and Networking
Liaise with mentors and speakers leading innovation and entrepreneurship in North America
Access a Global Network of Queen’s entrepreneurial alumni
Join a cohort of thousands of like-minded students and recent grads from across Africa
Fellows are matched to industry leaders and entrepreneurs in the final phase of the program
Receive feedback at important startup milestones.

Financial Support & Opportunities
Up to 60 Fellows will be selected in the final phase to receive a stipend of $500 CAD
Opportunities to pitch for prizes of up to $15,000 CAD in the pitch competition at the end of the program
Opportunities to travel to the Dunin-Deshpande Queen’s Innovation Centre to build lasting connections that will help your further your business venture.


Inclusivity
Eligibility

Open to students and recent graduates from all academic disciplines, and from any African post-secondary institution. Whether you are already working on a business or you are looking to start something new, they can help you.

They are looking for participants who are committed to developing their entrepreneurial mindset and taking advantage of the resources provided to develop their own enterprise. The program is delivered virtually and can be completed at any pace, however the most committed participants will commit at least 10 hours per week. In order to progress through the program phases, participants will submit assignments online, adhering to strict deadlines.


The program content is delivered in English. Mentorship may be offered in English and French. Assignments and pitches must be completed in English. Prospective fellows who are unable to speak or write English are still encouraged to apply and form teams with someone who can fulfill all the requirements of the program in English. Prospective fellows may also work with their local university to come up with a strategy to make sure they are able to access university resources that will help them navigate the challenge related to language ability.


Application

Applications are due December 4, 2024 at 12:59 pm EST.

Phase 1 – Explore Entrepreneurship January 2025 – February 2025
Phase 2 – Ignite Entrepreneurship March 2025 – April 2025
Phase 3 – Launch Entrepreneurship May 2025 – August 2025
Deadline: December 4, 2024

Click BELOW to Apply

https://www.queensu.ca/innovat....ioncentre/programs/j

My tech startup failed due to 3 mistaken assumptions—entrepreneurs take note



Sometimes founders fall so deeply in love with their technology that they become blind to the other elements they need to create a commercially viable business.

I’ve been there. I’ve done that. And I’ve learned from it.

Back in 2013, I had the dream job—executive role, great salary, stability at a public company. But I still wasn’t satisfied. I felt my job had made me an optimizer when I was itching to get back to being a builder.

I had founded services businesses before—and two nonprofits that continue to this day—but I had never built a product company. I had just finished a project about video technology and saw the huge opportunity in artificial intelligence applied to video.

Next thing I knew, I was quitting my job. A friend introduced me to a technical cofounder. I found the use case literally in my backyard: gigabytes of family videos of my young kids, impossible to organize into precious little bits I could relive.

We fleshed out the application, using AI to automatically tag, categorize, and search videos so you could easily find priceless moments or create “automagic” highlight reels. (Remember, this was in 2013, before Google Photos leveraged AI or Apple Photos used facial recognition.)

We grew to a team of 10, and in less than three years, we launched an advanced AI-based video tagging solution—available as an application accessed through a browser or in an iPhone app. And we had users.

Perfect startup story? It turned out not to be. In the end, we made the tough—but right—decision to shut down the venture. Do I regret that time? No. The lessons I learned from Viblio were more valuable than spending three years in “optimizer mode.”

Our failure wasn’t about execution—it was about assumptions. Here are the three mistaken assumptions we made:

Feedback is sufficient to prove product-market fit
A common piece of advice for founders is to validate their idea by seeking early feedback from potential customers. So, we did that. We started with interviews with friends who fit our target audience. We widened the circle to interview people we met at events. We paid to survey a thousand people that fit different market segments we wanted to test out. We analyzed the data and included it in our pitch decks to show product-market fit.

It’s not that the advice we get as founders is wrong—it’s just truncated, incomplete, pithy.

Here’s the thing. People don’t like telling you to your face that your idea isn’t going to be big. Our efforts showed that people thought the tech was cool (because it was!). But that didn’t mean anyone would pay to use the application we wanted to build.

What I should have done is set up a presell campaign: a website describing our product and offering a deep discount if people prepaid for the promise of delivery in the future. That would have given us real data on whether our target audience saw enough value in our product to pay something—anything—for it.

More features will drive stickiness
It’s not that we didn’t have users. We operated on a freemium model, where people could use our service for free with the theory that we’d build more features later that would require a subscription.

It’s just that our users didn’t stay engaged on our platform. They uploaded their videos, they played with some of our features, and then they disappeared.

So, we added more features, starting with automagically-created highlight reels that we sent to our early users along with a call to action to create more themselves. We added a “face page,” where you could click on a face and we’d load all the videos we found that contained that face. We tried doing a lot of other things we thought were really cool. Nothing drove stickiness.

Turns out we were solving the wrong problem. We thought we were solving for stickiness—but we still hadn’t solved for product-market fit.

We can hire who we need
When we started Viblio, AI was exploding (and still is today, but in a completely different way). Google had just acquired DeepMind, and tech companies were hiring machine learning specialists at high six-figure salaries. Our seed money just didn’t cut it.

Neither my cofounder nor I had the natural ecosystem for the right tech people or target markets. We lucked out engaging a senior AI person and ended up hiring a straight-out-of-college machine learning engineer. But it was impossible to hire anyone else in that field. We did pretty well, but pretty well isn’t enough to build a company in a highly competitive field.

As an advisor to startups today, I think about the mistaken assumption we made—that we could just pay our way to the right team. People choose demanding high-risk journeys either because they are paid a lot or because they are following other people they want to follow. If you lack people in your ecosystem who are experts in your startup’s area of focus, you won’t likely pay your way to the team you need.

The value of failure
These three assumptions led us further and further away from realizing our true product-market fit. We eventually did hit on two markets that we could grow into: professional sports and adult film. With each, being able to categorize huge libraries of video and create highlight reels made sense. We saw some strong early traction in people uploading their adult films to our service.


And thus, I came to understand my biggest learning. The Silicon Valley hype of finding your product-market fit isn’t enough. You must have passion about the market you are playing in. You must understand it, and have an ecosystem of people you can draw from who are connected to it.

We shut down Viblio in 2016. But even though the company failed, the journey was not a failure. In three years, I learned more than I had in six years in executive enterprise roles. Building a company teaches you things you’ll never get from working safely. Among the many lessons from my failed startup, I have focused on three in particular that have made me successful in my subsequent roles:

Do more with less. We built a functioning AI video platform on a shoestring budget. Most scaling companies fail because they learn to spend more and still end up not doing more!
Prioritize ruthlessly. Everything feels necessary, but not everything matters. It’s hard to shut down something that seems cool, but if it’s not moving the needle, it has to go.
As they say, “fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”

Mona Sabet advises startups, serves on boards, and is coauthor of the new book Sail to Scale: Steering Startups Clear of Mistakes from Launch to Exit.

As seen on Fortune Magazine

Lord Jesus, Thank You

Only the Life of God is Divine and Eternal. To be divine is to have the nature of God (Being of God) - Only God is divine.

Whàt is Life?
Only the life of God is Life

#iprayforyoutoday Almighty Father, on behalf of every one of us I say thank You, thank You for Your word, thank You for Your gifts, thank You for faith, accept our thanks in Jesus Name.

In the Name above every other name, I decree concerning all these Your children; faith that moves mountains, release unto them. You said in Your Word that I would decree a thing and it will be established unto me; You said in Your Word that You would not let my word dropped to the ground; I decree concerning this your children no more shame.

Before the end of next week, every mountain in the life of Your children will be gone. And the power to move mountains for others release unto them. Let your glory fill all their lives. Put an end to sorrow in their lives. Let there be no more weeping. Very soon, let them sing glory ahead.

LORD, grant our requests. Let our joy overflow. And like never before, let them serve You. Thank You for answering prayers. For in Jesus mighty Name we have prayed. #amen.