OWP liVe REPORT

67

Curiosity, perseverance and strong ideas weakly held co-exist in the entrepreneur’s palette

I N N O V AT I O N

Co-founder of SpotMe and serial entrepreneur, Jim Pulcrano, Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management, discusses the start-up space in 2020 and the role and mindset of the entrepreneur in society. Pulcrano facilitated three in-company visits during OWP liVe. The entrepreneurs he featured included Grégoire Ribordy, co-founder and CEO of ID Quantique, a provider of innovative quantum-safe security solutions, Galina and Dan Witting who founded Baabuk, a wool fashion start- up created via a crowdfunding campaign, and Breathe, founded by Ismael Ghalimi in response to the COVID pandemic and California wildfires.

musical chairs, and people were starting to say that the music’s going to stop soon. Nobody predicted COVID, obviously. In April and May, I contacted people I know in Silicon Valley to ask what they were

new ideas and relationships, most venture capital firms (VC) doubled-down on the ventures already in their portfolios, to assure that they’d make it through the pandemic.

How about since then? Has there been another shift?

Third quarter VC investing is up 9% year-over-year. It’s human nature to adapt, right? We’ve figured out how to work with Zoom, or Google Hangouts or whatever. Entrepreneurs got better at pitching themselves online and saw new opportunities, VCs got more comfortable with picking up the signals on good investments and coaching them. When you get iconic companies like Google or Facebook saying, ‘We’re not going back to the office until July 2021’, that’s a signal to the entire ecosystem that if you have a fund, you get used to investing in start-ups that you haven’t had a face-to-face with. And if you’re an entrepreneur, you get real good, real fast at working in this “new normal” and finding the silver lining in a crisis.

JIM PULCRANO IMD Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management

feeling. Through more than 150 calls and emails the main thing that came through was optimism – we’ve been through crises before, the dot.com bust, the 2008 nuclear winter, we’ll work our way through this too. A key point that came up from quite a few entrepreneurs was that if they’d raised money at the very end of 2019 or January this year, they were fine. They had a runway of 12 to 18 months so they would survive. For those who were in a seed round, however, COVID was a nightmare. Q1 and Q2 were really tough for nascent companies. Rather than invest money in

For context, describe what the pre-COVID start-up scene was like.

Pre-COVID, we were in a bubble of too much money. Dot.com déjà vu. All over the world, people were in love with start- ups, and venture capitalists had tons of money from investors that needed to be invested. But, this is like a game of