5 Lessons I learn as a Stanford Start X Cultural Judge
I have joined 5 accelerators and I’m currently a Cultural Judge for Stanford Start X Accelerator. I’ve been doing it since I graduated Start X in 2017, 5 years ago. There are several reasons I really enjoy listening and learning from inspiring entrepreneurs.
This year in particular (Winter 2022), I was blown away by the ideas these entrepreneurs are executing. The batch this year was one of the best, with almost all the teams having great experience and expertise in their area with a strong balance of supporting founders.
Here are the top 5 reasons I really enjoy being a Cultural Judge and the learnings I receive:
- The ages of entrepreneurs can be anywhere from 22 to 75 years old. Some of these entrepreneurs are still taking classes whether that’s a PhD, Masters or they are still at Business School in Stanford. These students are called ‘SIR’s’ (student-in-residence). Sometimes you can get older serial entrepreneurs who might be professors or just generally successful individuals looking to join the Start X community that will bring them support and structure as they build their companies. Some have already worked at Amazon or Google or somewhere big and very successful in their field. So the backgrounds and ages vary dramatically but the core desire of building a successful company is always the same. It’s interesting to learn their profound backgrounds and how and why they are working on the problems they are trying to solve today and for the future.
2. The ideas that get submitted were particularly interesting to me this year for the Winter Batch of 2022. They range from building fungi to replace pharmaceuticals to new longer-lasting batteries that are more ecologically friendly. Other entrepreneurs were building better sensors for managing factories, helping farmers plant more trees, improving education through better feedback from students, improving kids educational apps with more interactivity as well as building a tech club that allows engineers to move up the ladder. One of the most ‘of out of the box’ ideas was a man who built a humanoid robot from scrap metal in his garage. His garage and robot were the real background image in his Zoom. It was rather impressive. The range is so drastic in the Stanford Start X applicants so it becomes more fun to compare and learn how they got this idea and why they are working on it.
3. You can learn a lot about yourself through listening to others and their responses to some of the questions. Sometimes entrepreneurs can struggle to answer the question “What is one thing about yourself you’d like to work on or change in order to be a better leader?” It’s an important question to understand and witness live on camera if the entrepreneur is humble: are they introspective, do they see their own faults and what are they doing to improve this?
4. Another question that can throw off an entrepreneur is asking the CTO one thing they would change about their CEO. This can be a particularly prickly question if the founders are new cofounders or have just a few weeks or months together under their belt. Most of the entrepreneurs in this batch answered honestly in this round. It can be fun to see how fast CTO’s respond to this. The speed of their response says a lot about the relationship with their cofounder and the strength and potential longevity of their relationship.
5. There was one group of founders (there were 3) that were all in the same room during the interview. This was a bit shocking since everyone has been doing remote work for 2.5 years now and most founders log-in in separate locations. As an interviewer, you could really see the dynamic between the 3 founders as they perfectly balanced the time responding equally between the 3 of them. I didn’t even realize how rare it is to see founders in the same room together these days, post-Covid. It was a great differentiator from all the other teams who logged-in remotely and personally refreshing to see the banter and camaraderie between this particular team as they shared a small space to discuss their company.
There are many small details that come into play when we judge the founders on whether they will be a good fit for Stanford Start X. But I was so impressed with all the applicants this year that I felt an overwhelming desire to share some of the many reasons why I really enjoy taking the time to meet all the applicants and learn how Stanford Start X can help them to thrive.
If any of you get the opportunity to participate in something similar, I encourage you to volunteer your time because it is helping to shape the next innovations of society and the world we want to live in the future.
Dana Loberg is CEO and Founder of Leo AR, the first augmented reality communications platform that gives anyone the power to enrich the world around them with realistic 3D and 4D animated objects and photogrammetry. Follow her @luckyloberg.