Global Entrepreneurial Experience Day 1
Ever since I started watching the show Shark Tank I always wanted to become an entrepreneur. That is why when my parents first mentioned this course I was very impatient. I wanted to start right away. I wanted to know what steps to take to become very successful. I believed that this course can teach me exactly those things. It could teach me to be an entrepreneur who can strike a deal on Shark Tank. Here is my experience on day 1 of the course.
Introduction
The seminar is hosted by Rutgers University. Today was the first class of the week. It is called Global Entrepreneurial Experience or GEE for short. It was from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. In the beginning of the class, the host James Barrood talked about what we were going to do in the class today. After he told us our schedule for the day, we heard from Francisco D’Souza, a co-founder of Cognizant Technology Solutions.
Francisco D’Souza: Cognizant Technology Solutions
Cognizant is a very successful company worth billions, that is also ranked in the top 200 of all the Fortune 500 companies. Frank talked about all the things he learned from his time as an entrepreneur and CEO of Cognizant. The first point he taught us was to always keep learning. He also said to turn our hobbies into jobs. That way you can make your jobs your hobbies. If you do this, you never actually feel like you are working. This way your job will be fun.
Dream Team
Next we listened to an entrepreneur Mukesh Patel, a Rutgers Professor, who talked about how to make the perfect team for any company you might start. He said that the perfect team consists of 7 key components. The founders/executives, the competitors who may want to invest, your employees, board of directors, contributors/investors, experts, and finally, you. He also said that your team should always consist of people who are smarter than you. If you are the smartest person, then it is not a good team at all. If you aren’t the smartest person in the room it will make you want to do more than what you would have if you were the smartest person. This brings me to the final point. You must always push yourself to the fullest.
Cooperation
We next heard from, Diana Kyser, who is a consultant, talked about the best ways to cooperate with your teammates. She said a main part of cooperation is to listen to each other’s ideas, and don’t rule any of them out unless you are sure it won’t work.. She also said no company can ever be successful without cooperation. She also said the one of the best ways to help with your cooperation and teamwork skill was to do team building exercises, and activities every now and then. This way your team can take a quick break and use the time to refocus and get back on track.
Social Media
Finally, we heard from three entrepreneurs Sree Sreenivasan, Judi Fox, and Mark Metry, author and entrepreneur. They all were spoke about the best way to share content, the social media. They all had their own opinions on what platform is best. However they all agreed that different reasons call for different social media platforms. For business and professional work, LinkedIn is the way to go. On the other hand, if you want to spread the news about your idea or company in a more personal way, they said Twitter as well as Instagram would almost always be more suited. They also said when trying to spread the news, always send it through multiple platforms, to guarantee that many people have read about your idea/company. They finished off with saying that social media is the best way to share content about specific ideas.
What I gained
Listening to such successful entrepreneurs helped me gain a ton of information about how to start you own business. I learned about how to form the perfect team, how to cooperate, and how to communicate with others about a product I might be selling. I even found a real life example of what all of this can achieve from the success of Cognizant. I had never known that for a dream team to be successful there has to be people smarter than you. Using all of this information, if I should ever start a company, I would know exactly where to begin and I would be set for success. With that we wrapped up the first day of this seminar. I can’t wait to see what I will learn tomorrow. Hope you enjoyed reading my blog about Day 1 of the Global Entrepreneurial Experience(GEE).
NytroMind 