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My experience with the Hacker Exchange is full of contradictions. The two weeks I spent in San Francisco were both engaging and extremely exhausting, the longest two weeks and the shortest two weeks of my life, the most exciting and most stressful conditions I have ever been in. This program has tested me in so many different ways. From working for 10 hours aContinue reading “Final thoughts on the Hacker Exchange”

A huge motivation for applying for an entrepreneurship course was the opportunity for me to learn how to present myself confidently as well as being able to work on my public speaking. Being coached by Nathan Gold, one on one and also through his workshop, was really helpful. He helped me realise my weakness of not engaging or tryingContinue reading “What did I take away from this experience?”

Leading up to the pitch, there were many factors to a startup that I had to think about and apply to my own business. Most importantly, I had to think about a revenue stream. For my platform, I wanted to find ways to establish my startup as a social enterprise which would require a revenue stream. The mainContinue reading “It’s the final countdown(pitch)!”

When I started this journey with Hacker Exchange, despite my enthusiasm for this course I had minimal idea of what I wanted to spend my two weeks, day and night, working on. There were so many ideas I would have been excited to work on. I had tossed up looking into ways to incorporate renewableContinue reading “What is my startup?”

To guide us for our pitch at the end of the Hacker Exchange, we received a comprehensive pitch workshop from Nathan Gold. Nathan is a speech coach specialising in pitching as well as having experience working on TedTalks. Throughout this workshop, we were taught how to capture our audience, how to effectively deal with our nerves and how toContinue reading “Preparing, pitching and prototyping”

During the course of the first week and a half, the Hacker Exchange cohort had the fortune of visiting tech companies in the heart of the technology capital of the world. This part of this program was most anticipated by most of the group. The first company visited was called Mixpanel. Mixpanel is a software company that specialises in business analytics and is valued atContinue reading “Site-seeing in Silicon Valley”

From the rest of the week, we received a range of workshops and sessions to continue learning about how to further develop our businesses. Our first talk was with Ryan MacCarrigan, a lean startup coach, who was able to delve further into the core principles to a successful startup. Most of the principles to seemed quiteContinue reading “Ingredients for a Startup”

December 2nd marked the first official day of the Hacker Exchange 1.8 program, an intensive two-week innovation program that would help curate a startup idea and inject it with the potential to become a global startup by providing the opportunity to pitch to venture capitals at the conclusion of this program. Arriving at Silicon Valley, our group of 30 youngContinue reading “Arriving to the Valley”