The San Jose State’s Office of Innovation hosted the SpartUp Incubator Program Speaker Series, an event where successful entrepreneurs participated as panelists, on Thursday inside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library.
SpartUp Incubator launch director Michael Ashley said the event is the third of a four part speaker series.
He said the series themes are designed as “four pillars” which include ideation, prototyping, startup planning and pitching.
“The reason pitching is the last pillar of the incubator is because there are a lot of pitch competitions coming up for the startups,” Ashley said. “People who have been working on their startups all year long are now ready to talk to investors.”
The event showcased Forward Inception founder and CEO Alora Frederick, ParkStash founder and CEO Sameer Saran, Inquis Medical Inc. CTO Jason Fox and Quency Phillips, executive director and CEO of Lighthouse Silicon Valley shared their experience with startups in the Bay Area.
Each panelist had the opportunity to input their own ideas on conversations ranging from building technologies, understanding the market, creating capital and business planning.
Saran shared a personal anecdote regarding the importance of marketing.
“I had a seven slide deck and that’s all I had. I had zero product but I had an idea of what the customers might need and that was my first contact with them. In that first call we gave them a presentation and one week later, we had a check in the bank,” said Saran, “They said, ‘we need your product.’”
During the event, conversations and ideas ranged from building technologies, understanding the market, creating capital and business planning sprang to and from.
Frederick focused on the analytics of starting a startup, Saran explained how to garner the attention of investors and consumers, Fox gave legal advice and Phillips added how self identity and preservation is important in navigating through the industry.
SpartUp also worked with founders of Xircle Inc. Seema Vora, Surabhi Gupta and Isita Bagayatkar in hosting their second Founder Fiesta.
Xircle is a student-based app that connects students that go to the same university to hangout, study or do different activities around campus according to the Xircle Inc. website.
“The plan for the Founder Fiesta was to try to connect founders and cofounders and learn how to work together to find a cofounder for their own startup so they’ve been fantastic. I hope you [the guest] got some benefit out of the Founder Fiesta,” said Ashley.
Vora said the first speaker event they hosted had six people while this second one has 34.
Max Rothe, mechanical engineering senior and event moderator, said the success of Founder Fiesta was due to Xircle Inc. changing their prompts and activities, helping maintain new student engagement.
Bagayatkar, who is also co-founder and CEO of Xircle Inc., said, “My thoughts on [Founder Fiesta] is the vibe, I got was a lot of people are in the same place that I was in my sophomore year before Xircle Inc. They’re interested in the space but maybe they don’t have an idea, team or know what the next step is going to be. There are common questions, is it risky and there’s a recession. I think our next Founder Fiesta is to help them on how to get started.”
SpartUp is also preparing for future competitions and conventions.
Ashley said he stresses that SpartUp is not just for students or alumni, but also welcomes faculty, staff and community members to join their program. He also said SpartUp is working on building their international affairs with founders from Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Eastern Europe to talk about centralized challenges they face in their country.
The program has garnered 271 incubators and 25 startups working with real companies in the span of seven months.
SpartUp is scheduled to host its next speaker series on March 2, in preparation for the Sunstone CSU Startup Launch Competition on May 5, at SJSU. SpartUp is expected to host 18 out of the 23 CSU’s, where each university will choose its two best startups to compete for over $200,000 in awards.
