Some time has passed since my last post about entrepreneurial life.
I got to know 2 new start up accelerators
1. Papaya Ventures – started (among rest) by the impressive lady, Luisa Ribeiro, is located in a trendy remodeled colonial style house in Botafogo. I enjoyed the cool space and the great vide that left me impressed and motivated. I also met the guys from Dujour – who are promising to be the next IT thing for fashion and looks sharing. Maybe the next Instagram? They come from the technology and fashion retail background so they certainly know what they are doing! Apparently, some celebs are using their app already! ( I have a memory of an ant, so I cannot remember which ones, but I believe it was some rapper.. )
For whoever is interesting, Papaya’s last cycle was dedicated to consumer mobile apps and they are working on their next one which will focus on B2B.
2. Tonight, I attended an event from the Founder Institute, which is an accelerator for persons who work full time and want to launch something in their free time. They have an interesting setup of a type of mutual fund: everyone who enters has to contribute and also give a share to all the other existing members. They are now launching an accelerator program in Rio for the first time. I went because they have a big track record of launching ~500 companies in 20+ cities around the world so I figured it could be an interesting option for me.
The information session left me unimpressed by promises of a potential network of Rio-based mentors (who might those be exactly?) and a bunch of middle-aged participants who kept talking about their existing companies and how they want to relaunch them and be innovative.
Now I am trying to evaluate if I want to spend 15 weeks meeting these people and will I learn anything from this. On the other hand, it may be a good discipline to focus on execution. Food for thought.
As for LetMeKnow, I finally managed to buy a very cool customized logo from 99designs.com for only $100 bucks and one day of execution. Best deal I’ve made so far in this business! Now, the only thing left is to figure out how to add it to the website! Indeed, baby steps..
And.. last but not least, Mulheres de Lideraça / Women Leaders is still going very strong with lots of support from everyone! Love it.
Grobetrotter 