21 Oct Startup School Diary 1

Hi and welcome to our first blog entry in English! We have some fantastic news. This year, we are participating in the Startup School programme hosted by Tetuan Valley, presenting Fundación Verón as our project.

We are extremely excited and honored to be chosen as one of the participating teams by Tetuan Valley. Only 12 teams have been selected of around 120 projects that applied.

Every year, Tetuan Valley (a startup accelerator based in Madrid and partnered with Google) hosts a six week intensive entrepreneurship training course, in English and in person, mainly focused on teams who are trying to launch their technological product to the market. For this reason, the programme is mainly centered on startups that are still in their early stages, in order to aid them in their first baby steps.

Each week there is a session covering different topics on how to launch a startup into a market: effective presentations, product validation, metrics and business models, product development, legal, and investment. Once the six weeks are completed, there is a Hackathon, in which all the teams meet for an intensive 48 hours to work on programming and problem resolution. Finally, after all of this, Tetuan Valley hosts a Demo Day at the Google for Startups Campus, in which each team presents their final pitch in front of investors, entrepreneurs, other accelerators, and different agents from the startup community. This is a fantastic opportunity for innovative but little known startup projects and entrepreneurs to get their ideas out into the community.

Every session, the 10 selected teams also present a 3 minute pitch on their project. This way, each team is encouraged to practice their pitch, listen to feedback, improve their presentation, and thus improve how they intend to sell their project. The idea is that week to week progress from each team is visible, and that the final pitch on Demo Day is a massive improvement from their first presentation during the interview stage. 

Throughout the entire process, Tetuan provides mentors for each project, consisting of members of the Tetuan Valley team, alumni of previous Startup School editions, and members of other startups working at the Google Campus.

The best thing about this programme (apart from learning, haha) is that it is entirely free. Entrepreneurs can meet other entrepreneurs and investors, make contacts, and use the Google for Startups Campus facilities all without cost! All whilst being aided by the very well established and well known Tetuan Valley. Tetuan also doesn’t take any quotas or equity from any of the selected projects, all they ask is that you give back what you can to the community in the future. Basically, they are legends.

The 19th of October, we attended the first session of the Startup School. We got to listen to all the other amazing entrepreneurs pitch their projects, and then Patricia presented our pitch to some fantastic and constructive feedback. We are very excited for the next session and to see everyone again!

Thank you for sharing this incredible experience with us, Tetuan Valley! See you soon!