Getting your foot in the door of success as Moonshot Tech Companies
I was fortunate to get an amazing opportunity to attend the MIT Tough Tech 2020 Summit. There were tons of speakers who were dropping constant knowledge bombs and the overall environment was mind blowing despite being completely virtual.
Tons of Tough Tech discussions were centered around Moonshot Companies, who are solving the world’s biggest challenges and trying to maximize their positive impacts on the world. One conference I attended was on Advanced Systems, where CTO of Motional Laura Major and Professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik from the University of Toronto talked about game-changing business strategies for Moonshot companies 🚀 .
Here are some 🔑Takeaways:
💸Transforming innovative tech advantages to sustainable profits
Firstly, just as civilizations weren’t built in one day, the key is baby steps. Before creating a self-driving car, you need to open up basic research and have self driving laboratories, where you can see results on a smaller scale.
How do you convince investors of the research’s value?
With big impacting solutions, Moonshots can offer up tons of concerns for potential investors. Here are some great points Laura made about making your research more sustainable:
- Make sure you are solving an important problem(pin-point a useful market opportunity)
- Find In-roads or cost areas for larger companies that you can help them with
- Align your project to help solve or benefit a company’s capital
Understanding Tech Versus Understanding Need
If you are a researcher at a moonshot tech company, how can you shift towards using the technology to help with a need?
- There has to be an “early splash” of potential to show… Show the path that the company would be able to take to scale up and address a larger opportunity that could help a potential business or group of businesses.
- Think about the payoff, and cost analysis: will more research and development for specific ideas provide enough capital overtime to provide legitimate value?
- How do you convince the public and non-technical investors about the capabilities(and inculpabilities) of an advanced system? → The 🔑is education and exposure to the technology
✅Setting up for Success
Being part of a moonshot tech company is a constant challenge of growth, and you need to constantly change leaderships styles and challenges to focus on. One of the biggest keys to this is building the right team. Ideally teams that have the following people give the company high potential for success:
- Individual contributors that can help with research
- Engineering team — Just like a mechanical system where different components work together, just as much thought and care is needed for building those teams.
- Preserving talent in their specific areas, while leveraging different private interest avenues can be useful, as long as you have a centralized main objective.
My name is Ankit Nakhawa, I’m a 15 year old passionate about BCIs and AI. If you want to ask a question, talk to me about this article, or anything else, you can contact me at ankitnakhawa@gmail.com, or on LinkedIn, I’d love to hear from you!
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