I was responsible for the business development of the company. When joining Sympheny (a SaaS Swiss startup that has built a software that allows urban planners to increase the sustainability of city-based energy solutions), they had a very good product but had difficulty in explaining it. Therefore, my main mission was to bring my business-related profile and help them build a vision and business plan that would help them sell their product and raise enough funds.
The main action items I had were the following:
- A 70+ page business plan. The document outlined essential aspects of the future strategy of the company, from its mission and go-to-market strategy to financial forecasts and equity structure.
- A survey of potential customers of the company to better define an effective pricing strategy and a cost-efficient sales channel.
- An effective pitch deck to present to potential investors. During the last three months, I developed numerous versions of the document. I incorporated all useful feedback, both from within the company and from juries of competitions in which we took part.
- Completed and submitted applications to VC pitch competitions, mainly in Switzerland.

I made use of the knowledge gained in the MBA, mainly related to the following courses:
- Foundations of VC: thanks to Professor Angela Lee, I had the knowledge I needed in order to better advice Sympheny on the right steps to take to raise enough funds. Specifically, I applied the following learnings:
a) How to build an effective pitch deck, i.e., how to convey information and advantages of the company so that investors decide to invest in the company
b) How talk to potential seed stage investors and understand the main drivers behind their decisions and behavior
c) How to find out the main flaws in the company to strengthen its appeal to VC funds, i.e., team composition and market size in Sympheny´s case
- Managerial Negotiations: This course was essential for me to advise Sympheny on how to negotiate with the ETH University in Zurich. ETH had the rights to an exclusive license part of Sympheny´s software, an aspect of their business that had to be addressed by negotiating a royalties structure that was fair to both parties.
- Strategy Formulation: I found that it was essential for me to properly transmit the importance of a medium-term strategy to convince Sympheny of some hard work yet to be done.

There were several challenges that we managed to overcome to make the experience as seamless as possible:
- Being based in a different country from the rest of the team made communication more cumbersome. Their product and industry is quite a complex one, hence I had to ask many questions and organize many meetings with the different team members to ensure that I was understanding their potential well enough.
- The initial market size of their product was simply not big enough. I had to properly explain to them that we need to increase the market size (by expanding into other market segments or even adapting the SaaS´s functionality) in order to convince VC funds. This took a bit of time, since I had to firstly understand the product´s adaptability and the market's needs, but I managed to increase the size from $300M to almost $50B.
- All the team members were engineers with not much business experience. As such, it was initially challenging to properly explain the huge importance of certain tasks that seemed inconsequential to them, such as building an attractive pitch deck.

Key takeaways:
- Always make sure that you and the rest of the team are on the same page. If team members have different backgrounds, it is essential to empathize and understand why each person´s priorities are drastically different.
- The life of a startup CEO is tough! It was sometimes hard to get Andrew Bollinger to review some of the work I had produced, but I got to see how stressful his role was. This is essential knowing that I intend to be an entrepreneur at some point in my career.
- Remote work is tough, but you can really make it work. You have to make time to get to know the team even if it´s in a virtual format: organize drinks, chat about non-work-related issues, etc.
- Even if you have a good product or service, it will not be of much use if you don´t sell it well. Sympheny has a great product and potential, but they were not explaining its virtues properly.