Last class day in Dublin

Today started off with our class meeting in the morning.  Our purpose today was to have each group talk about what each learned during their time working for the various companies.  Leadership was the talking point, but we also were each able to speak a little bit about the work projects too.  This really forced me to think critically about some of my takeaways and it was great to hear what everyone else had learned.  It was clear we all came away with many valuable lessons.  I had three main takeaways that I shared with everyone and will share here as well.  First lesson, when you are considering a new product for a company or if you are a new company working on your first product, you have to do your due diligence in your market research.  Which leads into my second takeaway, and that is when you come up with a result that the product does not fit into the market the way you thought, you have to address it.  Even though it is hard to admit that the product won't fit into the market place the way you wanted, it is better to find out when you are doing the market analysis before you get even further invested into developing it and waisting your time and money.  And finally, no matter how cool of an idea you think you have, if it does not solve a problem that will make people want to buy it, it does not matter.  You can't make money off sommething that does not fit into the market place.  In terms of leadership, I learned how to make things work as a team when there is no clearly defined leader.  Although it is probably better to have a clear leader, sometimes you can join together and work through obstacles as a team and rely on each other.

The second part of the day we visited the NDRC, which is effectively a launch pad for entrepreneurship start ups in Ireland.  They were very receptive to us and had 4 different entrepreneurs present to us their proposals that they had already pitched the week prior.  They all had pitched to try to get further funding and it was interesting to hear them talk about their different business ideas.  I was a little surprised to see how much money each of them were asking for to fund the business.  I thought about if I was an investor if I would give any of them money for their businesses, and I only would have given one of them any money out of the 4.  Simply because I did not believe some of them had a great enough idea or business model to truly be successful.  I believe this is a result of so much government funding going on in Ireland for start ups.

After our time at NDRC we had a good dinner together at this restaurant called the Porterhouse.  It was good to celebrate the conclusion of our class and adventure in this fashion, all together one last time in Ireland.  We have a presentation to give on the 16th of June back in Colorado and then we are done with the course!