Mentoring and co-creating at “4 Years From Now”

Here are my takeaways from the amazing event “4 Years From Now” a.k.a. 4YFN, the young brother of the mighty Mobile World Congress located side by side in Barcelona.

For those of you who know me, you know I am driven by a passion for business growth and unchartered territories. It always reminds me of David Bowie’s iconic line, “Transmission… transition” from TVC15. It mirrors the journey I guide B2B Tech startups through: transmitting insights to spark meaningful transitions in their businesses.

My first client was a telecom startup. To support its CEO, a brilliant technical guru, in achieving sustainable business growth, I created the ‘From Tech To Growth^IP ’ framework. Fast forward to this week’s event. I could not help but notice that I discussed the same pain points with the B2B technology startups and scaleups that I met in Barcelona.

Except that there was a twist.

I first presented the ‘From Tech To Growth’ framework at a Founders’ Workshop.

I spent more time than usual on practical tools to help the 40 founders in the room. The goal was to help them get immediate outcomes and RoI on the questions that matter, as illustrated in the slide.

Then I participated to one-to-one mentoring sessions, one of my favorite exercises, where the line “transmission… transition” becomes real and tangible. Of course, in very limited time, we were not trying to transform the whole startup. We focused rather on a specific issue to solve.

• For a successful startup in Portugal, what are the criteria to decide whether its first international affiliate should be in Spain (proximity) or Brazil (language, culture)?

• For an AI and blockchain startup on secure identity authentication, should they expedite the exploration phase with banks or pivot towards selling APIs to developers’ communities, maybe using Telco Camara APIs?

• For a laser communications company, should they add to their defense and space vertical a ground-based point-to-point connectivity offering? And if yes, when?

It went on and on. Each of them came with their own issue at hand.

The one challenge which keeps them awake at night.

The bottom line is this: they had no time to apply the framework in its entirety. It is therefore essential to ‘co-create’ the framework which will make them successful… in four years from now.

Thank you

Philippe

P.S.1: You may take the “From Tech To Growth” self-assessment scorecard. It is free, it only takes two minutes. It offers some reflective questions and provides some customized tips based on your score.

P.S.2: Whenever you are ready, you can make a short, complementary appointment with me to discuss your business growth issues at hand. Go to Recognition Call.