“Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary co-founder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. Great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, “I didn’t quit.” ‘’ Ben Horowitz, author The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Being a first-time founder has its blessings and its courses. During this session, we want to talk about the realistic goals of embarking on the exciting and challenging journey of starting your first business. Especially if you have been working in the academia for the past years and you want right now to make the leap and start your own company based on your research results, you will have a better experience starting a spinout if you are armed with some expectations about your likely journey. Spinning-out requires a clear time and usually also money commitment, and its success highly depends on the founder team’s passion, irrational optimism and deep faith the technology they’ve developed. From writing their first business plan to their first investment and scaling up, 4 founders from 4 different TU Wien- affiliated companies in different stages share their experience with transforming their research into successful products or services.
At the end of the workshop you will:
Guests:
Nermina Mumic – CEO & founder Legitary
Nermina graduated with honours from Vienna University of Technology with a master’s degree in Technical Mathematics. After her studies she gained profound experience as a data scientist in a leading global IT consulting company, developing AI solutions for various industry applications. Within the scope of her PhD in Technical Mathematics she developed a new machine learning method for fraud detection in streaming data. Based on her research results, she founded Legitary GmbH as a spin-off from Vienna University of Technology. Legitary is the winner of the world’s leading music startup competition Midemlab.
Benjamin Mörzinger – Founder Campfire Solutions
I would like to be able to look my future children in the eyes and say that I have done everything to leave them the world as a better place. That’s why I am committed to ensuring that we, at Campfire Solutions, have the right long-term goals and that the team has the perfect environment to be effective.
Julie Rosser – CEO Pregenerate
As an equine surgeon, I grew frustrated at the lack of effective treatments for arthritis in horses. When I began researching arthritis, I learned first hand the true cost of animal testing in medicine and vowed to establish an alternative. Pregenerate’s Arthritis on a chip is that alternative, enabling pharmaceutical research for arthritis in both the human and veterinary medicine sectors – with a market size greater than $570 billion
