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Looking back on our Wellstreet Launchpad Kick-off Days!

The Kick-off of the Wellstreet Launchpad, our support Programs in partnership with Google Developers Launchpad that we offer to portfolio companies, took place on the 8th and 9th of January 2020. It was a couple of very intense days of solid knowledge sharing and skills development for our founders. We had a FoundersLab Day and a Diagnostics Day.
Published:
March 3, 2020
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Looking back on our Wellstreet Launchpad Kick-off Days!

The Kick-off of the Wellstreet Launchpad, one of our support Programs that we offer to portfolio companies, took place on the 8th and 9th of January 2020. It was a couple of very intense days of solid knowledge sharing and skills development for our founders. Now we’ve had the chance to catch our breath, we’d like to look back and share with you the outcomes of the event.

Powered by Google Developers Launchpad, this program includes sessions conducted according to the Google mentoring methodology.  And for this first event, we gathered both experts from our own mentor pool and also Lead mentors from Google’s global mentor pool. We used this first event to foster knowledge and method sharing between all the mentors, which was exciting to watch (more on this below)!

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On Day 1, we hosted a FoundersLab, a tough session developed by Martin Gonzalez, who came personally to deliver it for 8 founding teams. Martin has been working at Google since 2014, helping leaders at Google and startup founders the world over figure out their toughest people challenges as Head of PeopleLab at the Launchpad Accelerator. This is a day for founders to look inward and also at their relationships with co-founders, to learn how to deal with conflict & adversity, and get them ready to go the distance together. It’s all about understanding some psychological traps that affect the way founders behave and making sure founders have mechanisms in place to deal with these. They found it exhausting, but mainly empowering and really rewarding. 😅 Many of our founding teams actually took some of the techniques and exercises they learned back to their wider teams and used them during their 2020 kick off retreats!

On Day 2, we did a deep dive diagnostics session with each company to uncover strengths, weaknesses, biases and blind spots. The tool we used was developed by one of our fellow Google Launchpad partners in South America and has also been used for a Google partner accelerator in Oman with great success. This exercise then allowed us to jump into 1-on-1 mentoring sessions in the afternoon, tailored to each team’s biggest challenges for 2020, identified during the exercise. The mentoring sessions varied from b2b sales pipeline management to performance marketing training, identifying the right target audience and identifying the right sales channels and partnerships. We had somewhat anticipated this broad range of challenges 🙈, so we had selected a very diverse group of mentors who up to the challenge.

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The Google Developers Launchpad saw an opportunity to train new mentors in delivering their unique FoundersLab, so we hosted a “train the Trainer” session at The Factory. The mentors who would become new deliverers of this session shadowed the FoundersLab on Day 1 and then on Day 2 they had their own training with the founding father of the session, Martin Gonzalez.

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All in all, we were delighted with the days and enjoyed watching founders and mentors throw themselves in, with no pride or reserve, united by one purpose of building better companies, in a sustainable way. We also loved hosting one of Google Launchpad ‘s most prestigious sessions, the Founderlsab, and having it at the Factory made it all the more special.

We can’t thank enough the google team and the mentors Kate Gray, Julie Robles, Jan Beránek, Greg Albrecht, Ishtar Touailat, Bojan Lazic. Arnt Eriksen, Martin Gonzalez, Klara Leander, Magdalena Przelaskowska and Christian Zanders for flying in from all over the world volunteering their time and expertise.

And thank you to our startups for their will to open up and answer the tough questions - all in the pursuit of building incredible, profitable and sustainable businesses in the Nordics.

Thanks and see you on the next Wellstreet Launchpad Day! ❤️

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