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# System prepended metadata

title: how I felt @QØ Catapult Incubator as a program

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# how I felt @QØ Catapult Incubator as a program

## what went well

- the startup model/framwork taught is proven
- our teachers & most mentors are extremely knowledgeable & are able to apply all they know into our particular situation
- fruits & snacks
  - the selection and amount was great, especially when we have the huge packets & people who like it can take lots without feeling guilty that other people won't be able to have it.
- **mindset change & paradigm shift through practice**

## what didn't go well

- meals. consider stepping outside of 
  - it usually isn't difficult for peskitarian to find food to eat, but with the options in Chicago every day for one/two meals I resorted to no or very little source of protein and rely mostly on fruits, even though the number of total food options was fairly large. Sometimes the only meal option was medium spicy (in particular the "tofu stir-fry"), and it was dificult to take in large amounts especially if not used to spicy food.
- post- customer discovery interviews: my team didn't sit together, share and reflect
  - I realize for every team it's different, some/most well functional ones probably did sit together and shared primary data in an additive & assessitive fashion that did result in some great insight.
  - Our communication for bridging customer discovery interviews was unguided, partially due to a lack of understanding of how best to communicate that information, resulting in each person vouching for their customers basing only on secondary data from themselves.
  - I think each member need to be critical about cherry-picking/highlighting the best insights from all the interviews (basis upon which each member does read every word in the journal) which they found true, and be very careful to not consider the journal as statistically complete & consistant dataset as to support conclusions such as "60/100 of people we interviewed did not have this problem, thus we shouldn't focus on this". Because guess what, through the few people who do find that problem exist for them, it's possible they some collection of commonalities. once these commonalities are hypothesized, the team can go out and test whether they can based on that to locate their customers.
  - I do not recall in the customer discovery curriculum any content related to how best to communicate our individual insights gained to the team. correct me if I'm wrong, but as I would figure, the pipeline would work something like:
    ```mermaid
    graph LR
    A[individual/pair interviews]-->|knowing how to share|B[team knowledgebase]
    B-->|find our way|C[hypotheses fail/pass]
    C-->|identify new hypotheses to test|A
    ```
- similarly, we felt somewhat lost 

## my personal faults & improvements

- I feel regretful and doubt myself for two things I was considering initiating but did not execute:
  - teaching people how to sort trash in SF: just by standing next to the trash cans for three lunchtimes & pointing at which one goes where, and if asked give a simple explanation. after continuous three days, people are going to remmeber.
  - asking people to bring their own cutlery & plate for Chicago/NYC
- team work... you know the details so won't elaborate here.

- did not take into consideration the vibe with founder's methodology/mindset for team selection.
  - I was only picking the venture, not the founder, and I wish I had differently. I should have known, with flexibility & the right people, the right things happen. I think if I had experienced that before or had been shown one of those teams as example rather than the teams which founder went to MIT & built this amazing product; in other words, if I had been aware, I would have totally made my choices based on founders.
  - it's more than the personality... it's the mindset difference / vibing. the personality test didn't give me/QØ usable information, since I scored ~50% on all the criterias... reason is very apparent, the scenarios which the tests hypothesizes are somewhat more individualistic rathar than intereaction with social/team scenarios. I was considering them in a specific manner & thus my response was varied across the board of questions testing for any particular characteristc. for instance, it asks TODO.
  - I think it's safe to acknowledge that there is a difference between the two, at least for me: because the parts you feel comfortable reflecting/admitting to yourself is different than those with others, additionally your self-representation would be situational. why unit test (test each person's individualistic behaviors) when we can integration test(test how people would react when placed in a few particular team situations, and judge whether they'd react well with each other based on those responses manually)?
  - maybe there are good reasons, perhaps because people less accurately self-report for hypothetical situational questions. but we 
- I need to 

## QØ responsibilities & suggestions

## food for thought

- I stubbled upon B8ta twice during my customer discovery & validation trips. potential partner?
- 