VentureWell Conference: Idea to IMPACT

Day 1: August 26th

We sent a team of three to a conference held by one of our stakeholders, VentureWell. The E-1 conference workshop is held in Cambridge at the MIT nuclear technology center. Several guest mentors joined the full-time staff of VentureWell to discuss pertinent issues and venture creation. Our team was grouped with Kubala Cryotherapy and Calla Imaging, two budding projects vested in women’s health in low-resource settings.

We discussed top-down versus bottom-up analysis and Naakesh’s recent work on TAM, SAM, and SOM came in handy.

All three days we walked 40 min from our hostel to MIT. The walk was beautiful, next to the Charles River.

This was one of the many poster activities VentureWell made each team do. Pictured is a rough draft of Ukweli’s value chain. Some things to notice are the lack of subsystems due to the market and the trifecta between wholesale consumers, customers, and consumers themselves.

Day 2: August 27th

The visiting mentors focused on deep-dives into segmented value propositions and market discovery. Our team prepared three value propositions for three different applications: UTI screening for pregnant women, UTI screening for everyone, and various assay applications of screening for STIs or oil quality. Our strongest value proposition was for pregnant women.

Naakesh Gomanie (left) and Cassidy Drost (right) craft a value chain for Ukweli on Day 1 of VentureWell.

Day 3: August 28th

Today was a short day at the conference. We spent most of the time discussing IP and ways that the venture could fail. Venturewell ended the conference by informing us on different coaching and funding opportunities that can be applied to later on as we advance our venture.

We headed straight to Boston’s Logan Intl. Airport as soon as the conference ended. The journey to Sierra Leone had finally begun. We were all super excited for the layover in Netherlands.

Naakesh on the plane to Boston!