5 big lessons learned from our two days at Startup Grind

This time last week, we were on stage pitching to a global audience at Startup Grind.

It was also an honor — we were one of 50 startups chosen to present, from a pool of more than 7,000 — and a tremendous learning experience. We aren’t the same entrepreneurs who flew out to Silicon Valley. And that’s a good thing.

Here are a few of our main takeaways from the gathering of entrepreneurs and investors from around the world, presented by Google for Entrepreneurs.  

This is going to be a marathon at a sprint’s pace. So we better eat a power bar or two (Kind was the bar of choice at Startup Grind) and hunker down for an intense — but also intensely rewarding — experience.

We met a lot of companies out there at different stages of life. Some had secured funding; others had been bootstrapping for years( while still bringing in revenue). But they all echoed the same basic experience: Building a business is hard work, and for all the successes and critical milestones reached, there are just as many missteps, setbacks and full-on failures.

We believe in our business and its potential to create a global, connected, social giving community. But faith only gets you so far. Creating the kind of business we want uBack to become is going to take a lot of work. Good thing we’re in this for the long haul.

We need to think big, big, big — and small. All at the same time.

The message at Startup Grind was to focus on your grand vision — not surprising in the kind of climate that’s working toward self-driving cars and robots that deliver groceries (yep, we saw that!). We love that. After all, our vision is pretty big. As we say over and over, we want to help people change the world.

But at the same time, entrepreneurs and investors stressed the importance of also thinking small, making sure the details, like basic accounting, aren’t forgotten amid the bigger picture.

The vision is what drives your company forward; the details are what keep your customers satisfied and, ultimately, on board. So don’t focus on the big at the expense of the small.

Female entrepreneurs are still an underrepresented demographic. Especially in the tech space.  

There’s a lot of data out there around the relative lack of female entrepreneurs. We saw that reality at Startup Grind.

We sent four members of our team to the event — all women, 2 of them minorities — and although we were not the only women there, we were certainly among the marginal. It gave us a differentiator, and that led to more opportunities for valuable interactions.

That said, we know opportunities don't always abound for female entrepreneurs. Women get far less VC funding than their male counterparts — a little less than 3%. And sexism plagues the startup space just as it does the corporate world.

As a minority women-led company, we hope to be a powerful voice for our demographic and an example that diverse teams are a force to be reckoned with.

Startups can be supportive, even when we’re all fighting like hell to survive. And that was such a welcome surprise.

The Startup Grind values are as follows:

“We believe in making friends, not contacts. We believe in giving, not taking. We believe in helping others before helping yourself.”

That’s not a mission statement you see often in the business world – and Startup Grind puts each value into practice. After years of attending corporate conferences, it was incredibly refreshing to participate in a well-run, energetic conference that opened every day and session with a standup round of applause as a show of support.

It’s all about community. Think about it: As an individual donor, our impact amounts to maybe a few thousand dollars a year. Collectively, the United States generates $373 billion a year in donations. That’s when you’re able to make real change happen.

And so it goes with the startup community and Startup Grind. There’s a lot we can accomplish when we come together — far beyond what we can each achieve on our own.

Thank you, Startup Grind, for the incredible opportunity. And now we get back to work.