Friday, May 1, 2009

Investment pitch and “my grandpa”


Surprisingly enough, the presentations last week reminded me of my grandpa’s story in early 40’s.  At that time, a military commander for the Albanian king “Zogu”, he was forced to commute back and forth facing a tremendous responsibility of his actions and impacts that may have on his entire battalion, sometimes even their lives per se.  Every so often, he would listen to his fellow arguments and then decide on the next steps that would have to be pursued. Indeed some of his actions were enormous success while some total failures.                          

Now sixty years after and in a total different environment, it is me who was sitting and listing to my fellow arguments/presentations trying to persuade me to take a particular action; specifically vote for their idea thT will improve some aspect of the social life.

Comparing to the last century, needs and people perspectives have been changed. Now we do examine offers in total different and new environment. For instance, for better off his nation, my grandpa tried to pursue the politics of listening and then acting sometimes with even fighting in the end. In this global time, me and my colleague directors focus on listening to the young entrepreneurs and take a specific actions such as deciding on which idea we’re  going to invest in but performing everything through creative ways of questioning, talking getting external/ internal perspectives, researching. This happened last week during presentation pitch. Additionally, I tried to look on how young entrepreneurs position themselves, how do they promote, would that be something that is in demand looking from both fff mission and the idea per se.  Overall, all the entrepreneurs showed a strong maturity, passion and frankly I was positively surprised about their abilities to step back, envision the future and in the same time knowing how to not jeopardize any percentile of their idea.  Nevertheless, indeed just as in my grandpa case, have to admit that some of their idea will also face some breakdowns but I’m confident enough that this will only motivate these young entrepreneurs to be global agents for change in the future!

1 comment:

  1. The basic idea that Action Center has sounds more than attractive. There is nothing that I could agree more than that the best way to change something is through the education. Especially when it comes to education of young people; showing kids since they are young age on how many things they can influence through small steps is priceless.
    In Action Center I felt we have seen a will to do so, but also a lot of what they still have to learn and cope with. It was hard to admit to myself that seeing 60 IPods, probably bought only for that purpose seem like a vast of money. Especially when to keep them working all the time, people who work there, are supposed to climb ladders to press play on each of them every couple of hours (I learned that because some languages that I understand were not working so I asked why). Although I could see value of learning through that and showing something in artistic sense, that seemed as enormous vast an irony when is in the place that speaks about hungry people around the world. I hope they will produce new educated generation, and manage to change something as they would say “in this life time”.

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