Gavin Tweedie reflects on the Seraphim Space Camp experience
GSI was honoured to be selected to join Seraphim Capital’s first iteration of the Space Camp program that took place during an intensive 9 week period during May through July this year. The program exposed GSI to some leading lights in the Spacetech sector who provided valuable insights and guidance.
It is unlikely GSI would have been able to easily gain direct access to global companies like Airbus, Telespazio, Cyient, Rolls Royce, SSTL as well as seasoned VC investors and founders of billion dollar companies such as Michael Jones, inventor of Google Earth.
The program has helped GSI to accelerate its thinking and provide clarity on the role and value the company offers its clients and partners.
It was very demanding for our company as we had every day business to take care of. We were going through a new seed raise, on-boarding new customers, servicing contracts, all while trying to keep up with the intense program schedule.
But I can honestly say now, at the end of the program, that we really benefited from it.
We were challenged to upgrade our thinking in several areas around our messaging, our strategy and our key business focus . A business sprint run by Satellite Catapult also helped our team to brainstorm and unlock a number of ideas that were percolating but had never been fully explored.
So my key takeaways from this program were:
You can always learn something and should be open and receptive to new ideas
Be prepared to accept that you may have made some mistakes and admit them
Leave your ego at the door, it may take a bruising, but it’s necessary to grow
Don’t make excuses, make time for events like this
You are capable of far more than for which you give yourself credit.
In the last few days before the final pitch event, I’ll admit myself and George Lindsay, our COO were working 18 hour days to craft a set of messaging that would appeal to venture capitalists.
On the final two days, we presented our technology and our proposition on a demo day and investor pitch day. Both days were enjoyable and resulted in a valuable opportunity for our company to engage with the potential business partners who were among the principal corporate sponsors within Seraphim, in addition to now being on the radar of several interested VCs.
So all in all, we have grown as a company and are now much more aligned with the business problems we solve for our customers.
I would recommend any start-up to give serious consideration to participating in an incubator such as Seraphim Capital and we are looking forward to the future with a renewed sense of optimism.