The other day we met Samir, CEO of SiNode a Northwestern University Startup company dedicated to improving battery performance through the use of graphene. Their product aims to be the solution to the problem of mobile device batteries that need to be recharged several times a day. Samir walked us through the pitch of SiNode, something he said took them about a year to perfect to the point where instead of being placed in pitch competitions, they were winning them. The pitch was clean and simple, and very effective through the use of well chosen graphics, simple language and judicious use of animations to keep the audience’s attention. Although Samir was not actually “pitching” for real it was easy to see how he and the company could be very persuasive.

Samir has a pretty impressive background in management consulting and politics, even working on the Obama campaign before finishing an MBA at Northwestern and starting SiNode. While I imagine he has quite a number of contacts, they would probably not all be in the energy and mobile devices sector. One of the things about building a company is that you need to contact other people to partner with to help you manufacture and sell. The question is, is how do you find these people? Here’s a few tips we gleaned about founding a start-up and networking:

• Utilise your university’s alumni database and finds who works for the target company. Contact them and ask for an introduction to someone at the relevant dept.
• Making contacts and maintaining them takes lots of hours on the phone.
• You need to hustle & get out of your comfort zone. If you aren’t willing to hustle, get someone who is.
• Pitch your business idea ASAP by entering competitions. You won’t win the first time but it will help refine your message and understand your weaknesses. You’ll also see whether people are actually getting excited about your product.
• Understand the value of having a good team. You need both a business-oriented person and a tech-oriented person. You also will need the inventor or someone with kudos on board – it will improve your credibility.
• The MBA needs to understand the technology to some extent, and the engineer/PhDs need to understand the business side of the company in order for them to be able to understand what investors want and customers want.
• The whole team needs to be involved when setting milestones, PhDs MBAs and Engineers. Otherwise you will run into problems of not delivering on time. Which can eventually lead to investors pulling funding.
• Understand the industry value chain, who supplies to who and where you can fit in. It might be that you can’t supply direct to a big company. But you might be able to make yourself indispensable to one of their suppliers and get in that way.