Skip to content
This repository has been archived by the owner on Nov 12, 2020. It is now read-only.

Latest commit

 

History

History
37 lines (23 loc) · 3.23 KB

3.2-office-hours.md

File metadata and controls

37 lines (23 loc) · 3.23 KB

{% include "_nav.md" %}

Faculty Office Hours

Office Hours are half-hour long online meetings with SV.CO Faculty. This is how startups ask faculty questions and how they get personal feedback. Faculty Office Hours are intended to guide startups through the five stages.

We've noticed that startups usually ask three kinds of questions:

  1. "What is your opinion about our idea/product/method?"

    We've advised faculty to always preface this with this sentence: "I'm happy to give you my opinion, but the only opinion that matters will be provided by your customers."

  2. Factual questions like "What is the estimated market size of hyperlocal delivery startups?".

    A majority of such questions can be answered by our search engine overlords1.

  3. "Should I do this now? Which option should I choose?"

    See the preface to the first kind of question, but just to set expectations right, a faculty member can never choose for you. The best they can do is to provide tradeoffs between options.

Office Hours are structured so that teams get regular, quick feedback. Here's some tips to a great Office Hour:

  • Get access to a good Internet connection. This is the #1 reason why Office Hours are disappointing. When possible get access to a stable, reliable connection.
  • Make sure your founding team is together. Having distributed teams is fine, but we've noticed that having them together leads to better conversation & less trouble with connection issues.
  • Do your homework.
  • Make questions specific to your product. "How will I talk to customers?" is a good question, but a better one would be: "My product requires a partner involvement before I can launch. How can I get early feedback from customers?"
  • Ask & graciously accept feedback. Remember that most faculty do not spend a lot of time with your team, so their impressions might be skewed to a half-hour session. Even if they are mistaken in their impressions, accept their feedback. You can always schedule more sessions to fix what is wrong.
  • Act on feedback. It's disappointing when teams do not act on feedback provided by the faculty. Of course, teams are free to decide not to act on any piece of advice (this is common & completely OK), but they should be able to reason out and explain why they didn't.

The most important tip is this:

  • Prepare relevant questions beforehand. Pass them to the faculty through your SV.CO representative. As an example, if you are talking to a Marketing & Sales faculty, you might want to brainstorm questions in that field and send them in beforehand. We've noticed that the first 10 minutes of the Office Hour session are most productive and it's a good idea to spend that time on questions you'd like to get answered.

To schedule a session, speak to your SV.CO representative. To facilitate scheduling and to make sure the faculty has time to prepare for your questions, you must schedule Office Hours three days in advance. That means that if you'd like to schedule an Office Hour on Monday, you should get confirmation for a slot by Friday 2PM.

The current Office Hour calendar is available here.

Footnotes

  1. Google. And efficient googling is also an extremely useful skill. ↩