BC Business
Munjal Shah, GROW Conference | BCBusiness
When looking at career options, it’s difficult to imagine working on a single project for a decade straight. But that’s the scenario posed by Munjal Shah, entrepreneur-in-residence at Charles River Ventures, during his speaker session at this week’s GROW Conference. His talk, titled, “The Intersection of Design and Entrepreneurial Thinking,” focused on incorporating the idea of immersing yourself in a space as an entrepreneur to come up with an idea for a product or service that’s useful and actually solves a real problem. As an example, he took the audience through his own journey through design thinking. And as a successful serial entrepreneur, Shah’s words are worth heeding. He’s co-founded two ecommerce sites (Like.com and Andale), which sold to Google and Vendio respectively. But before jumping into his next project, he decided to figure out what was important to him and completely immerse himself in that space. For him, that was the health and fitness industry. And when he says immerse, he truly meant delving deep into the market to see what products and services are already available. He tried out a variety of health devices, fitness regimens and diets to see what worked. Next, he “became a beginner again” by attending an endocrinology class at Stanford University to understand some foundational health concepts to begin building his ideas. His next piece of advice for entrepreneurs looking for an idea was to “create lots of options,” filter out the terrible ones and choose “the biggest idea with the smallest beachhead.” The concept of putting thought into how entrepreneurs go about finding a problem to solve seemed to resonate with conference-goers, particularly relating to Shah’s passion for his projects.