How did VentureWell contribute to your leadership development and your professional trajectory?
VentureWell gave me the foundation for understanding the entrepreneurial/venture capitalist (VC)–backed founder journey. Participating in [each of the] three phases of VentureWell’s accelerator programming and learning about different challenges we might face helped me be more confident in building and leading MITO® Material Solutions as a recent college graduate. Now, I have an established career and the ability to grow professionally in different areas.
What’s a key learning or takeaway from the VentureWell program you participated in, and how did it impact your journey?
File organization and stress tests. We still use the VentureWell Google Drive outline for our internal filing. It has helped me raise and close multiple funding rounds, and I always know where to find things. The stress tests at the beginning helped set a temperature gauge of reaction to different scenarios throughout my entrepreneurial journey. While you can never imagine which scenarios you will face, these test experiences helped me and my co-founders understand what areas of the business we were better at handling and how to come up with a proper response plan for unexpected events.
What’s the biggest change or milestone your institution or venture has experienced since participating in VentureWell programming?
The macro environment has made funding quite difficult in recent years, and when you pair that with climate and materials-based companies having fewer VCs investing in the space, our biggest challenge was finding investors who could do more than just add funds to the company, which prevented proper investment in growth activities.
Read more about Haley’s innovation journey.