How to Build a Strong Team as Young Entrepreneurs

On October 12, we invited a team of student founders who founded the “Dream Accelerator” startup — Joseph Liu, Christina Wang, and Roy Mao as our guest speakers to share their stories and experiences co-founding and running this company.

What is Dream Accelerator and how did the company get started?

With the aim to support high school ideas through community crowdfunding, Dream Accelerator was established as an online platform where students can see funding opportunities from the general public to execute their projects, ideas, and organizations.

The idea was originally initiated by Joseph when participating in the Future Entrepreneur Program (FEC) program Phase I. He then met Christina and Roy, and they together moved this project forward to Phase II and Phase III.

“At the beginning, this was just a project designed towards helping high school student clubs with the demand for school funding. That quickly evolved into a more substantial idea. It is currently a platform to help any teenagers who are striving to start their own organizations.”

In addition to that, the team also discovered the problem from their customer persona. One example is the student club that collaborates with NASA and SpaceX, and sends the interested students and parents to the international space station. The club was costly and required an amount of 20,000 USD in total. And the school kept refusing to provide this funding. After relentless consultation, the school ended up funding this club with 20,000 USD but closed the club for the following years. However, the students who came out from this club had gained a lot of scientific knowledge and skills.

“So we came up with Dream Accelerator to promote student clubs and campaigns, and help solve the issue of funding through Internet crowdfunding.”

Finding the right business partners

Christina and Joseph connected with each other at the end of FEC Phase I, and then started searching for another teammate. After about a month, they found Roy, their third partner.

When asked how they decided to partner with each other, Christina said that she chose to join the team rather than stick to her original business idea because she was more attracted by Joseph’s idea and himself as a partner to work with. And Joseph told us that he didn’t intentionally do anything dramatic to attract two other teammates, but just showed his true self to others and let them two decide. As the last person to be on the team, Roy, he decided to join the team after a one-hour talk because he thought these two people were the ones he could trust.

“While working as a team, we have definitely encountered a lot of challenges. But we help each other a lot.”

For example, Christina, as the CFO of Dream Accelerator, has struggled with math calculations during Phase II. With the team’s help, she has done a much better job, as she told us during the Monday Series.

Apart from being partners, they are all very good friends. Joseph and Roy have been hanging out quite often. As for Christina, she is currently based out of the U.S. and is also looking forward to meeting her co-founders in person soon.

Their experience with the Future Entrepreneur Challenge (FEC)

Here are the comments we received from the three guest speakers:

“One of the biggest things I’ve learned from this program is that you gotta be very committed when dealing with startups.”

“Meeting new people, and advancing both the academic and the practical side of skills doing a business really helps us a lot.”

“I came to understand that doing a startup and being an entrepreneur is a long and hard process.”

“As an entrepreneur, you gotta be flexible to face different situations, and stay calm.”

“A major aspect of being an entrepreneur is that you should know how you establish your credibility and how to demonstrate yourself in public.”

The Future Entrepreneur Program, in these three guest speakers’ eyes, has pushed them to their limits and helped them cultivate a whole bunch of hard and soft skills in developing their startup.

“I’m beyond grateful for what I took away from this program,” Roy concluded.

If you want to learn more about their stories, please check out the full episode here.