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Harvard iLabs

Through a very friendly face who attended StartMIT, I got invited to join a few times at the Harvard Innovation Lab. Made many connections there and it is truly exciting! I used to watch startup videos that originated from here.

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Figma prototype‍

After many many user sessions, I noticed patterns regarding what people both liked, misunderstood, and said they wanted. Has a bit of an epiphany while playing with the whiteboard all day.

I condensed the value proposition around 3 subjects:

1. 4x less painful hosting (faster)
2. More genuine dialogue (personal)
3. Commitment you can count on (less uncertainty)
4. Private & Secure / No Ads (cheaper/less cost)

I have never before seen such a positive reception. After the first few, many iterations on the positioning and core features, now all the students I have talked to have signed up. Telos is an experiential good. Meaning it needs to be used for them to actually be able to decide, there is still a long road ahead with the Ladder of Proof, but the problem of social media fatigue, screen time regret, as well as the pain of getting friends to meet up in real life due to faulty tools is painfully clear on the ground.

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Self-Improvement

As I will do anything that will make Telos succeed, I overcame the hesitation that I held beforehand regarding honing in solely on my signature strength; UI/UX design. Although design will always be it for me, I come to the new understanding that I should never refrain from getting into the nitty gritty of anything if I want to be able to properly lead Telos. To make it more fun, currently, I am learning to type with 10 fingers 100 words per minute. Started at 32, now at 51, on average. I am enrolled with Scrimba, an online coding school. Just finished the crash course on HTML and now doing about an hour a day of JavaScript. My goal is to transition to React and then React Native (in which the app is programmed), so I can become an individual contributor (IC) to the front end, as well as understand the behind-the-scenes significantly better.

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I'm incredibly grateful I decided to come to the United States. This journey has opened my eyes to the fact that anything is truly possible with hard work. While the world offers many great places, I'm not exaggerating when I say that if I could choose to be anywhere on Earth, I'd want to be right here. The intelligence of the people here is evident in their deep, thought-provoking questions. There's an extraordinarily high level of motivation in the air, partly due to my exposure to the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship at MIT and Harvard Innovation Labs (iLabs). But it's mostly because of the palpable sense that you could build something here with the potential to spread across the globe.

The core takeaway from my visit can be summarized as follows: MIT is the perfect place to launch a next generation social network to end social networks. Not only is the perfect beachhead. I believe it is also an excellent place to acquired that makes a successful technical team after some traction is secured. I am extremely thankful for the hospitality I received during my visit and have come to the opinion this is where Telos should launch.