Key takeaway.
Having limited resources forces entrepreneurs to be innovative. We met with Tero's founders Elizabeth Coulombe and Valérie Laliberté and our colleague Jean-Gabriel Crevier to talk resourcefulness and startup mindset.
Since generating over $1.75M in pledges through its incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign, the Tero team has been hard at work building the scalable prototype for its next-generation composting technology, which allows you to transform food waste into fertilizer in a mere 3 hours. Driven by a deep desire to make a dent in the environmental crisis, cofounders Elizabeth Coulombe and Valérie Laliberté launched the project knowing full well they’d didn’t have all the answers, nor did they have the resources to do it all on their own. Their solution: leverage their scrappiness and seek out the expertise and experience of others to build a viable, marketable product at scale.
Their solution: leverage their scrappiness and seek out the expertise and experience of others to build a viable, marketable product at scale.
Words we won’t soon forget
It can be a blessing to have a lot of resources, but sometimes, when you fall into excess, it can become a curse that causes you to throw yourself into a whole bunch of projects and ideas. If we’d had our current resources when we started 10 years ago, I don’t think we would have had this much success. It’s our experience face-planting on smaller projects that’s made us capable of tackling bigger, more ambitious projects today.
Jean Gabriel Crevier
Former GSoft CFO & Cofounder of Le Chiffre
If constraints can be fuel for innovation, why not experiment with creating additional limitations around your next project to see if it can foster out-of-the-box thinking and creativity?
Perhaps you can slim down the budget for a certain part of the project, try giving your team an ambitious timeline or create a parameter around the tools and processes they can use. Though it’s important to make sure you’re allocating the resources they need to give a project a fighting chance, finding ways to keep your team lean and resourceful no matter its size can be a great way to generate new ideas.
Rest assured: these videos were created in 2019, so don’t worry we didn’t have to use compliances of COVID-19 security measures everyone is kept healthy and safe.