1. PICK YOUR FOUNDING TEAM CAREFULLY. Some of the girls were focused and aggressive; others were less organized or preoccupied. Keeping on their year-long schedule for business planning, design prototyping, market research and selling took emotional endurance. Each company picked an Operations VP to motivate and coordinate the other officers, with varying results. (Did I work for this start-up in the late 90's?)
2. DO SOME EARLY CUSTOMER RESEARCH. Some companies had to switch products early on, after finding that their first product lines didn't sell. Good experience, but the groups who squeezed in some test marketing got a faster start.
3. PICK SALES CHANNELS THAT REACH YOUR TARGET CUSTOMERS. Unsurprisingly, most of the 10 companies make products for teen/tween girls. ("Know your customer.") Finding sales venues was very challenging, however. Outside of school, where do you set up shop to reach teen girls? Malls discourage unlicensed vendors, and supermarkets trend toward adults. The local farmer's market had mixed results. Perhaps eBay?
4. MANAGING TO THE NUMBERS IS HARD. None of these young execs had experience projecting sales or cost-of-goods. Eight months later, they have a sharper sense of their ventures' inputs and outputs. Like all of the start-ups I've seen, teams had to scramble and re-plan as they reached the market.
5. LEAN ON EXPERIENCE. Each team had two adult coaches, meeting weekly on deliverables and progress. The coaches provided sage advice, particularly on intra-company dynamics. (That's a polite phrase for staying focused and working together.) Pencil in board of directors here.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
