Schulich Alumnus Shares Her Business Insights
Every month, Schulich Startups hosts a workshop for our entrepreneurial students, in which they invite a notable alumnus to share the lessons learned while launching their business.
Earlier this month, our students had the opportunity to hear from Eva Lau (MBA ’05), the Managing Director and Co-Founder of Two Small Fish Ventures, a global investment fund that focuses on early-stage, transformative tech companies with strong network effects.
Before holding this position, Lau was the Head of Community and Content at Wattpad and helped shaped the company into one of the largest online communities today. Prior to Wattpad, she was the Director of Product Development of Brightspark Labs, a Toronto-based accelerator.
In this interactive workshop, Lau focused on the framework she has designed, called ASSET, which many entrepreneurs and accelerators have adopted in their business strategies to scale the network effect in their products.
“Network effect means the value of the product will increase exponentially with more usage, like telephones and blockchain.” The ASSET framework is broken down into:
A – Atomic Unit of Product
S – Seed the Supply Side
S – Scale the Demand Side
E – Enlarge the Network Effect Coefficient
T – Track Proprietary Insights
The “atomic unit” is the smallest unit, in which users will gather around. For example, Facebook has posts, Twitter has tweets and UberEATS has food items. She explained why two companies can perform differently, despite having the same atomic unit, like Spotify versus Myspace. “The simpler the atomic unit, the easier it is for the user to learn.” You can read the rest of Lau’s framework here.
Lau concluded her presentation by pushing everyone to go chase their dreams and to not give up when it gets hard. “If you fail, don’t stop because the world needs you. Do it big and dream big. Thank you.”