On May 15 a non-profit course for young start-ups was launched in the format of a Telegram channel - Virtual Valley by U Skillz. At the launch, 5 topics were announced, each of which is scheduled to be covered by videos from guest entrepreneurs, summaries, and useful materials. The topics cover most of the "pains" of new entrepreneurs: where to start a business, how to make a prototype of an idea, when to go to an investor and pit your ideas.

The idea for the course came in part thanks to journalist Yuri Dudya's film about Silicon Valley. "Most of the characters in the film are our friends or acquaintances," Dmitry Falaleev, the course initiator and founder of the U Skillz educational project, toldMade in Russia. - We wanted to deepen some topics that seem important to us, we made a live conversation with Andrei Doronichev (Google), Nikolai Davydov (Gagarin Capital) and also invited three female entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley - Anastasia Sartan (StyleHacks.ai), Natalia Karayaneva (Propy) and Stasia Galgashova (LegionFarm). We had collected questions from our guests beforehand - we had over 600 questions, even a tenth of them could not be answered during the online meeting. But we decided to answer differently - through the channel.

The first problem on the entrepreneur's way was revealed by Vadim Asadov, a venture investor from San Diego, California - he answered the question "What should I do if I want to do a startup but know nothing about it? Alexei Khakhunov, co-founder of the company Dbrain, talked about the main skills of an entrepreneur, from his point of view.

Already after the first video courses, thanks to the organizers' interactive approach and desire to establish direct contact with participants through open chats, the list of announced topics and speakers expanded. "We just wanted to answer questions from the audience," says Dmitry Falaleev. According to him, real entrepreneurs are very initiative and active people, so the response to the Facebook post with a request to help and additionally record video answers to the questions of the course participants was large - more than 100 people. The list of speakers included entrepreneurs from Russia, the United States, Berlin and London. These are the founders of Flint Capital and Vestor.In funds, GetPaid, Claustrophobia, iFarm, Smetana, Synchronization, Welltory, Algorithmics and many other young companies.

"It's important to us that we can bring in entrepreneurs with a global mindset," Falaleev added.

The channel publishes notes of meetings with entrepreneurs as part of the course, in addition to the announced videos. For example, with Arik Akhverdyan, founder and CEO of international startup VCV, and Mikita Mikado, founder of PandaDoc.

According to the editorial board ofMade in Russia, it is precisely these kinds of free initiatives that can qualitatively increase people's interest in entrepreneurship. It seems that there is a lot of information on the Internet and all the topics of entrepreneurship have been covered for a long time. But it is not so, which is confirmed by Dmitry Falaleev himself: "Frankly speaking I've never seen programs with so many active entrepreneurs and investors".

For reference. U Skillz is an educational project for self-development, increasing personal effectiveness and improvement of the skills required in business and career.

Made in Russia // Made in Russia

Author: Daniyal Zagidullin