FAST TRACK TO THE FUTURE
Olga Kravchenko Memento
Olga Kravchenko studied an MA in Arts & Cultural Management at King’s.
Accelerators are programmes specially created for a cohort of early-stage ventures to speed up their growth. Our accelerator, King’s20 (introduced on page 6), is a year-long programme for students, staff and alumni from King’s. Each year 20 (early stage) ventures are chosen to receive an estimated £43,000 of support which includes office space at Bush House, coaching from experts, workshops, and the opportunity to pitch for scholarship prizes worth a total of £130,000. By 2021, King’s20 aims to be one of the first university accelerators to achieve and maintain gender parity. We asked three entrepreneurs in the King’s20 Accelerator to share their experiences.
WHAT’S YOUR VENTURE?
Memento allows anyone to create virtual reality reconstructions of life-changing events, such as a wedding, using just their smartphone. Our technology transforms social media from boring 2D into an exciting new 4D format. It has the potential to become the Instagram of immersive technology. WHAT HAVE BEEN THE MAIN BENEFITS YOU’VE GAINED FROM BEING IN KING’S20?
The office space and the comprehensive mentorship are really beneficial for small start-ups like ours. Developing your business is challenging but the mentors give us clarity as it is not uncommon for people in our position to get caught up in the flow of ideas we continuously generate. A great benefit has also been working alongside a bunch of other entrepreneurs so we can bounce ideas off each other, share our successes and failures, and support each other on our journeys. WHAT MAKES THE KING’S20 ACCELERATOR SO SPECIAL?
It offers a great range of opportunities for the entire year, including networking, so that we can get leadership training, find out about funding competitions and meet investors. King’s20 supports us without trying to change who we are. HOW HAS YOUR VENTURE EVOLVED? WHAT KEY LESSONS HAVE YOU LEARNED?
We have developed a virtual reality demo of our product that is available as a separate mobile app. We launched it in July 2018. The key lesson we have learned is that every entrepreneur should fall in love with a problem and not with a perfect solution he/she developed in their own head. The solution might change, but as long as you know that the problem is real, you have a very high chance of making it a success. www.memento.media @mementoVR
28 Start! Issue four 2018–19
