Commit, Try, Fail, Trust: Advice to Young Entrepreneurs

Edward Kim, Susie Pan, and Jack Gao will be graduating from college come Spring. But they won’t be focused on job applications and graduate school essays like so many of their peers, because they’ve already launched their own company.

These young entrepreneurs don’t see age as an issue in launching Bombe – a cloud-based software for analyzing scientific data — but rather, establishing credibility in a highly technical, highly niche field.

Bombe allows scientists to visualize their data, and collaborate with other scientists around the world. It’s a product with a very niche and specialized target market, but the Bombe team is proving their product’s worth by revolutionizing the way scientific data is conceptualized.

We use our status as ‘students’ to ‘get our foot in the door’ but we make sure it’s clear to them we’re starting a company, not a school project,” says Pan. “When we meet with our users, they’re impressed by our product. They’re excited that we’re creating something.”

Prior to launching Bombe, co-founders Edward Kim and Jack Gao worked at Canadian Light Source, Canada’s national synchrotron light source facility. Kim’s biggest frustration in the field was the data analytics software. He was confident that he could create something better and easier to use, but couldn’t find time to make his idea a reality.

Being chosen as part of The Next 36  has allowed Kim and his co-founders to devote their time to Bombe. The Next 36 is a Canadian entrepreneurship program with over 1,000 applicants and only 36 undergraduates admitted each year. After their admittance to The Next 36, the three cofounders combined their interest in science and entrepreneurship to create the idea for Bombe.

Launching a startup, fresh out of graduation, may be a growing trend with the job market still a daunting place to be dumped into right out of college, but the course isn’t an easy one.

“We’re building a product and we don’t know if people are going to use it or like it,” says Pan of the biggest challenge they’ve faced so far. “There are a lot of things we don’t know and there are a lot of things we try to plan for, but things happen in a startup. You just have to go for it.”

Pan offers some great advice to fellow, young entrepreneurs.

1. “Commit to [your] start up full time. It’s much harder to do it as a side project. If you can’t commit, you don’t believe in it enough.”

2. “Try and fail. So what? You can be 25, broke, and have learned a ton. [It’s] basically the equivalent of grad school.”

 3. “Trust your team, love your team. There’s nothing more important than that.”

The Bombe team may be young, but their self-awareness on the path to entrepreneurial success is applicable to anyone on a similar journey – from recent grads to seasoned startup founders.

Check out Bombe’s blog to stay updated on this entrepreneurial journey.