Lea Würtz Kristensen is a design engineer and the CFO of the startup Obtek which is an add-on that will make users spend more time on washing his or her hands with soap and water. In 2019, Obtek is participating in Startup Mentors with two mentors Lizanne Svane and Sanne Bech Thougaard. The year before that they had the mentor Niels Buchholst who ended up as member of their advisory board.
In 2017, Lea participated in the Venture Cup Challenge with a different startup. We’ve asked Lea five questions about her dreams and recommendations – take a look below:
1: What are your goals and mission?
“My goal is to change the way we see handwashing and bring more patience and effort into this process. My mission is to contribute to the synergy between me, my co-founders, and everybody that helps us and create results that makes the goal come a little closer.”
2: What keeps you motivated to achieve your goals?
“What keeps me motivated is my fellow co-founders and colleagues. This is a common project and we have fun and learn together in the process. Also, using the learnings from my studies are a big motivation. It is very inspiring to use the theory in real life, learn what works, when and how, and learn from my mistakes. And last but not least, it keeps me going to see that we can learn the children better habits when washing their hands”
3: What is the best startup event/program/accelerator/conference you have ever been to and why?
“AKA Startup was a very good startup program. I learned a lot about the startup world, we had an office space that we shared with a lot of other interesting people who we got to know through a fun and interesting setting. And Anders Berthelsen was an inspiration and motivational speaker that made an impression on me.”
4: What are the best startup advice you have received or given others?
“Sell it before you build it. In ObTek we experiment and ask questions to our users to make a better product that meet their needs, so we are able to target the kindergarten market. This way we already have a MVP that we are selling before we have tied ourselves to an enormous bank loan.”
5: Can you recommend any startup movies/books/role models?
To the early stage startups out there I can recommend a blog post from two fellow design engineers from my study at Design and Innovation at DTU, Mads Svendsen and Christian Breinholt. They also started their own startup, Sentar, but after 18 months they decided to shut it down. Through three posts they tell about the biggest mistakes they made and in ObTek we have read them thoroughly to learn from them. In ObTek we considered, and still are from time to time, if we are experiencing the same pitfalls. It makes us reflect about our business, the way we think and which way we are going, which is not always fun but necessary. You can read the blog through this link: https://medium.com/hackernoon/mistake-1-out-of-3-trying-too-hard-to-validate-the-need-for-our-product-909fd57b0e33
