HIGHLIGHT:
Luke's story is resonating a famous quote "A dream does not become reality through magic: it takes sweat, determination and hardwork". As a pre-revenue company, Luke is well aware of the challenges when deciding to come all the way from U.S. to Thailand to participate in SPACE F program. With strong work discipline towards clear sets of goals, Luke Wright has set out to clear the hurdles of pre-investment challenges for Manna.
My name is Lucas Wright, I’m the CEO of Manna. We are an insect technology company currently based in Texas, USA. We combine technology with a brand, with both powering one another. The most difficult time we’ve faced as a company, which was just us three founders at the time, was travelling from the USA to Thailand to participate in Space-F. There was no guarantee of investment, and we had to cover living and travelling expenses entirely out of pocket, so there was great financial strain.
To solve the difficulties of this pre-revenue and pre-investment phase, we simply worked hard. We worked from the early morning until 7pm, so 10-12 hours of work every day Monday through Saturday. We put all of our effort and time into our work to give ourselves an edge over competition and gain investment. The rationale was that we needed to complete the work of a well-funded company of maybe 10 or 15 employees.
In order to do this, we had to work smarter and longer than those other teams would. We worked smart because we knew that technology was important, so we needed a proof of concept and patents as soon as possible. We also needed to develop a strong product-market fit to demonstrate that our technology would be worth billions of dollars.
This experience of long hours working on specific goal-oriented tasks was foundational for the company in terms of culture. We now define our goals for the year, or for the quarter, and put all of our efforts towards those goals. We receive a lot of help from Expara, and Douglas Abrams in discovering what things are important for investors to know before they will invest. Once we knew the criteria that investors needed, we set out to accomplish those tasks such as patents, technology, product-market fit, customer data (traction) and many more.
Published on 9th Dec. 2020