The Big Picture 3
This article is written by Jeremiah Uke, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.
Felipe Millan is a highly ambitious and successful professional with proven success driving rapid growth for start-ups and mature companies. As an entrepreneur, he founded led several companies; as a start-up mentor and advisor, he translates my experience into valuable lessons for other early-stage innovators across the world through my work with some of the world's top accelerators and incubators, including Techstars Accelerator, Katapult Accelerator, Startupbootcamp Accelerator, Startup Wise Guys Accelerator, and others. Not only have I helped numerous entrepreneurs translate their ideas into reality and grow their businesses, but I also leveraged these relationships in my role as a Global Evangelist@ SEMrush.
Felipe functions as the Community Development Manage at Twilio Sendgrid. The community is a very important factor to Sendgrid. Starting out as a startup, Sendgrid received a lot of support to get to where they are today.
Twilio consistently shows support to grow the community and they do this in a number of ways. Very recently they gave $1.3M to about 20 projects equity free, spread across different industries. Felipe also talked about the 1 percent pledge. The 1 percent pledge says that companies have to give 1 percent of their equity, time of their employees, and services back to the community. So, if your company is making $500M, you have to give $5M back to the community.
Twilio and Twilio SendGrid are combining their focuses on developers and founders to empower them as much as possible. Twilio SendGrid runs a free Startup program Accelerate and invites you to apply for it through the link SendGrid.com/Accelerate/Apply. The team works with over 300 global partners and is offering all their resources at no cost to the participants of the program.
The feeling of seeing people grow is what Felipe loves the most about his role in the community. He had a Startup background with SendGrid which later got acquired and then merged with Twilio. So Felipe has seen the process of watching a company’s growth. A startup makes thousands in dollars while corporates make millions, the major difference is the growth mindset.
As a startup, you should try to think a little bit more globally and try to understand your community. In this case, your community is not just around you or your office. You should be able to identify your community in every country in the world.