Paraventures

Can you give us a brief introduction to who you are?

My name is Yosuke Ochiai from Japan. I’m an International MBA student of Sep 2021 intake. I graduated in July but am doing Business Extension Module for the entrepreneurship track, so I’m still working on the Extended Venture Lab.

Tell us about your startup - When it was founded and what it does?-

Our startup is Paraventures which was started in March 2021 by Cassandra Christian, Vincenzo Morla and me. Paraventures is a digital travel platform for people with disabilities, mainly providing outdoor adventure activities such as horseback riding, surfing, scuba diving, etc. When I was playing rugby in college, one of my teammates took a hit in his neck during a rugby match, ended up in a hospital for over a year, and left in a wheelchair.

This changed his life and our relationship forever. At that time we had a promise, hiking Mt. Fuji together as a team building event, but because of his accident we canceled and postponed it. Every teammate thought that would never happen. However, 10 years after graduation, we reached the summit with 100 teammates using a special wheelchair for hiking. It was an absolutely emotional experience and changed his life and our relationship again. We, Paraventures, believe that adventure activities have power to make our customers happy and positive.

Are there skills that you learned with IE that helped you when creating Paraventures? Which and how were they applied?

Every entrepreneurship skill/asset that I acquired in IE has helped me shape the Paraventures business today. First of all, we stuck to a problem of our customer, not to a solution that we wanted to deliver. It sounds like a super basic process but many startups often overlook the real pain of customers and just build their ideal solution which the customers don’t really need at their ideation phase. Every professor and mentor stressed the importance of this process, so we didn’t leave our customers and thoroughly validated their problems. This made our business model sharp. Second, we learned how to prepare an attractive investor pitch material holistically. Knowing the necessary building blocks, such as problem, solution, market size, competitor landscape, business model, unit economics, finance, etc., and the way how we streamline those using storytelling, we brushed up our pitch every week. This led Paraventures to win the second place at Berkeley Haas’s annual business competition, Investing in Inclusion pitch competition. Lastly, the plenty of professors and mentors (investors and entrepreneurs) that IE connected us are lifetime strong assets to keep growing our business.

Interview by: Jamie Banda, MIM 2022