Abandon your own point of view

Entwine translates architectonic design choices into energy performance information to enhance performance through architecture. They promote sustainable building design through a holistic, synergic collaboration, to break the boundaries between architecture and engineering.

“Our perspectives can be biased when you are so deep in it, and you need that outside view to be critical of your idea.” - Carlo Mancari

While a startup is often born from the bold ideas of one or two individuals, for it to transform into a real business, it needs to serve a market. Carlo, one of Entwine’s co-founders, learned early on that to do that meant challenging their own ideas and expertise. As part of Beyond Beta’s WE BUILD incubator facilitated by WE BUILD Denmark, the engineer and entrepreneur shares how it’s been to navigate the startup space, and where he sees his business moving.

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What has been the biggest learning since starting Entwine?

“You need to abandon your own point of view and be more open to listening rather than listing off the benefits and impact. Be open and ask questions. It’s empathy, and it’s required to understand the needs of the market.

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Beyond Beta and the advisors have given us that outside perspective and provided a really critical eye. There’s a saying that you can see everything with your own eyes, except for your own eyes, and that’s what our mentor does – show us our own eyes. They help us with everything that we didn’t know, we didn’t know.”

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How has your business evolved?

“Definitely the go-to-market strategy. We really didn’t have that before. We thought, ‘yeah, we have a great product. It’s solving so many problems. It’s just so much faster and so much easier to use than what’s there now. It just makes sense, and we can sell it easily once it’s developed.’

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But now we are learning that you have to build a very well-structured strategy to identify, for example, who your first customers are and why. So it’s really been about learning how to enter the market, how to get your first sales – it’s having a business that’s reliable on itself.

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In just a few months of work, I truly see a shift between an idea with a messy organization and no clue of how to bring it to being, to now having the beginning of a strategy and a strong business structure.”

What is the dream for Entwine?

“We believe a lot in this approach – not because it’s just good business, but because it provides the potential for us all to do better in construction, which is an incredibly impactful industry on the environment. There is so much room and potential, and we hope to bring it to action.”