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People’s Choice winner Samuel Killin, describes his experience at last month’s Sydney Firehose competition. 

Somewhere along the line I realised that corporates don’t do anything by coincidence. As such, I was honestly skeptical when I heard about Firehose. It felt like an odd match. A big data competition headed by the corporate’s corporate, Coca Cola, and Pollenizer, a startup accelerator that prides itself on being light and nimble.

For Pollenizer, there’s a lot to give and a lot to gain. The guys and gals there eat hackathons for breakfast, and any insight into corporate problems are infinitely valuable for their own projects.

But Coke. I couldn’t help pondering who in the skyscraper was trying to play me, and why. I’m also completely irrational, and threw my concerns to the wind and signed up anyway, but, ya know.

I needn’t worry, however, as it took a whole five minutes chatting with the Coke team to discover they were as thirsty to learn as us. That’s Coke the organization, and also its staff, who genuinely wanted to soak in everything both professionally and personally. It was humbling to realise that they had put this thing together to learn from the startup scene in a very genuine and sincere way.

My team-mate Simone and I built CokePass, a cashless payment/delivery solution for B2B delivery businesses like Coke. Why? We chatted and chatted to the army of Coke Folk that turned up and found out that Coke have been thinking about moving away from 30 day invoicing and paper receipts for a while now but haven’t for the life of them figured out a nice way of doing it. We ran it past the Pollenizer startup experts who liked the fact that it had an instant revenue stream and clear scale prospects. Win.

It turns out Coke have a bunch of similar problems – where a healthy splash of naivety and creativity can go a long way toward solutions. If understanding the startup mindset gets them closer to these solutions, then you can see why they’re hanging out in Pollenizer and so keen to be there learning. Hopefully there’ll be something in our ideas to get the cogs moving at Coke HQ, and maybe we’ll help them along as we progress with our project. Some way, I’m sure things will start moving.

So, in the end, my skepticism was unfounded. Coke were just there to learn stuff, just as I was. The Pollenizer/Coke combo worked, and worked well. All in all it ended up being the rarest of all things: a win-win situation.

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