How the ‘Hacking 4’ University Course helped us found our first tech start up together

At Common Mission Project (CMP), we are immensely proud of our students’ record of entrepreneurial success. Since our inception in 2016, 2800 students have taken CMP Hacking 4 courses – tackling problems sourced from government and industry by deploying lean start-up methodology in class – building 400 teams and spinning out 53 start-ups. Even when they don’t reach start-up stage, many of our students build skills and form relationships that help them accelerate their entrepreneurial journey.

Curtis Mills and Giorgia Tomasello are two such students. They founded their tech start-up Trovalo in 2022. Trovalo is a unique marketplace that enables users to buy, anonymise and understand data.  Both Curtis and Giorgia took a ‘Hacking 4 Ministry of Defence’ (H4MoD) course at their universities (Cardiff University and King’s College London), which put them in student teams and partnered them with a Ministry of Defence senior contact and an Industry Mentor to solve a national defence and security challenge.

Katrina Broder, from the CMP UK Team, recently caught up with Curtis and Giorgia to find out more about their entrepreneurial journey, how ‘Hacking for’ gave them a common language to set them on their way – and where they go from here.

From Student to Entrepreneur

After studying H4MoD in Spring 2021, Curtis and Giorgia joined the Alacrity Foundation as graduate entrepreneurs on the Start-up Entrepreneurship Course in Business and Technology.  Giorgia explained: “I was working on an H4MoD problem at King’s College London, Department of War Studies, as part of my MA degree in International Relations. Caroline Thompson [Head of Partnerships at the Alacrity Foundation] was my team’s Industry Mentor and we kept in touch at the close of the course. She encouraged me to think about applying to the Alacrity Foundation”.

Curtis tells a slightly different origin story: “I had a great experience on the H4MoD course, and Common Mission Project ended up writing a blog piece on myself and my team which was shared on social media. I was contacted by a member of the Alacrity Foundation’s leadership team who asked if I’d be interested in working as a Technical Lead in the Start-up Entrepreneurship Course. Honestly, I jumped at the chance”.

‘Hacking 4 gave us a Common Language to use…’

“In the Start-up Entrepreneurship Course there were 15-20 of us and we were put in multiple team configurations to see what worked best”, said Giorgia.  And so, when Giorgia, Curtis and their third co-founder were put into a team they knew right away that they had found the right combination “the three of us immediately hit it off”. 

Curtis added: “When Giorgia and I met, H4MoD was the first thing that came up and was a commonality that we bonded over straight away. When we were starting the ideation phase of our product, H4MoD gave us a common language to use, and we were so grateful to have the lean start-up methodology already nailed at the beginning of the course - it kept us a step ahead.” 

In terms of the practicalities of founding a company, Giorgia noted how H4MoD “taught us how to think about problems in a totally different way and that’s how we approached founding our start-up”. She said, “We worked to get to the root of our problem before redefining it in order to solve it. More specifically, we used tools and concepts that we had learnt and applied in our H4MoD courses, such as Value Propositions, the Business Model Canvas, and interviewing skills, to help create and expand our start-up.”

The Trovalo Proposition

So what’s the Big Idea with Trovalo? “At the highest level,” said Curtis, ‘Trovalo is a data marketplace. We want to expedite the process of acquiring data, which currently takes anything from 6 to 14 months, to weeks, days, or ideally minutes. We also want to help buyers understand the data through visualisations or tags. We started our first round of funding a couple of months ago and are in the middle stages now working with an investor.” 

Giorgia added: “Ultimately, we want Trovalo to become the place to purchase data, and further down the line offer all the services surrounding data such as consultancy, anonymisation, etc. We also want to help people recognise when they can sell data and how - so there’s commonality in the complex platforms. Our overall objective is to help democratise data so that everyone can draw insights.” 

Serial Entrepreneurship 

This is no flash in the pan; it’s a defining moment in both Curtis’ and Giorgia’s careers. For Curtis, “In terms of personal goals, I want to fund and scale and grow my business, and in particular lead the technical team. In ten years, I hope to do the same for another business. Independent of Trovalo I want to stay in entrepreneurship and continue solving problems using complex technology.” 

Giorgia said: “One thing we have in common is that we can’t stop solving problems. We’re always finding new ideas to work on and new problems to fix.” So would she have found herself ploughing the entrepreneur’s furrow regardless of her work on H4MoD, then? “I can’t emphasise enough the impact H4MoD has made on my career choice. I wouldn’t have founded my start-up if I hadn't taken H4MoD. I remember the day I had to choose whether to take the H4MoD module or not, and I had heard on the grapevine that this was a tough course that required a lot from students.  However, I thought that I needed to put the effort in to get more out of life, and so I selected the H4MoD module. I am so glad I did!” 

To find out more about the Hacking for MoD (H4MoD) course and at which UK universities it is running, visit our website or get in touch at info@commonmission.uk