Hey 👋,

this is Matthieu, one of the co-founders of StrategyQuest, and I'd love to get personal in this blog post:

"Back in 2011, when I started my professional career in Hong Kong, I set out to launch a business. And coming from France, having graduated from business school, I had spent a lot of time studying entrepreneurship, marketing, and business strategy during my education. One thing was clear from all this training:

- I needed a business plan with financial models.
- I needed to conduct a market study.
- I needed to read everything I could about my potential clients and suppliers.
- I needed to understand industry trends before launching.

That was supposed to set me up for success.

But, as most of our readers know, no plan survives first contact with the market. My first entrepreneurial venture failed miserably within a few months.

From Theory to Experience: The Game-Changer

Then I stumbled upon Startup Weekend, a community-driven event focused on experiencing startup creation. It was essentially a hackathon with a strong business and innovation focus, running for 54 hours over a weekend.

Here’s how it worked:
- On Friday evening, participants pitched startup ideas.
- The top ideas were selected, and teams were formed.
- And on Saturday and Sunday, teams worked on:
- Customer discovery
- Prototyping
- Developing a pitch
- By Sunday afternoon, teams pitched their ideas to a jury.

And this absolutely blew my mind."



What I only realized much later after becoming an organizer, facilitator, and eventually Techstars’ regional manager for Greater China, supporting hundreds of Startup Weekends is this:

Experiential Learning Beats Traditional Training

Everything we read in books, watch in lectures, or learn from others remains theoretical. While it’s crucial to learn from other people's experiences, those lessons don’t truly sink in until we experience them firsthand.

When you actually go through:
- The rollercoaster of emotions of working with a brand-new team,
- The frustration of realizing your idea isn’t working,
- The pressure of pivoting, iterating, and adjusting your strategy in real time,

… that’s when learning happens.

This is the flaw of traditional strategy training. In an innovation-driven world, we’re always operating in uncertainty. We’re experimenting with things that have never been done before. So how do you prepare for something unprecedented?

Bringing This to StrategyQuest

At Startup Weekend, we didn’t provide much content just enough to guide participants. But what we engineered from the ground up was an environment where they were forced to experience startup creation.

- In just 54 hours, they went through the entire entrepreneurial journey.
- The experience was so close to reality that it felt real.
- And because of that, the lessons stuck.

That’s exactly what we are creating with StrategyQuest.

Our scenarios and environments evolve dynamically from one session to another. They are designed to be:
✅ As close to reality as possible
✅ Comprehensible and structured
✅ Immersive enough to feel real

Just like Startup Weekend, it may not be the "real thing" as you’re not running an actual company but it’s so close that it feels like you are.

And that level of immersion is what ensures better retention, application, and decision-making when it matters most when you, as a participant, are faced with critical real-world challenges.

That’s why experiential learning beats traditional training. 🙌