Top Tips from a new kind of accelerator: What can you learn in a week?

If you’re a start-up, how do you know whether or not to choose an accelerator?

Matt Mower’s piece is a good place to start here, and there’s more. The value lies in the right alignment of three components:

• Programme design. You can’t throw people in a room for days or weeks, add lectures and workshops, and hope for a result. You have to know what you want to accomplish and how you’ll make it happen.
• Experience creating success. This goes for the executives and the advisors you choose. The latter have to have demonstrated they can create in a programme, which means that they must be both wise and good teachers. No good lecturing people if you can’t show them how to do it.
• Company selection. They have to have the right team, target the right market and be at the right stage for whatever accelerator they choose.

In short, it’s all about the people.

Sound obvious? If it were, there would be a unicorn in every crowd. But it’s a tricky balance to get right. This is true from the US to Europe to India, from 2 days to 3 months - and with companies pre-prototype to to exit-ready.

Activate Capital is a new kind of accelerator. I’ve been working with start-ups since the first wave of the web, and I thought I’d seen everything. But as a new partner at Activate, I’ve learned at least as much as the founders of Hello Tomo who are working with us for the 6 weeks of our first Startup Lab Programme.

Here are 3 top tips from the first week:

1. Choose exactly the number of companies who will benefit from your particular programme to get a specific outcome. In this case, it is one company over 6 weeks. We had a lot of promising applicants, but there is an enormous amount of individual attention necessary for real success. What’s more, Hello Tomo’s founders and Activate Capital feel like a perfect fit in terms of what is needed and what we can provide in order t help them raise money with the learning we all get in our 6 weeks together.
2. Integrate wholistic thinking about the company and the team into every aspect of learning, both on the part of the company and the advisors. The more explicit the connections among all the parts, the stronger the whole. For example, when Matt led the workshop on product development, all advisors were present to listen, ask questions and contribute. The same was true with the pitching. Everything any of us learns from any part of the process enhances and enriches the other processes far beyond what one person can offer by her or himself.
3. Start with some preliminary work on the pitch. A 3–5 minute-pitch provides an efficient assessment of the founders’ thinking about the product or service. Perhaps more important at the beginning of a intensive collaborative journey, it offers a pretty accurate gap analysis of their thinking about themselves. Even two hours of review leaves a company better equipped not just for the programme that follows but also to present themselves effectively. In this case, Tomo took the practice seriously enough to knock it out of the park at a Demo Day.

It must be emphasised: Tomo is a remarkable company, and the founders are each highly unusual on his own. It’s a real collaboration — they have the content and we have the structure. I can’t wait to see what happens on week two.

What to see what the founders of Hello Tomo had to say at the end of the first day? Here they are: