What colour is your accelerator?

A question that we at Activate Capital have been chewing over for many months is: What help do early-stage startups need most? In terms of an accelerator, what programme would be valuable enough for them to invest their precious time with us?

We’ve been working with high-growth companies for years and Activate Capital is a programme we’ve designed based on our experiences. Bearing in mind London is bursting at the seams with incubators, pre-accelerators, and accelerators the question for us has been; If we want to do something in this space, what can we do that is both meaningful and differentiates us from the crowd?

One perspective on programmes sold to high-growth companies is provided by Chris Howard in a piece he posted in February called “Is every startup accelerator doomed to fail?”. For me the money quote is:

newcomers aren’t delivering solutions to problems the modern-day entrepreneur actually experiences anymore, but are in fact attempting to copy solutions to problems experienced in 2009

the traditional offerings of ‘connections’, ‘awareness’, and ‘credibility’ are no longer as powerful as they used to be to attract the best and the brightest so the modern-day accelerator now needs to offer something different.

While startups are happy to get these things from an accelerator our observation is that they need much more and — with some notable exceptions — they don’t seem be getting it. Chris makes the point that major players in the accelerator market have drifted from acceleration to curation. But is being curated what startups most need?

Our experience tells us that that the habit of asking, and re-asking, certain questions is really important to long-term survival. Examples of such questions are:

• What is your vision?
• Why are you doing this?
• Are you executing a strategy worth the name?
• How do know that your customers really want your product/service?
• What is the next smallest iteration that proves it?
• How do you hire the right people & partners?
• How are you holding yourselves accountable to your strategy?
• How are you feeding your learning back into your strategy?
• How do you avoid wasting money developing technology?
• How can your business be profitable?
• What don’t you know (that you should)?

But startups often aren’t capable of addressing question like these without focused help. They need more than a space and sessions with mentors who are not deeply involved in helping them to understanding their business. While it’s more than fair to expect an ambitious startup to aspire to self-reliance this necessarily has it’s limits.

From this it follows that our “why” should be to exercise a duty of care, to share our wisdom & experience, to promote a design-lead approach that helps startups ask (& keep develop answers to) the deep questions.

Which brings me to another point. Who are “we”?

At Activate Capital we are all entrepreneurs. We believe that those at the sharp end of designing and delivering programmes for entrepreneurs should have been entrepreneurs themselves.

We have experience of starting and growing businesses; of hiring using scant resources; of falling down and picking ourselves up; of suffering the sleepless nights that go with that territory. We think we can speak to the challenges of being an entrepreneur with some genuine authority & empathy.

When we were thinking about what Activate Capital should be we decided that we wanted to do something that embodied our own philosophy and entrepreneurial experiences. It starts with calling ourselves a “digital startup lab” (we could probably drop the ‘digital’ but it helps us remember that we are about digital platforms first and foremost). As a lab we intend to practice design-thinking both with ourselves and our startups. We’ll help entrepreneurs to do experiments to prove their business.

I hope that if you’re considering joining an accelerator program you will ask yourself these questions:

• What do I really want this programme to do for my business?
• Do I want a partner that’s been there, and is committed to helping me apply design-thinking to my strategy, profitable business model, prototype, and plan?

We are Activate Capital. And this is our programme.