Introducing Fluent & my 2018 BHAG
For the past two years, I’ve had the honor and challenge of leading NMotion, a startup accelerator in Lincoln Nebraska.
Joining an established accelerator program, I set my sights on evolving and maturing the impact of NMotion from strictly a ninety day accelerator into a year-round resource for founders at all stages, from Idea to Series A.
- My team and I expanded programs like Prelaunch and NMotion Labs to improve the way we helped very early stage founders validate and test their startup ideas.
- We developed and launched NMotion Fellows, which allowed us, for the first time, to support NMotion alumni and area growth-stage founders through monthly workshops and roundtable events.
- We experimented with other community-building programs like Spotlight LNK and Hack Your Weekend to increase our reach with creative people considering entrepreneurship in the future.
- We refined the vision and scope of the core NMotion accelerator program, focusing on supporting startups at a specific stage of development.
I personally learned a lot during this process — about leading a team, aligning stakeholders around a common vision, developing programs that work, and about who I want to be as an entrepreneur moving forward.
Because through all of this, I’ve been a founder first.
And in 2018, I’m returning to the role I’m most suited for — entrepreneur, disrupter, and experimenter extraordinaire.
My personal motto is “Dare Greatly.” One of the things I love most about working in the startup space is the expectation to always level up and to find the next harder challenge after gaining some mastery at the current level.
Having been a founder in an accelerator first, building a startup over the past six years, and then transitioning to managing an accelerator for the past two years, I have a unique point of view on the design and implementation of accelerators. And because I spent twelve years as a private educator and learning coach prior to founding my first startup, I am also most energized on working on the ways we craft the educational/learning components of startup programs.
I’m ready for the next challenge — how I can experiment and positively impact accelerators at a bigger scale.
My new business, Fluent, focuses on serving the accelerator community at large through on-demand accelerator management, curriculum development, and accelerator design consulting. Instead of managing one accelerator, I will be consulting with dozens. Instead of working with one batch of startups, I’ll coach at least 100 companies in 2018.
My first stop is Birmingham Alabama to serve as Managing Entrepreneur-in-Residence with the Velocity Accelerator from January-April 2018. At the same time, I’ll be consulting with and supporting entrepreneurial programs across the country.
I’ve been incredibly lucky to be a member of the startup communities in Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa. Now, I’m looking forward to building and strengthening connections between cities all over the country (and, fingers crossed, abroad). Stay tuned for a lot more content here and on my website as I share my experiments and observations working with 100+ companies next year.
