Mar 2, 2022
Attention Hackers, Hustlers, and Hipsters: Launch your Startup through gALPHA
gener8tor’s mission is to be the best partner for a community to invest in its best and brightest. We carry out this mission by creating best-in-class accelerators for entrepreneurs, upskilling programs for folks looking to upgrade their professional toolkit and corporate innovation programs.
Why focus on investing in communities’ best and brightest? We believe it’s possible to create top returns by investing across race, place, and gender. We have proven our commitment to investing in diversity over ten years of work and publicly publish our fund’s performance. Through this focus, our portfolio companies have raised over $1.2B+ in follow-on capital and have created over 7,400 jobs.
We are now taking the lessons we’ve learned working with 800+ companies and combining them with our accelerator model to launch gALPHA, a free venture-creation workshop designed to help entrepreneurial students and technologists create high-growth startups. gALPHA provides product ideas, mentorship, and coaching to teams of students and technologists, and works with them one-on-one for one month to help them develop an innovative and marketable product or solution.
The goal is simple: gALPHA aims to grow a community’s startup ecosystem by creating complete, well-rounded teams and setting them on a path to build new products or innovations with $1B+ potential.
Although the program is still new, we’ve seen exciting results from the startups we’ve built so far. To date, 16 of the startups built through gALPHA have been accepted into subsequent programming such as gBETA or other accelerators, and have raised over $500,000 in venture funding.
gALPHA’s Framework
When developing a program that’s designed for innovation and creative problem solving, it’s impossible to be entirely prescriptive. Instead, it’s important to provide a framework that fosters creativity while putting action to sudden sparks of genius. In that light, the gALPHA framework is:
- Create a serendipitous environment where talented folks who have complementary skills and shared interests can meet.
- Form well-rounded teams who have the ability to execute without outside help.
- Work with each team to identify $1B+ problems operating in a space with few or no direct competitors.
- Customer Discovery + Rapid Prototyping.
- Provide long term-support to the top ideas through subsequent programming such as gBETA and gener8tor’s investment accelerators.
Who’s it for
The best startups are able to execute quickly and efficiently on their vision because their team has the relevant skills and tools to build. When you distill these teams down into their simplest form, you will find these three types of people: Hackers, Hustlers, and Hipsters.
👩🏻💻 Hackers: People who can technically build incredible things.
- Software developers, software engineers, programmers, system architects, IT specialists, mechanical engineers, data scientists, design engineers, project managers, food scientists, etc.
👨🏻💼 Hustlers: People who obsess over growth and customers.
- Business development representatives, software sales folks, account executives, partnership managers, community leaders, etc.
👩🏽🎨 Hipsters: People who love design, marketing, and consumer trends.
- UX/UI designers, graphic designers, digital marketing specialists, interior designers, product designers, etc.
gALPHA is designed for Hackers, Hustlers, and Hipsters who are serious or curious about starting a company. These folks are able to join gALPHA in any of the following ways:
- As a team with or without an idea
- As an individual with an idea searching for a team
- As an individual without an idea open to joining a team
If you’re interested in building a startup with us through gALPHA, register for the next program in your area!
What to Expect
The goal of gALPHA is to have fun creating complete, well-rounded teams who are building new products or innovations with $1B+ potential.
During the program, gALPHA participants should expect to commit 3–5 hours per week. This time is usually spent finding a problem that they’re passionate about solving, and then working with their team to build a rapid prototype and obtain traction with customers.
gALPHA is a part-time program typically for working professionals and full-time students. The program is flexible to each participant’s schedule, providing the core programming through 2–3 individual meetings per week and a weekly cohort-wide event for all the participants.
Below is an example program of what gALPHA looks like.
What’s Next?
If you’re interested in building a startup with us through gALPHA, register for the next program in your area!
