Cohort strong
“Years from now, when you look back on what you and your startup gained from this accelerator, what do you think will be the thing that really mattered most?”
I ask that question of every startup team in every tech startup accelerator (and pre-accelerator bootcamp) I work with. With only a handful of exceptions, everybody gets this question wrong. The right answer is the cohort. But that’s OK, how would they know at the very beginning?
If it’s a good accelerator program and you make the most of it, the most valuable benefit is not the investment capital, it’s not the mentoring, or the education, external accountability, publicity, travel, pitch coaching or the demo day.
All of those benefits are important, but you can hack your way to each of them by other means.
Build a great product customers love, tell people about it, and be good to people, and you’ll find investment capital eventually. Build a good relationship with the right investors and it comes with mentoring. Consume enough blog posts, books and podcasts and experiment with what you’re learning, and you’ll learn everything an accelerator can teach you, and more. Have a partner, spouse or kids, and you have all the external accountability you should need. And so on.
Hindsight is 20/20
Years later, when I ask startup founders, “When you look back on what you got out of the accelerator program, what was the most valuable benefit?” Most of them will nominate the benefit of being part of an accelerator cohort, and of being part of an accelerator’s alumni network. It’s perhaps the most subtle benefit but it’s potentially the most powerful.
Sure, outside an accelerator you can go to a bunch of meetups, host coffee mornings, bond with other founders at hackathons and spill your guts at #Fuckupnights but rarely do those relationships form as close and as meaningful bond as the relationships you form with the other crazy people you went through your accelerator with, and rarely do they pay back your investment on the relationship to the same degree.
Why cohort bonds are strong
A tech accelerator program is a very intense experience that nobody outside your accelerator cohort will ever truly understand.
It many ways, it’s like being selected as a contestant on one of those reality TV shows where you and a bunch of strangers are dumped in a challenging environment for a period of time (Only 12 episodes for a TV series, but 3–6 months for an accelerator!).
In many ways it’s nearly as public as reality TV – if you’re selected, the accelerator works hard to promote the startups in the intake, at the beginning, through the course of the accelerator, and leading up to and after the demo day. Everybody knows there were ten or more unsuccessful applications for every startup selected, so the industry is watching to see how well you perform, to see if you (and the accelerator) will create a better company by the end. Your family, friends, ex-colleagues and social network are all following your journey too.
Like reality TV, you will probably need to ‘form alliances’ to win. You’ll need to quickly pitch, recruit and learn to manage relationships with cofounders you might have only just begun to get to know, as well as interns, contractors, cloud workers, early hires, mentors, program managers and investors.
Like reality TV, nobody expects all of the contestants to be successful. The industry looks forward to the blog posts, the social updates and the confidential chatter about who’s doing best and who’s faltering and on the ropes.
Like reality TV, you will be hauled up in front of ‘judges’ – all manner of experts who may challenge your assumptions, send you back to the drawing board again and again, ratcheting up the goals every time, and expecting you to take the tough love and say thank you.
Any intense experience between a group of people causes some relationships to fail, but it builds much stronger and longer-lasting relationships in those that form under pressure and persist once the intense experience is over.
Think of all those movies and books about a platoon going to war, a group of dwarves and a reluctant hobbit, a group of strangers surviving in a dystopian future, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnston leading people through a natural disaster or an alien invasion – they’re all about how strong the relationships become when you face something together that nobody else will ever truly understand because they weren’t there to experience it like you did.
Long shelf life
The relationships forged in the fires of an accelerator program tend to last a long time. You won’t call on favours very frequently, but your cohort relationships will become your VIP access card to expert advice, second opinions, warmer intros, better savings, great press, awesome hires and incredible deal flow. It can be a powerful club if you pay it forward and pay it back.
A cohort of great startup founders will go on to achieve many things well beyond the bounds of the startup they were working on when you first met. Some will become respected CEOs. Some will become serial angel investors, or venture capitalists, senior leadership in bigger tech firms, industry outreach people for big vendors, useful lawyers, bankers, designers, photographers, speakers and authors.
It’s really because you had nothing in common at the beginning that makes these relationships really useful later on.
Every time I give this talk in front of a cohort or one-on-one, and I tell them that the relationships with the other founders in this cohort will become the most valuable benefit in the program, they look at me like I’m crazy.
I can see them thinking,
‘These weirdos? That old guy? Those women? That kid? They’re all working on startups solving different problems, for different customers in different industries. I have nothing in common with any of them. At best, they’re my competition for investment and mentorship.’
Wrong.
The startup journey is hard and it can be as lonely as fuck. But it doesn’t have to be.
Later today I’m attending a memorial service. At the lowest point in one founder’s life, the cohort has come together for support of the most precious kind – emotional support. We’ve got her back – and when each of us needs it, she’ll have ours – as long as it takes to make all the sacrifices worth it, and then long after that.
Cohort strong.
