Accelerating in a Pandemic
Last Friday, we marked the end of our 8th accelerator programme with the annual Demo Day event. Not only was it our first virtual Demo Day, it was also with our most geographically diverse cohort to date. We had over 500 registrations and 330 people engaging live with the teams.
In case you missed it, you can watch the event here:
With things wrapping up, I wanted to reflect on the past 3 months, marking our first-ever fully remote programme — what’s worked and what hasn’t.
On March 2nd, we welcomed our latest cohort in our offices. Although being the 8th iteration, this one felt different from the get-go — we had a new fund, several new team members (including myself) and so we wanted to make it bigger, better and more successful than ever. After 3+ months of scouting and interacting with over 600 companies, we selected our 5 teams, and started the programme as we always have — with teams settling in our freshly painted office and various speakers joining us in person.
2 weeks in and we had to do the biggest restructuring to date, shifting the whole ongoing programme to a digital medium… Fast forward 13 weeks to today, and we have completely digitised our programme. We’ve made introductions to over 120 mentors, investors and industry players — amounting to over 400 individual meetings.
Before going into any more depth regarding the programme, I want to address the elephant in the room — how can you ever hope to accelerate companies in an social and economic crisis?
And in particular, how can we help our companies fundraise during such an unprecedented period? Funding for UK startups raising for the first time fell by 83% between 23 March and 17 May compared to the same period in 2019, according to new research by Plexal and Beauhurst.
There have been some general issues that have affected every company in the portfolio. Fundraising has become tougher, as VCs went into ‘portfolio management mode’— refocusing their capital and resources to support their own portfolio companies, which means there is less capital for new investments. We have also seen a decrease in round sizes and valuations, as founders are becoming more conservative with their growth forecasts and hiring plans, and VCs are also trying to reflect the current market environment into more conservative deal valuations.
We’ve taken several measures to help our portfolio companies navigate these troubling times. The Investment Team has been in close contact with our 51 portfolio companies to make sure they have the resources to bounce back, whether through additional funding or strategic advice, including finding additional cost-cutting measures and having access to government credit lines. On the 17th of April, we also hosted a Mental Health panel for our Founders to understand how one can cope with the new WFH paradigm in the midst of a global pandemic
Generally, and while there is a short-term headwind on all sectors, we believe in the medium/long term, Proptech will benefit from a tailwind as the digitalisation of the real estate sector accelerates in a post-Covid world, as traditional real estate players are now taking the time to automate several processes that were long overdue. Our new research lead, Andy Saull, is in the process of working on a case study which looks at specific examples of the winners and losers in Proptech from Covid19 — we will be publishing this soon.
Let’s talk about what we can and have done in the last 15 weeks. There are really 3 main outcomes that we aim to deliver on.
Connecting teams to relevant industry players
Helping companies develop their product and business
Helping teams raise their next rounds of investment
Our programme typically begins with mentor introduction and during the third week of our programme, teams were supposed to be meeting relevant mentors and industry experts. Unfortunately, this was also exactly the time, when everyone suddenly started working from home and we were actively digitising the whole programme — talk about perfect timing.
Over the span of 5 days, each of the teams had met with 40 individual mentors, amounting to 100 hours’ worth of Zoom conversations. To date, we’ve made over 400 introductions to 120+ relevant mentors, industry players and investors.
Massive credit to our amazing mentors who showed up for our companies, despite the impact of COVID sinking in.
Helping companies develop their product and business
Our programme is typically very hands-on with weekly workshops, tailored to the specific requirements of the given cohort. We have now had over 20 workshops and I have to say that the engagement level has far surpassed my expectations. Apart from making workshops as engaging as possible, we also utilised this time by focusing a lot more on individual 1:1 work and introductions.
Something also worth noting is our Speaker Series event, where successful alumni joins us on a Wednesday evening to share their insights, as someone who has literally been at the other end of that call. It’s an opportunity for teams to share pain points and get answers on any questions they might have. This has easily been one of the highlights of my week in the past few months — with 16 amazing speakers ranging from Tushar at co-working platform Hubble, to Cem at property management firm Plentific, as well as many others. Their lessons, stories and war stories have helped foster a sense of community- albeit remotely.
Helping teams raise their next rounds of investment.
There are several elements to preparing teams for their next rounds of fundraising — working on their financial documents and projections, preparing their various decks and polishing their pitch. We also actively support startups during their actual fundraising processes, but as an initial step, we setup the initial connection, so it can be well developed before the actual raise. During the last few weeks, we’ve been introducing each team to relevant Angels, VCs, Family Offices and other Real Estate investors.
Typically, all of our teams would look to fundraise straight on the back of the accelerator. This year, most teams from our B2B cohort are looking to fundraise towards the later part of this year and some looking more towards 2021. There have also been some changes in the strategies behind their next fundraises — with teams looking for significantly longer runways.
Something that doesn’t fall into any of the three buckets, but is arguably more important than everything is the social aspect — expressed both as collaboration during the programme and later engagement with alumni. This was the hardest part to emulate, we had our Speaker Series events and weekly catchups, but overall you just can’t reach that same level of collaboration and interaction. We recognise this and plan to supplement it with future alumni engagements, whenever we can that is.
This social aspect has also traditionally played a key part of our events, where networking plays just as big of an aspect as the pitches themselves. We spent a lot of time thinking about this, and in the end, we made the tough decision to move away from the fool-proof Zoom and settle on Hopin for our Demo Day. The biggest difference between the two platforms is the Expo area feature, which at the end of the main pitches, allowed our teams to go into their own virtual booths, where they showcased their products and interacted with attendees.
After our biggest Demo Day event to date, we’re now laser focused on supporting teams with their fundraising processes, as well as envisioning how the Pi Labs accelerator will look like in the future. This pandemic has completely changed our perception of productivity and remote working so much, that we cannot afford not to adapt. We’ll be feeding all to these insights into our programme design for our future programmes — stay tuned (:
