Take out the fluff: A refreshing startup accelerator approach
The global market has been peppered with startup ecosystem players ranging from startups, training companies, accelerators, incubators to the odd corporate initiative. What was a disjointed and fragmented ecosystem has now become a structured environment. At Sprint Pirates, we argue that the ecosystem has become over-structured. The premise of our argument is built on the idea that the real movers and shakers will not be structured or mandated and will not be put in the same “high growth” box as their fellow shakers.
We feel that the system is almost polarising the best of the best by dictating the rules of engagement and growth. Angels and VC’s have been forced to cookie cut their approaches with the hope of finding a “diamond in the rough”. The problem is, it needs to be “rough” to find that diamond, and it’s not — it’s too organised. Early-stage cap tables are standardised and valuations not fully understood or fulfilled. Our philosophy is that winners need to be treated like winners, as in one at a time, and not on a one-size-fits-all basis.
That’s why we built Sprint Pirates in an unstructured and responsive way. Our full-time, hands on approach, and our selection policy of only 3 teams per cohort allows us to be flexible. Before our first program, we had a vague idea of what that would mean. It worked because we were able to deliver a founder friendly deal that caters for all online early-stage deal-flow and build our operations and program around it.
In this first cohort each team was at a materially different stage relative to the next and no team paid the price for that — there was no momentum impact on any of the startups. We don’t believe in workshops every day and the aim is not to build our a full company structure to support growth, but rather a business model that drives growth. Our mentorship is experience based, not network based. Despite the fact that we do have extensive networks, we would rather our portfolio of startups achieve growth in the merit of their business models and not by their associations. This way startups are able to deliver on their valuations from their future institutional investors — something that many startups in traditional accelerators struggle to do.
So why 6 weeks? Well, that answer is simple too. It’s about product/market fit, lag time and sales cycles (particularly in b2b). Our hypothesis is that if we can ready the growth of the one metric that matters to any startup they will ultimately tell the most “un-fluffy” stories to users, customers, and investors.
We work in an open-plan space with our startups and are always available to them. There is obviously some structure; particularly around tooling, meeting, and administration of program activities, but that’s it. For the entire duration of the “program” we are here to break our backs and make sure that our entrepreneurs’ objectives are met.
What do we mean by “objectives”? A fast-moving startup needs to evolve constantly with the appropriate direction. Every sprint is designed with an objective that is measurable in the context of the overall vision of each company. We’re looking to push the needle on the few metrics that matter (I’m being politically correct here, we only really care about one at a time). That means that we’re are not claiming to be able to answer every single question regarding validation in our quest for product/market fit. Instead, we stage this process for each startup, giving them a set of dominoes that are likely to fall at particular times under specific circumstances. Our goal is to show commercial progress that contributes to the building of a fully functioning business model. I’ll go into detail of this in my next blog post. In the meantime, go check out Flex. It’s a complex marketplace allowing gym trainers of all kinds to broadcast their classes to individuals on a live basis all over the world. We’ll go into how we tackled their first few core assumptions, and how they got to where they are now.
These business objectives are built into our investment thesis. We offer £15k to each startup that walks in, and a further £20k at the end of the program (no hidden costs or deductions) to fuel the growth of the startups validated markets. At the end of this last program, we re-invested in 2 out of 3 of the companies based on their traction.
We do everything we can so that our startups can enter other accelerators, which boast incredible networks, so that they can take full advantage from the beginning of their programs.
In the end, only the strong will survive. And to be strong, entrepreneurs and their startups need to be able to stand independently and make magic happen their way. If they don’t manage to do that, they’ll fail fast (good) or remain small (not so good, maybe).
I guess if there was a silver bullet to building a successful company from the ground up, I would be out of a job and writing product descriptions for kids cereal brands that haven’t changed a thing for the last 20 years instead of dedicating my time towards helping build great companies. We believe in an open and collaborative approach to building success.
