TTAcademy - The Journey
Over 1,000+ entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders from all over the world working in the Transformative Technology area had the opportunity to be part of our first TTAcademy cohort.
For one full and intensive month, a series of speakers sessions, mentorship support, networking opportunities and investors office hours were shared among our community. Our final goal is to help our community save time, gain momentum, and develop as leaders, entrepreneurs and innovators using tech to expand human possibility.
The best time is now. TTAcademy emerged as the leading vertical entrepreneurship program, fully focused on the Transformative Technology space. As compared to other ecosystems that are much more developed, we are at a ripe confluence of Need/Economic Impetus, Demand/Behavior Change, and Means/Emerging Tech*, that signals a market opportunity acceleration. The market opportunity today is already at $3TN. This will grow as more of the enabling technologies shift from the “cusp” of impact to being suitable to deliver transformative product experiences.
There were two conditions for joining the TTAcademy: 1) working on a project full time and having launched a prototype in the Transformative Technology area, or 2) being strongly interested in it. Among our cohort, we had separate tracks for both profiles (teams that are working full time and have already prototype, and innovators who were in the process of getting things started or were partially aligned with the TT core). Below you’ll find the numbers that prove how the recruiting strategy reflects the efforts to offer the most inclusive program possible.
Of our Entrepreneurs Track. 46% of these teams had at least one female co-founder, defined as someone who owns at least 10% of the equity. This average is much higher than the industry average. Based on the data provided by the Crunchbase’s study on female founder representation of U.S.-based companies, in 2017, only 17% of startups have a female founder.
The gender ratio remains remarkable in several aspects. About 38% of the Entrepreneurs cohort had more than 50% females in their company. Over 50% had at least one female investors (according to AngelList data, only 7.4% of investors are female). Almost half of them had at least one external female board member and almost 80% had at least one female advisor.
About a third of our Country Managers were female and it was a key aspect for recruiting such a balance and inclusive cohort. Because of the nature of the field we are working in, it tends to attract more diverse and inclusive group of people. There are a lot of female experts, investors and founders highly interested in this area.
As shown by these numbers, the TT field is an uncommonly diverse and gender balanced sector.
We also had a huge diversity in terms of age. Around half of the applicants were over 40 years old and have worked at least 10 years. We want to highlight the fact that it is never too late to start your entrepreneurial path.
Some other interesting stats about the full TTA Cohort:
- 42% are solo founders. 31% are 2-founders teams.
- The vast majority of our applicants (64%) are working on Software development. 22% are working on both Software and Hardware
- In terms of business models: 49% have B2C products. By far the most popular business model (38%) was the subscription business.
- In terms of valuation: Over half of the cohort are currently bootstrapped. The rest were valued at $3–5M or even more.
Our intent has always been to support entrepreneurs who are both beginning as well as those who have already started on their journey. Because of that, the content we designed for the cohort is broad but at the same time deep enough to be valuable early. We put a lot of effort finding the right level and areas of expertise in order not to repeat any of the traditional start-up content you can find in other programs. The TTAcademy was built to offer really specific and relevant knowledge to people building companies for this space in particular.
As reflected in the ongoing feedback we requested from our TT Community, the average rate about the content was: 4.52 (59% of the responses gave 5/5). This stats remained fairly steady throughout the weeks. There was quite of diversity on the responses about the highest rated sessions, but some that stood up specially over others was the TransTech Market Overview by Nichol Bradford, Bo Shao founder session (part of the Development Program by our partner: Evolution) was also one of participants favorite.
“Measuring what matters most” by Amy Baglan, Ofer Leidner’s Founder Story (Happify) and “Building a B2B and B2G Roadmap (and How not to Die 1st)” by Nadeem Kassam and David Plans (BioBeats founders), were also very popular sessions among our cohort.
In order to compare our entrepreneurial program to similar programs in the sector, we extracted the NPS (Net Promoter Score). This is how measure the value that the TTacademy brought to our participants.
For the overall program (TTA + Evolution) we got an NPS of 66 (anything 50 and above is considered as excellent). Our mentorship program got 50. If we compare this score to the average B2B SaaS NPS (40), we got an excellent rating. To provide another anchor: one of the companies with a remarkably high NPS is Airbnb, with a consistent score of 74.
All this couldn’t have happened without the excellent support of our speakers, who were willing to share their playbooks and our mentors, who gave up their time and expertise to support younger startups in their journey.
This program has been a continuous learning experience for all of us. Our community has shown so much enthusiasm, and was really engaged with the content and with one another, that we thought of starting a new chapter based on the roots of out TTAcademy cohort. We are planning to open up resources, make the content available in a self-study format and welcome new members in our community.
Part of what is coming are our chapter leaders that will start creating communities all over the world that can connect with other potential co-founders, investors, or just like-minded people. If you are starting to think about building a company or you are just curious about the Transformative Technology space, you can reach out to us at any time.
We want to thank one more time all the people involved in making this program possible:
- Our generous sponsors — Evolve.foundation, Evolution, Joyance Partners, Joy Ventures, Mayfield Partners, Elevation Capital, and Jazz Ventures
- Our volunteer mentors who gave away their time in the most altruistic way
- Our speakers who were so open to share their knowledge among our participants
- Our Country Managers, volunteers team and partners that were a strong support in all the possible aspects
- And finally our participants, who gave the highest value to the full program. This couldn’t have happened without all and each one of you
In excitement.
Nichol, Rui, Jeffery, Paola & the Transformative Tech Team
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