Tag: Incubators

Creating a founder’s guide to European accelerator programs

We’re quite deep into writing the Startup Factories report for Nesta at the moment and while most of our research on the project has been looking at programs in the US, one of the interesting things is that we seem to hear of another program in Europe launching almost every week.

So we’ve decided that we’re going to add a founder’s guide to European accelerator programs. It won’t be a ranking like this one for the US accelerators because we don’t think there’s enough data but it will bring all the information that might be important to founders making a decision about which EU program to apply to into one place.

Just to recap, our definition of an accelerator program is one that:

  • Works with pre-seed stage companies – usually with small teams (2–4 people) of first time founders.
  • Is open but selective – they have some form of application process with expert judgement that picks the most promising companies.
  • Provides finance during the program — usually in the form of equity investment.
  • Is time bound – they have an intense period of support for companies that usually lasts for three months, although there is often some form of support beyond this period.
  • Supports teams in cohorts – they tend to take companies in batches to create peer support.
  • Has a heavy focus on mentoring – bringing in people from the local tech and business communities to help the companies
  • Has the aim of securing further funding for companies.

The ones we know of that fit that definition and will be running in EU countries in 2011 are:

Either drop me an email or pop a link in the comments below if there’s one we’ve missed and we’ll add them.

The Startup Factories

I’ve just started working on a great little project with Nesta looking at the new breed of ‘business accelerators’ that are helping early stage high tech companies in the US and Europe. We’ll publish it as a short book in the middle of the year but up until then I have the fun job of finding out all about the likes of Y-Combinator, Techstars, Seedcamp and Springboard and working out what really makes them tick.

I first came across the idea of accelerators when Matt Jones and Matt Locke suggested we should apply as School of Everything to the newly created Seedcamp in 2007. It was quite an experience. Dougald did a lot of the work on our application which I seem to remember us pulling together very quickly, then we had an incredibly awkward conference call with the judges where I think they’d already heard about 40 pitches in a day and some were quite obviously a bit bored. But a couple of days later Reshma called back and asked if we could make it. We jumped at the chance.

I think it’s safe to say that none of us really knew anything about the tech startup and investment world at that stage. We had met a few investors through a friend but it was very clear even then that we were ‘too early’ for any of the London VC firms. We’d also met one angel investor but the idea that someone would invest the money themselves rather than through a fund was new to me at that stage. In the five days of the Seedcamp week we learned an incredible amount about that world and the whole thing gave us a leg up and certainly inspired me to pursue it further. We went away with a bunch of people telling us we had something that might just work as well as a few who didn’t quite get it of course.

Although we didn’t get any investment from Seedcamp or immediately from any of the people we met there, it did serve us very well over the following months. Within six months we’d signed a seed funding deal with a whole bunch of angel investors as well as the Young Foundation and Channel 4 which I’m really not sure we would have got if it weren’t for the validation that Seedcamp gave us and the things we learned about that week.

Since then I’ve been a mentor for Seedcamp and enjoyed it a great deal. I was at mini-Seedcamp in London yesterday as it happens. I like seeing early stage companies pitch and helping where I can. I do think there are a few things that could be improved on but in general I think it’s is a brilliant addition to the London tech scene and can celebrate a lot of success both directly and indirectly.

I think it was Saul Klein (co-founder of Seedcamp) who first mentioned Paul Graham to me and that was when I started looking at Y-Combinator. It’s become one of the most interesting institutions in Silicon Valley (although it didn’t start out there oddly enough) and the more I learned about Y-Combinator, the more I thought it was a fascinating model, with almost every stage of the process thought through and optimised. As we started to develop Social Innovation Camp in the UK, Anna and I started to think that we should move to more of a Y-Combinator model for social startups. Hence Bethnal Green Ventures which we ran the first cohort of between October and December 2010.

I’ll be posting early thoughts and some snippets from interviews as we develop The Startup Factories (our working title for the project) here. We’ll be travelling to visit some of the US accelerator programs in late February and we’re lining up some brilliant contributors to write essays that we think will help people understand the phenomenon. I’ll still be working on School of Everything pretty much full time so this is going to be an interesting exercise in time management for me but it does feel good to be getting back to a bit of research and writing.
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