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| The 5 most important questions to answer when creating a startup incubator |
I'm in the process of writing up a document that outlines all of the things that need to be considered when creating a startup incubator (like Y-Combinator). When I'm finished, I'll post it as an open document so anyone can go in and improve it.
Here are what I believe to be the five most important questions to answer:
- What are the financial and non-financial goals of the program's investors, and over what time frame? What is the business model for the program?
- How mature do you want the teams to be at the end of the program: live product, revenue generating, angel ready, VC ready? This affects which teams you accept.
- What is the ideal founding team and what is the minimum viable founding team?
- What do you do (or not do) if things go wrong with a team or their product?
- Will there be further involvement or investment at the end of the summer?
Obviously, there are other factors like investment terms, office requirements, speaker series, etc, but I think these are the top five most important. What do you think are the most important?
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| Posted 9.06.2009 9:17 am by dave ( permalink ) |
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| Comments (3) |
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John McCarthy commented 9.06.2009 11:13 am |
| First question: Does the world (or your city) need another incubator? |
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Rob Shedd commented 9.06.2009 9:37 pm |
| I thought there were some good summary points based on TechStars and Launchboard Digital at the end of this blog post -- http://montrealstartup.com/blog/2009/08/28/lessons-from-techstars-and-launchbox-digital/ -- many of them are similar to what you have already listed, but it might help expand the list, especially with regard to the type of environment that the companies are working in. I think that the community style program that TechStars and DreamIt run is a big advantage for those programs over the "each company works alone and gets only a little time with PG" model that YC runs under, however, founders might be looking for different things, so a question covering these aspects might be useful. |
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| I'm the CEO and co-founder of Postling. You can reach me at dave@postling.com. For off-topic stuff, read my Tumblr at CaterpillarCowboy.com. |
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