THEY SAY "DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE–BUILD YOUR MVP"

HERE'S OUR STORY

ARE YOU RESPONSIBLE FOR AN ACCELERATOR, AN INCUBATOR, OR AN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT CENTER? KEEP READING.

We realized we did something that couldn’t scale and we built our MVP, when we delivered a year of work in 3 months with two people and 20 AI personas. This began our founding team’s journey with a Vision: to encode startup. We enable entrepreneurship, while lowering their costs, risks, and complexity to support the delivery of more successful businesses to the economy.

Elizabeth McCalley, a business strategist, technologist, and go-to-market executive most comfortable in nascent markets, is a master at making the connections between new technology and business value. She has spent two decades bringing new offerings and services to market.

While every company is a software company, and while now most companies are doing AI things, few are AI-Natives, like the cloud natives 20 years ago. We are.

We picked a very difficult problem–starting up. We have spoken to hundreds of people working in the startup ecosystem who are founders, investors, advisors, fractionals, etc. Not one person disagrees that there isn't a problem in the startup ecosystem itself. The 70% startup failure rate is ridiculously high. Some say, “Meh. This is just the risky nature of startups.” Just pivot.

Guess what? Time equals money. Our vision is to reduce the failure rate of startups.

The truth is, investors have very few tools to assess risk in startups. Founders have fewer tools to get to market with precision with in-depth business planning and marketing support while protecting equity and capital from the idea to product market fit. Everyone has their hand out.

Elizabeth was looking for a new mission after spending much of her career on the 7 Trillion dollar economic problem of healthcare and said, “Let’s go over here for a while. Let’s go fix something solvable amidst the AI crisis of job reorganization, displacement and inevitable growth.”

Our outlaw spirit said, “Let’s pour our heart into economic development starting with founders and provide a novel solution. No one gets left behind, it takes a village, even in business.”

So, we are building a startup platform for the 99% of founders not served by existing programs and services. To some, we look like a horseless carriage. Others see we are building cars. No one has called us crazy (to our face)…Yet.

What do you see? How are your startup investments going? How’s your program accelerator capacity, risk and return? Are you moving the needle on economic development in the current accelerator business model design?