Collaborating with other accelerators

[Hugh Mason]

I was asked this question in a private email and thought it better to answer it here in case anyone else wants to chip in with an opinion too:

Do you collaborate with other accelerators like Techstars/YCombinator? If so, how?

Several times each week we get asked to partner with another accelerator, a corporation, a government or a university. For a while that became overwhelming, and also quite frustrating because we want to share what we have learned and we are not so arrogant as to believe that we know it all. Meng and I would both much rather have 10% of a watermelon than 100% of a grape. I'll leave the discussion on corporations, academia and governments to another post and focus on your question which is about other accelerators.

The main way we connect is through the Global Accelerator Network, of which we were one of the first members. It was set up by Techstars to share the insights that they had gained and to learn from others running similar programs in different contexts around the world. There are some shared services and infrastructure emerging (for example, most of us use the f6s.com platform for admissions) but the main way it has helped to date has been to accelerate our members' understanding of what they are doing.

Once we realized that we are not really in competition with each other and that, in the very risky world of startup enterprise, anyone's success is everyone's success, then it became obvious that sharing as much as we can, as quickly as we can, about processes etc is in everyone's best interests. We have conference calls for our accelerator MD's every two weeks and at least two conferences a year when people get together. So a lot of trust has been built and that means we share detailed metrics on our own and (anonymised) startup performance. Between us, to date, operate 50 accelerators on 6 continents and have raised USD959M for startups and created over 5000 jobs in thousands of startups. So it's an exciting thing to be part of.

The collaboration is also now growing into an international hosting network for our alumni, giving them a foot on the ground at any participating accelerator's space. It means startups that are established in their home country can share insights from their market with startups in the market into which they are trying to expand, and vice versa. That's critical in a region like SEA where so much of business will always be face to face about about who you know as much as what you know.

Outside the GAN, we have been reticent about forming any partnerships because we are acutely aware that, moving beyond simply flashing meaningless logos on a website, real relationships take a lot of energy to maintain. So whenever an accelerator approaches us, we try to answer three questions in this order:

• First, WHY would a partnership between us help your work and ours?
• Then HOW could that partnership work, and
• Finally WHAT do we actually need to do to make it happen?

We share how our mental picture of what an accelerator is has changed. When we set up we thought we were running a program - like a car wash for entrepreneurs - they came in at one end and shiny investment-ready startups came out at the other. So we thought that we were program managers.

Now we realise that is true but also that an accelerator is much more than this. The accelerator program itself is like the game at the centre of a premier league football stadium. You need the game and the elite players down on the pitch to attract everyone together, but it is the fans around the game in the stadium, and the supporters watching on TV, and the people who put their children into under-12 football leagues, and the magazines and the merchandise and everything else that actually makes a football club. So the players, the fans at home and far away, the supporters in grandstands, the corporate sponsors who bring clients to watch games - they are all different stakeholder groups and together they all make up the football club.

In the same way an accelerator is much more than a program. We are really managing a giant premier-league 'startup club' with seven different communities, all of which we must engage if we are to succeed. These are the seven communities:

1. 'Wannabe' startups - the biggest challenge for us is to keep connecting with the very best startup teams that we can because we find that only 1 in 30 applicants is ready.

2. Current startups going through the program - we have a program that works. So there is not much problem here although of course it can always be better.

3. Alumni - we now have 38 graduate companies so managing them is a challenge but that's mainly an operational thing.

4. Mentors - we don't have a problem attracting strong mentors but we would like to understand their motivation and make sure we give them what they want better.

5. Investors - we have access to capital but would like to raise more (we have secured $3m out of the $6m we are raising for our next phase of growth).

6. The accelerator team - a critical thing for us is to develop new sources of sustainable revenue to cover our operating costs.

7. Corporate, government and academic partners - we look to these to generate Revenue, Referrals of talent and to build Reputation. Of these,generating Revenue is by far the most important to us, for example programs that are sponsored by government or corporations to bring startups to Singapore as a route into Asia..

If a partnership with another accelerator could help us to address any of these specific challenges then it would be of great interest. So far that has not been the case but the door is always open!