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Tattoos and YCombinator Demo Day

This is going to be BIG.

Similarly, picking seed investors for your first startup in and around the craziness of an accelerator demo day can be just as scarring over the long term. In fact, you'd probably be better off both deciding on a tat on demo day. I'm saying this because I went to my first YCombinator Demo Day last Tuesday.

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What Future for Accelerators?

Both Sides of the Table

Accelerators have had quite a good run the past 5+ years. Not just Y Combinator and TechStars but a host of other accelerators across the country. There were a lot of requests for us to turn our mentorship program into a physical accelerator with a fund, office space and full-time staff. Yeah, he was LA, baby!

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How VCs, Accelerators, and Coworking Spaces Put Communities in Buildings vs. Buildings in Communities

This is going to be BIG.

Sun's space was for it's customer assistance unit and Cornell just had a demo space patched into a supercomputer back on campus. It needs to go house to house--founders and employees getting matched through individual e-mail intros, deals happening over handshakes, and startups getting recruited into your ecosystem one at a time.

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Why the Accelerator Model is Broken—and how 500 Startups is Fixing it

500

When I moved to San Francisco in 2012, I was working on my fourth startup and looking to join an accelerator. 500 immediately stood out to me, not only for their reputation as one of the top accelerators in Silicon Valley, but also because they seemed to be one of the few VCs at the time that recognized that true entrepreneurship was blind.

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Taking our Flagship Accelerator Virtual-First

500

When news broke of COVID-19 entering in the US, we were one of the first major accelerators to turn the Demo Day experience completely virtual, and since then, we have focused on collecting data from investors and founders to help the community at-large through reports like our COVID-19 Investor Survey and Female Founders Survey.

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Startup Business Funding: 5 Business-Breaking Misconceptions

Dream It

NOT spending time on the accelerator building the product. The most valuable resource the accelerator provides is the network, so use all my time to navigate that network. Being self-sustainable has given us a new perspective on startup funding, especially compared to what I experienced on my first accelerator run.

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When VCs Play Defense

Both Sides of the Table

The frantic pace of technology cycles, the amount of tech news, the blogs, the conferences, the demo days, the announcements, the fundings, the IPOs. As VCs we’re inundated with emails from founders, friends, colleagues, angels, seed investors, VCs, law firms, venture banks, corporates and so forth with their favorite deals.