Today is Fledge’s sixth birthday! Company start dates are usually rather fuzzy, so specifically today is the sixth anniversary of the day Fledge LLC was incorporated in Delaware. That is thus a date after the business plan was deemed viable and before the day we opened our first application and months before we started our first session with our very first fledglings. Six years later, the...
Brad Feld, co-founder of TechStars, author of many books for entrepreneurs and investors, and prolific blogger posted a list of academic research on accelerators. Academic Research on Accelerators The links include: Accelerators and Crowd-Funding: Complementarity, Competition, or Convergence in the Earliest Stages of Financing New Ventures?, Smith, Hannigan, and Gasiorowski, 6/13 Accelerating...
Being an entrepreneur is hard. The ups and down of startup life are far larger and stronger than most jobs. Working with entrepreneurs isn’t much better, as the empathy is almost are wary. We’ve worked with dozens upon dozens of entrepreneurs at Fledge and most handle these stresses in stride. Sure, they have some sleepless nights and exhaustion, but that is what...
From the inside of the startup process, as the entrepreneur, the pass to success seems rather simple. You’ve got a great idea. It’s obvious that it will work. It’s frustrating that others are not simply following along. Reality is that entrepreneurship is complicated. Few ideas truly are great. Most startups fail. Sometimes analogous situations make this far more obvious. Take...
Fledge9 wrapped up less than a month ago, but Fledge10 begins in Lima, Peru tomorrow and before that intensity builds, it seems a good time to wrap-up what Fledge9 did for each of the fledglings in Seattle. Africa Business Radio came into Fledge9 as a two-year-old, bootstrapped streaming radio station with a single stream of content. They left with a plan to create three more streams: East...
Fledge is over five years old, and for that half decade and more the industry has been debating how to measure the impact of a company and a portfolio. Using the Pinchot Impact Index, Fledge is able to not only do that, but also to show how that measure changes from session to session. More specifically, we measure three levels of impact for our portfolio of fledglings: the potential of the idea...
Do accelerators really help is the second most asked question in the industry after how do I apply? That would seem an odd question almost twelve years after the birth of the modern business accelerator, except for the fact that there were hundreds of useless business incubators back in the dot com boom. This is an industry with a multi-decade history of big promises. And industry with...
How Fledge helps startups varies from company to company. One of the best stories from Fledge9 is BioGen Kenya. They applied (three times) with a plan to turn used cooking oil into biodiesel. They launched and are operating that business in Nairobi, expecting to come to Fledge to learn how to raise money to expand. Digging into the opportunity, we learned that last year Nairobi passed a law...
After receiving (and reviewing) almost 2,000 applications, it seems long overdue to provide some guidance to the applicants on how to best apply to Fledge. 1. Do some homework Read the about page, the details, and the FAQ. Watch the video explaining What Happens at Fledge. For even more homework, pick up a copy of The Next Step, which is the core of the classroom material taught within Fledge. 2...
A new online magazine, Rank & File has a nice article on the power of mentorship.
Read it at rankandfilemag.com.
Download the Rank & File App for Apple and for Android.