Business Incubator Series: An Interview With Chris Heivly, Executive Director, LaunchBox Digital (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What would be the ideal company to have in your incubation program?

Chris: For the most part, first-time entrepreneurs who have a reasonably mature concept of what they want to build in a fairly large market or large market opportunity; something where the value is [so] obvious that they succeed in implementing their vision.

On an individual basis, the team is a bright, well-rounded team. We do not accept, for the most part, one-person teams. We like for there to be at least one, if not two developers on the team. We’re looking for A teams and really nice market opportunities.

Irina: How many companies have you accelerated to date?

Chris: Twenty-four companies have gone through the LaunchBox program.

Irina: How many in the past 12 months?

Chris: Seven.

Irina: When is your next three-month accelerator?

Chris: We run a three-month accelerator, once a year, in the fall. It’ll run from mid-August to early November. That’s the only formal thing that we’re set up to do right now.

We’re funded to run one of those for four years, including the year that we just finished. So, we have three more years to do; however, we have space for the full year. We’re building a new non-accelerator to run when we’re not running the accelerator. The accelerator itself only runs once a year.

Irina: When did you start doing the full year admission?

Chris: When we started the accelerator program in August, we procured space for a full year. We knew that when we finished the session [in the fall of 2010], we would start working on mini programs to operate in between [fall 2010] and [fall 2011]. Late 2010 is when we went to a full-year model.

The companies that came into the accelerator program came in [in August 2010]. They finished in November 2010. They’re done with the program. There’s no formal program for them right now.

Some of them went back to their respective places and homes in New York City and Denver and Berkeley; however, some of the companies were local, and they’ve continued to use the space.

That’s one of the things we wanted to offer. You don’t have to pick up and move out the minute that the accelerator program ends. Stick around, use the space. We have people coming by all the time. I’m still sitting here. The rest of the LaunchBox partners come in. There’s still advice to be given, mentorship to be done. It’s just not formalized.

As an example, each company, typically, gets a table, during the accelerator. So, one company equals one six-foot table. It’s very garage-like. It’s not very glamorous, but it’s very fun. As an example of the kind of programs that we’re going to run off session is we’re offering a program called a 30-day table.

We’re going through a selection process right now of having other companies in the area that have not gone through our accelerator program to be able to come in, use our space, be part of our group dynamic, collaborate and run their one- to four-person company out of our space.

We call that a 30-day table, and every 30 days, we’ll sit down and evaluate if they’re making progress, if we’re able to actually help them along. If so, we’ll keep them for another 30 days. We’ll do that up until the point where I have to kick them out and bring in the next batch of accelerator companies in August.

Irina: The 30-day table program is also at no charge, right?

Chris: That’s correct.

Irina: Where do you get your applicants?

Chris: That’s a great question. We had upward of 140 applications for the recent session. Ninety-five percent of them come from the United States, but we do get applications from around the world.

Of the more than 90% of applications coming from the United States, probably about 35% come from the local area, the Raleigh-Durham area, which some people call the triangle or RTP (research triangle park). The rest of them come from, I think, a little bit more from the East Coast than the Midwest or the West Coast. But they come from all over the United States.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Business Incubator Series: An Interview With Chris Heivly, Executive Director, LaunchBox Digital
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