Business Incubator Series: Interview With Kerry Rupp, Managing Partner, DreamIt Ventures – Philadelphia And New York City (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Irina: What are your core benefits?

Kerry: We provide a lot of the same types of services that you will see in other accelerator programs, but I will describe them just to make sure we talk about them, and then we will talk about a couple of ways that we are different.

So, as with any other program we provide a small amount of stipend. It is calculated as $5,000 for the company and $5,000 for each team member who would be on site during the course of the program, up to four founders. So, the maximum amount we will give is $25,000, but it is contingent on the number of the company members.

That is intended not to be funding; it is stipend to allow the company to focus on the business during the course of the program.

We also provide shared office space. So, there is a community of fellow entrepreneurs who are all working together in the same space, which we find to be a really important component of the program. I know it is not an ingredient in every single accelerator, but for our companies it’s a differentiating factor.

At the end of the summer, they find they’ve gotten a lot of value out of the relationships they formed with the other startups, the ideas those companies brought to them, the advice they gave; it also provides an interesting cooperative and competitive environment. Seeing the progress that other companies are making is often inspiring to the companies to get motivated themselves.

We also provide a dedicated, one-on-one mentor who is not just a big-name entrepreneur but someone who is going to spend somewhere between four and six hours a week with them over the course of the summer really trying to dig in with them on their business. And we give those one-on-one mentors a small part of the equity in the fund in order to help them feel aligned in terms of helping the companies along.

In addition to the dedicated mentor, we also provide an entire series of advisors. Some are subject matter experts who are available on demand for a specific topic, whether it is technology, marketing and PR, or business development, and then we do coaching on topics like pitches, presentation skills, and agile software development.

This year we are adding a new component where we have an advisory board of entrepreneur CEOs, and these are the first-time or early in their career CEOs who are maybe only a step ahead of the entrepreneurs in the program themselves.

We think it is interesting that they have just been there and face the same kinds of problems the companies in the accelerator are about to face, whether it is raising funding, building the culture of their company, or hiring their first interns and their first teams. So, in addition to our more seasoned mentors, we have this advisory board of young entrepreneurs who are also assisting with the program.

Then there are some other standards; obviously, the managing partners who run the program will also be providing advice and coaching. We have donated legal services from top-tier law firms, donated accounting services from top-tier firms, and a speaker series once a week. The program of course culminates in a demo day where all the companies can pitch to investors, the media, and fellow entrepreneurs in the space.

One of the other things that differentiates [our program] is that in addition to the dedicated mentors and the new advisory board of these younger CEOs, in addition to companies applying to the program and wanting to be accepted, we also solicit applications from individual entrepreneurs. These are technical, design, and business types, and we use that database of incoming applicants to match up to companies that we accept to kind of flush out the teams and make sure that each company comes in with a full skill set and complementary skills and experience.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Interview With Kerry Rupp, Managing Partner, DreamIt Ventures - Philadelphia And New York City
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