Business Incubator Series: Interview With Kerry Rupp, Managing Partner, DreamIt Ventures – Philadelphia And New York City (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Irina: How many applicants do you accept?

Kerry: We will take 15 companies in [each of] the upcoming sessions, and that is the maximum we accept because we think there is really good interaction between them at that number. It will be a maximum of 60 people, probably more like 45, if history proves to be the case again.

Most of these companies have an average of three founding members at the time they come in, and we think this is a perfect size in that it’s small enough for them to be interacting, getting to know one another, and sharing resources and ideas, and not so big that they lose unity as a group.

Irina: How long does it take for you to make the decision?

Kerry: We start reviewing applications in January or February and we give our final notice to the companies at the end of March. It is a rolling process. We start to review the applications as they come in, and we will make offers to good companies before that March 31 deadline if we see companies we think are the ones we want to bring into the program.

Irina: What is your selection process?

Kerry: A lot of it is about the team members and their backgrounds. We are doing a lot to make sure that the team is going to work together well, that they are passionate about their ideas, and that they have good experience and good skill sets.

Some of it is just about the people themselves, and as I mentioned previously, we often use the network of people we know who might have industry expertise, who can help us to determine whether the opportunity is compelling and whether there is a real problem in the market that this company is going to solve.

But, I think as you will find with many accelerators, it is a much less stringent due diligence process than if it were a bigger investment by a professional institutional investor, and that is part of the beauty of these smaller programs. A lot of it is about your intuition and seeing whether you think a team has the right idea right now or is going to be capable of finding the right opportunity when they work with you over the course of the summer. So, as I said, a lot of it is about the team as much as anything else.

Irina: And once you accept the company for incubation, what is your next step?

Kerry: They come in for a three-month period. It starts with a kick-off weekend when they get connected to their mentor, their legal team, and other resources who are going to be supporting them.

It is a three-month program that ends with demo days. So, in the period between their acceptance and their coming to the program at the beginning of May, we assess whether we will need to help them to flesh out their team with any of the strategists or hackers.

We will search through our network to find the single best mentor for them. We don’t just have 15 mentors that we use every time; we find a mentor who is specifically attuned to that company’s needs. So, it may be someone who is experienced in the same industry, or it may be someone who’s faced a similar business challenge in a different industry or someone with a complementary skill set. It is a tailored mentor-matching process.

Then we have a series of webinars the week between when companies are accepted and when they come on board, to make sure they are gaining traction and moving forward in the right direction as they try to figure out where they are going to live and prepare to come to do the program. They can meet one another and find out what everybody else is working on. They can start thinking about the first steps we want them to look at in terms of improving their business models.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Interview With Kerry Rupp, Managing Partner, DreamIt Ventures - Philadelphia And New York City
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