Business Incubator Series: Interview With Kerry Rupp, Managing Partner, DreamIt Ventures – Philadelphia And New York City (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Kerry: The public funding that DreamIt receives is not contingent on how many of our entrepreneurs are successful. I think that is probably because our investors agree with us that this model of succeed fast or fail fast is valuable. They understand that some of the companies will decide not to move forward after the program, which is part of the process of vetting these ideas in the market place. I don’t think they want to discourage that.

We think that it is important to allow risk and failure in this early stage of the entrepreneurial environment. We intentionally make this a three-month program and we don’t extend it to, say, a traditional incubator where a company can stay a long time and maybe get a little too comfortable in their incubator space.

Obviously that is a generalization, but we have seen it happen before. So, [with us] there is a really a sense of urgency when you have all the companies rushing to have something ready to show during demo day and knowing that the other companies are making progress with customers, revenue, traction, and products, so we intentionally have a defined timetable.

Irina: Thank you, Kerry. Fantastic insights.

This segment is part 8 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Interview With Kerry Rupp, Managing Partner, DreamIt Ventures – Philadelphia And New York City
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