Business Incubator Series: Stephen Fleming, Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Tech – Atlanta (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Where do your applicants usually come from?

Stephen: We do get pretty good coverage of the entrepreneurial opportunities coming out of Georgia Tech. That’s both the spin-out companies, which are based on intellectual property owned by Georgia Tech, and the startups being started by students, those that are not based on the Georgia Tech intellectual property. These are just students or recent graduates who want have an entrepreneurial experience and create a company.

That is, actually, by far, the minority of our overall membership. Most of our member companies come from the local entrepreneurial community here in Georgia, primarily from Atlanta. We serve the entire state, but more than 90% of our members are in the metro Atlanta area.

It’s a thriving, vibrant startup community. It has been for a long time. The ATDC [Atlanta Technology Development Center] has been here for a long time. Most startup companies tend to find us. We don’t do any marketing, but everyone somehow seems to know about what it is we’re doing. They will come to our events. They’ll come to locations where we have activities, and [then] they decide to join us.

Irina: How do you process these applications?

Stephen: Since we got rid of the very selective screening process, the application process is simple. Companies fill out a form on the website. One of our graduate students will receive it and pick up the phone, call them and have a brief telephone interviews with them just to confirm they are in the state of Georgia.

We have had some people apply from out of state. I’m a little flattered, but there’s not a lot we can do for someone in another state. [We also] need to confirm that they are indeed creating or trying to create new technology and not just resellers or implementers of someone else’s technology.

If those criteria are met, we welcome the company. We bring them into the incubator. We run them through an orientation process that we run every month. We will assign them one of our catalysts – the professionals whom I have on staff who run the incubator – and start scheduling meetings. Those will be one-on-one meetings. Some of them will be more of a classroom experience.

We’ll bring in 15, 20, or 25 entrepreneurs at once, and either one of my staff members or one of the members of the community will come in and teach classes on particular topics ranging from the obvious ones of “How to Raise Capital” to less obvious ones of “”How to Build a Team and How to Choose a Co-Founder” and “How to Share Equity with Someone You Recruited into Your Company.” We do a lot of that.

Irina: Approximately how many applications do you receive a month?

Stephen: It has tapered off a bit. At this point, I’d say we’re probably getting 15 or 20 a month.

Irina: How long does it take for them to get into the program?

Stephen: A couple of weeks. Certainly within 30 days, but we try to do it within a week or two.

Irina: Once an applicant is accepted into the incubator, what is the next step?

Stephen: They start orientation. They start coming to classes and start coming to meetings. We have a number of what we call, circles, which are made up of CEOs of companies. Those can be organized in a lot of different ways.

For example, we have a bootstrapping circle of companies that don’t want to raise venture capital. We have a hardware circle of companies that are building hardware, so not the software people. We have a marketing circle of companies for which the real challenge is sales and marketing, not development. A company can choose to join several of these, but it has to join at least one. Those groups will meet either weekly or twice a week, and they need to start participating.

What makes the community work is that everyone shows up and participates. It’s not our revealing the wisdom of the ages to these companies. It’s their talking to each other, and we facilitate that. That tends to work very well.

Irina: What other aids you use in your process?

Stephen: We have a range of mentors who are, typically, experienced local entrepreneurs who have been there and done that. I think in our current class of mentors there are 22 of them. It varies. These are individuals who have volunteered to spend a certain amount of their time working with these young companies for no compensation. They don’t get any equity. They don’t any money. They’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do. Usually, these folks have either been through an exit and have personal resources, or maybe they’re between jobs and want to spend a little time before diving back into their next entrepreneurial opportunity, or they’re trying to retire and trying to taper back their involvement. Still, they put a significant amount of time into ATDC endeavors. We couldn’t do what we do without them.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Stephen Fleming, Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Tech – Atlanta
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