Business Incubator Series: Troy Henikoff, Excelerate Labs – Chicago, Illinois (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What are the core benefits that your accelerator provides?

Troy: Here’s the way I look at it. There’s been a debate for years about whether entrepreneurs are born or whether they’re taught. I actually think the right answer is a hybrid. My belief is that there’re some personality characteristics that most entrepreneurs share. Not all. You can definitely find exceptions.

But most things like – and these are very broad, general things – you have to be a problem solver, you have to be the type of person who sees a situation and says, “Wow, I can come up with a solution to that.” You have to be the kind of person who’s comfortable with some degree of uncertainty.

If you get panicked when there’s uncertainty, you’re probably not going to be a successful entrepreneur. You have to be able to be comfortable with taking some level of risk. I think the best entrepreneurs are those who know how to mitigate risk in an inherently risky situation. You still have to be fundamentally comfortable with some level of risk.

What we look for is we take people who have those characteristics, have passion – an incredible amount of passion – for a particular idea that there’s a market for. Now, we can do the teaching. There’s a series of skills and tools that you need to be a successful entrepreneur. You’re going to figure it out one way or another.

When I started my first business, and I had no education in entrepreneurship, and I didn’t have anybody to turn to as a mentor, I had to learn a bunch of stuff the hard way. It was slow and cumbersome. I made mistakes that were expensive and time-consuming. It’s our goal to help these companies along and accelerate their progress at an unbelievably fast rate. We do it two ways.

One is by providing them with these tools. We do sessions on unit economics, building a financial model, search engine optimization, human resources, public relations, all the kinds of things you need to know about how to run a successful business.

More important, we wrap that with mentorship. We had 108 mentors who participated in last year’s class. That was 108 mentors who donated their time to come in and spend time, one on one, with these companies. Some of them came in, spent an hour or two, and didn’t come back that summer. Some of them spent time every single week meeting with the companies.

What happened was June, we had 399 meetings between mentors and companies. With 10 companies, that’s an average of 40 meetings for every company. Every company met an average of 40 mentors. Out of those 40 mentors, some organic relationships happened based on their having the right chemistry.

Each of the companies ended up with three to five mentors who really wanted to spend significant time with them and help them. Those three to five they would, typically, meet with weekly. They would dig into the business and help them with business model pivots; help them with introductions; help with technology, all kinds of things.

Again, it’s toward accelerating the company’s progress so that come Demo Day on August 31, they have a solid business model. They had a pipeline of customers. They could communicate clearly their value propositions. They had learned a whole bunch of this stuff. They were positioned to take off.

The value I think we provide is taking these people who have the inherent characteristics, the passion, a great idea and doing two things: give them the tools to be more effective entrepreneurs and, more important, give them the mentorship and the diversity of mentors to accelerate their businesses.

Excelerate is similar to TechStars in its structure. That’s by design. We modeled it after TechStars Boston. We’re an integral part of the TechStars Network. We work closely with David [Cohen] and Brad [Feld] and the TechStars Network guys.

Our uniqueness comes from where we are. We’re in Chicago. There are a lot of great things happening in Chicago. We have great universities here, large corporations.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Troy Henikoff, Excelerate Labs - Chicago, Illinois
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