Business Incubator Series: Troy Henikoff, Excelerate Labs – Chicago, Illinois (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Troy: The ecosystem is ripe for high-tech startups in Chicago.  We have great universities.  There are more Fortune 500 companies based here in Chicago than in any other metropolitan area, so – on the B2B side – we have the businesses to sell to.

In terms of uniqueness, it’s primarily about location and then the incredible breadth of mentors we have. As I said, last year we had 108 [mentors] who participated. This year, we probably have an additional 100 or so who offered, who want to participate.

This is a community effort. There are lots of other resources in Chicago for different stages of businesses, and I’d like there to be even more, but we’re the only one focused on this stage. Because we’re the only accelerator of our type in Chicago, we’re not associated with any one university or any one organization.

We pull in people from all the universities. We pull in people from all the organizations, the Illinois Technology Association, the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center, Northwestern, Kellogg, Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), DePaul, all of those, we pull people in from.

It becomes a community effort in a way similar to TechStars Boulder, except our community is significantly larger. Chicago has a population of three million. Boulder, I think, has a population of 100,000. It’s great to see the whole community come around our program.

If you look at similar programs in Silicon Valley, there are so many of them that the entire community doesn’t get behind one. They get highly segmented. We’re drawing from the entire resource base of the Chicago metro area.

I think that Chicago would benefit from having other accelerators. While we may compete for particular companies, remember, our mission is to grow entrepreneurship in Chicago. If there are more resources for entrepreneurs, that is a good thing. A rising tide will lift all boats.

I think it would be great if there were other programs around. There are some already, but if there were even more … other programs in the area that were either targeting specific metro areas, maybe some of them would compete directly for the types of people we’re competing for. That’s fine. Competition will make us all stronger. I’d like to see more and not less.

Irina: How do you take advantage of being part of the TechStars Network?

Troy: The most benefit we got out of the TechStars Network was when it wasn’t even formally the TechStars Network, which was our first year in 2010.

David [Cohen] provided a ton of help in some of the very mechanical, tactical things, everything from what the investment documents should look like for the companies to how to structure the 13 weeks, how to recruit investors, how to recruit mentors.

There were so many things that we had never done before. Just like we are trying to accelerate companies’ growth by giving them mentors and people who’ve been there done that before so they don’t have to make all the mistakes, Tech Stars helped us accelerate our growth by showing us the ropes and helping to make sure we didn’t make some of the mistakes they made in their first year.

It was tremendously valuable in that first year. Now that we’ve done it, we have a much greater sense for what worked, what didn’t work. I think the benefits now are a little less, but they’re still important.

TechStars had their New York Demo Day on April 14. On April 15, twenty of the TechStars Network accelerators met. We had an all day meeting that was really great. We shared lots of ideas. We shared thoughts about how we can grow as a group and how we can grow individually. We talked about how we can collaborate on things like the application process.

It was a valuable day, just the networking, being able to know who the other players are in the other cities. We’re going to be traveling to some of those cities to see first hand how they’re doing things. We’re going to have some visit us in Chicago. We’re coordinating demo days, so we don’t compete with each other on those days. I think there’s a lot of value in the network.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Troy Henikoff, Excelerate Labs - Chicago, Illinois
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9