Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How much funding support does Enterprise Ireland usually provide to those entrepreneurs who are qualified?

John: It’s in the low hundreds of thousands. If you go to the Enterprise Ireland site, it specifies that it changes with time. Obviously, over the past few years, Ireland’s gone through some changes. In fact, Ireland’s looking to entrepreneurship more than ever to get them through their recessionary period that was caused mostly by land speculation and real estate speculation.

They put more resources into the entrepreneur ecosystem now. I think the upper limit was €750,000. Again, that’s matching whatever you bring in. In reality, they fund at any level up to that, oftentimes at lower levels, maybe from €100,000 to  €300,000.

Irina: What is the story behind Citrix incubator?

John: Citrix Systems is a very successful software company based here in the States. Most people are familiar with Citrix because we have some popular product lines. For example, our GoToMeeting product is pretty well known.

We’re all about virtual computing. People have heard a lot about virtual computing over the past few years. There’s server virtualization but what we really have done well, in the past few years in particular, is on the client side is desktop virtualization or VDI as it’s sometimes referred to.

As the computing world continues to evolve, we’re supporting ways to provide any content, any application, anywhere to any device. That’s what Citrix is all about.

Citrix Labs is an internal organization that has been of the forefront of research and development for Citrix Systems over the past 10 years and has contributed a lot to the corporation to help them understand where the computing world is going. It’s always a big question for anybody or any company because it’s such a dynamic industry.

Citrix Startup Accelerator  is an outgrowth of Citrix Labs. Citrix Labs is run by Martin Duursma. [He is CTO, chair and vice president of Citrix Labs].

For the last 10 years, they’ve been doing internal research projects to try to look out in time beyond the current product road map, say three years and out. They’ve done that with internal innovation.

Citrix Startup Accelerator is now working in an open innovation style with entrepreneurs by funding them and supporting them. We’re going to learn quite a bit and hope we’ll launch a lot of independent, successful startups as well.

Irina: Is there a physical location for the accelerator?

John: It’s both. Citrix is all about virtual computing. We’re also virtual in our setup as a corporation. We’re set up around the world. Originally founded in Florida, we have a very big footprint here in Silicon Valley but also up in Seattle, in Boston, around the world in Cambridge, UK, in Bangalore [India], in Asia Pacific.

We’re spread around the world so we use our collaboration tools to run our business. That’s true for the startup accelerator as well.

We have physical location here in Santa Clara in Silicon Valley, where we’re supporting companies directly that need office space and want a presence in Silicon Valley.

It’s a global program. We don’t want to be exclusive to Silicon Valley. Many investors focus on Silicon Valley because it has the greatest density of both entrepreneurs and services for startups, which is fantastic. But we want this program to reach beyond Silicon Valley and reach entrepreneurs globally.

We’re a part of Citrix Labs and part of the Citrix corporation. The funding comes directly from the corporation. We’re funding up to $400,000. We’ve completed three investments since we launched the program essentially at the beginning of this year.

We’re using convertible notes to do that. A big part of it isn’t the money. We understand money is an enabler and it helps entrepreneurs and startup teams focus on building their products or services for a period so they’re not having to raise money.

Obviously, $400,000 only gets you so far. We are working with other investors. We’re seeing a number of the entrepreneurs who apply to our program bringing in other investors.

The real interesting part here, though, the work that we’re doing here is mentoring. With access to our channels, access to our customers, access to all the smart people out there in the world who have done startups, we can give them the advice and the mentoring.

[We’re] just building a program around them so that we can help them learn as quickly as possible about their theses, what they’re right about, what they’re wrong about and, of course, they make changes as they go.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator
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