Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

John: Having that video capability built into Angelsoft has been nice. I had one entrepreneur, for instance, who put his application in a few weeks ago. He just walked around the room on a Friday night saying, “We’re about to ship our Beta version. We’re going to send it off to Apple here to go into the Apple store in a couple of hours.”

Here’s the guy walking around the room with this laptop computer. You can tell because the quality is just so-so. Literally, there are guys eating pizza and pounding away on code. It really worked for us to see the guys and get a feel for who these [people are]. It can be quite abstract when you read a lot of different applications. When you see guys actually working away on a Friday night … it was great.

Irina: Since December 2010, how many pitches have you received?

John: It’s changed quite a bit since we launched the global initiative about a month ago [in April]. We’ve gotten upward of 100 applications, but we’re getting a real flood of them at the moment. Just yesterday [May 16, 2011], we went over 20 that came in over the weekend. We’re definitely gaining momentum and getting applications. Most of them are coming from outside of the United States, which is interesting.

We haven’t spent a lot of money on advertising or anything. We’re just simply getting the word out through the entrepreneur and innovation channels in the various regions I mentioned. We’re getting some level of reach. It’s quite interesting to see how it’s developing.

Irina: How many of the applications that you receive deserve a closer look?

John: Interestingly, you don’t know what you’re going to get when you do something like this. I would have guessed that a high percentage of them would have been not very good. People just go, “Oh, what the heck?” But that’s not been the case. I’d say 80% of them have been worth consideration. We’ll probably go to the second round and personally interview … at least 50% of them. We’ll give them a direct interview.

If you look on our website, I put a calendar on there. We wanted to have a focused campaign for Q2 going into Q3, just to give people motivation not to wait. I put a deadline on applications, which is the end of June 2011.

Again, I think what we expected would happen is happening. People who had been working on their applications are now getting them in. We expect, over the next month, to get quite a few. After June, I don’t know what’s going to happen. We’re not going to stop taking applications.

It’s just that we’ll probably have enough at that point where we’d need to continue to close them. You have to go through legal due diligence and physically meet the entrepreneurs. There are a lot of other steps that we have to take. Plus, it’ll be summertime, so things will tend to slow down a little bit.

When we get to September, when we have our grand opening here – in the third week of September – we expect to have a good number of the entrepreneurs here to introduce them to the community and to the press and so on. We’ll see where we land by then and how much more we’ll encourage applications for the end of the year at that point.

Irina: How do you plan to meet with the entrepreneurs who are outside of the United States?

John: We’ll work with each one of them individually. If they can come over here, and if it makes sense for them to come over here … I don’t want to get people to come over here just for the heck of it. Again, in working with entrepreneurs globally, we can usually put a program together for them to introduce them to the right types of companies or individuals that can potentially partner with them or potentially be beta customers or introduce them to other investors. We’ll put a program around them so it makes sense for them to fly over.

Irina: Will you invest in them upon accepting them into your accelerator?

John: Right. If we accept them, part of the entire process is the legal agreement, which culminates in a transfer of money.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator
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