Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Once entrepreneurs are accepted in the program, what is the next step?

John: We’ll work with each of them individually. What’s a little different about our program than some of the other programs out there is this is not a class-style program where we bring in a bunch of entrepreneurs for, say, three months and we run them through a curriculum of presentations and all that stuff.

I think those programs are great. They’re making a big difference in the quality of the entrepreneurs because they’re getting a lot of information in a condensed format to help them get their companies launched.

You might view us as the next step after that. Typically, those programs that last about three months, the entrepreneurs are then coming out looking for … seed level funding, maybe something more than that. We would be in that seed stage.

In our program, they’d be with us for a year to 18 months. We design a program around their needs as opposed to having a class of entrepreneurs. The next steps will differ from entrepreneur to entrepreneur.

Irina: What about your staff? Do you have employees? Do you use contractors?

John: There’s me. And I have another full-time employee. His name is Michael Harries. [Harries is the senior director and chief technologist for the Citrix Startup Accelerator].

He’s moved over from the Citrix Labs group at the beginning of this year. He’s based here with me. We’ll probably hire one more person to work directly for the startup accelerator. After that, we’ll be leveraging Citrix resources.

We’re getting mentors and help from our executives. I mentioned our design people. Across the board, we’ll be reaching out to our Citrix people to help the entrepreneurs. Beyond Citrix, we’ll be bringing in appropriate people either from the startup community or other organizations, wherever they may be, to help us develop and assist those companies, to get them to the next stage.

Irina: What do you plan to measure?

John: The key metric for us will be how many companies can successfully move on to the next stage and get follow-on funding or get enough customer traction that they can build their revenues and be successful.

Obviously, a percentage of them won’t be successful. That’s the nature of this business. So, some companies that won’t necessarily get that next stage of funding or find customers will learn valuable lessons.

That type of failure is what we encourage. What we try to do is do it in a scientific and measured way so people are measuring what’s going right, what’s not going right to take some of the mystery out of doing startups. I think that’s what’s really been happening, over the past five years in particular.

You used to have to be really smart and know people who had done it before to successfully launch a startup. While that certainly helps still, I think the education programs that exist today for entrepreneurs are more abundant.

Entrepreneurs have a lot more resources out there to figure this out as they go. We’ve got to measure as we go. Not all companies are going to successfully make it all the way to the market and to break even into profitability.

Part of the internal measurement for Citrix is what are we learning as a corporation. Whether the companies are successful or not, what are we learning?

That’s something we’ll measure internally. That’s a big motivation to why we’re doing this. As I said earlier, the Citrix Labs group has been doing this for some years with internal innovation. Now, we open this up for external innovation.

Not every project goes forward and finds a market. That’s OK. We’ve just learned something. The external measure everybody looks at is how many companies move on to the next level, get funded, or otherwise successfully launch a product or service.

Irina: Does your incubator have a specific business model?

John: We’re not a fund, so we don’t have to measure return on investment as the critical success factor for its continued operation. We do expect there will be a number of companies that will go on and be successful; therefore, our debt will convert to equity.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator
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