Business Incubator Series: John Richards, BoomStartup, Provo, Utah (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

John: We have about 50 top mentors who are listed on our website. Sometimes they provide only a few hours during the summer. Sometimes, they’ll come in and provide four hours every week because they fall in love with the program. They do it all free.

We had Matt Galligan in from Silicon Valley. Hw has done a couple of companies, such as SocialThing and SimpleGeo. He came in and we had a dinner.

He met with all 10 companies, and he mentored them for an entire day. We had a nice social dinner with everybody, the CEOs of the companies. We’re doing that a lot.

Irina: How do you usually get your applications? Where do they usually come from?

John: We start off in late January or around February 1, holding weekly – or sometimes, two or three times a week – recruiting meetings, up through the end of March. We do that all over in our three-county focus area.

We publicize and try to get TechCrunch and others to publicize them. Word starts spreading, but in the local region, we hold these meetings and everybody’s Tweeting and sharing it in social media.

We get a lot of buzz going, and we get anywhere from 100 to 400 people at each meeting. Sometimes we’ve had only 25 or 40 or so at a meeting.

We tell them about the program, and we do a lot of matching up. It’s amazing. We’ve had successful companies form these recruiting meetings. People who meet at these meetings don’t even apply. They  just go off and start companies. It’s cool.

We’ll be at the meeting, and we’ll say, “How many of you are here biz guys looking for a tech partner?” And then we’ll say, “How many of you are tech guys looking for a business partner with a good idea?” They raise their hands and we say, “OK, we’re going to have networking time. Go find each other.”

Usually, it’s about anywhere from two to five businesspeople in ratio to tech people at those meetings. They’re very energetic meetings. That’s where we get a lot of interest coming from.

A second source of interest is going to be the universities. Utah has a lot of strong universities, and the University of Utah and BYU are both world class in the fields of entrepreneurship and technology transfer.

We have strong state schools like Utah Valley University, which is a fast-growing university that’s about a couple miles from BYU. BYU has about 32,000 students. Utah Valley has about a 32,000 student base, which is the same size as the University of Utah Salt Lake City. There’s Utah State University.

So, we recruit heavily at the university level as well. Those are probably our two main sources.

Also, when Novell was sold to Attachmate, they laid off some people.  In this year’s crop of companies we have a team who are all in their 40s and are all Novell engineers. It’s kind of interesting. Most of the companies in these programs – at least, in ours – are younger entrepreneurs. These guys are all in their 40s.

It’s kind of fun. In some ways, they’re very easy to deal with because they’re more mature in their business careers.

We also get applicants from the large companies. Some large company folks break off and want to start a company, and they think BoomStartup’s a great way to go.

Irina: So, out of these 150 applications, you accept about 10?

John: Yes. Here’s what happens:  Of the 150 legitimate applications, about half of them get a good look.

We whittle that down to 30 to come in and give detailed presentations. They come in and pitch us.

After that, we’ll call back about the top 15 or 20 and have them come back for a second pitch. We meet and talk with them a lot. We might have a third visit with a few.

Then we make our invitations to the final 10; we invite them to be in the program. We make our final decisions in mid-April. The program commences in mid-May. The invitee has 24 hours to accept or reject.

Both years, one team in 2010 and one team in 2011, turned us down after we gave them the invitation. I think they like to wear that as a badge of honor, saying they were invited but turned us down.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Business Incubator Series: John Richards, BoomStartup, Provo, Utah
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