1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sumner Douglas of BoomStartup (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about the geography. You said Salt Lake City. Does that mean that you’re investing only in new test startups? What is your policy?

Sumner Douglas: Definitely not. We definitely do take a lot of surge from Utah. The Utah tech game has grown significantly over the last couple of years. We see a huge amount of deal flow coming out of Salt Lake City and very high quality deals. We look at deals throughout the domestic US and internationally.

At this cohort that I’ve ran, I had four international companies – one in London, one in Kiev, and two in Latin America. I had another four companies out of Utah and another four companies spread throughout the domestic US. We find a good company and if we think they’re a good fit with what we’re offering and vice versa, then we move forward quickly from there.

Sramana Mitra: Do you require that they move to Utah or they can stay wherever they are?

Sumner Douglas: They can stay wherever they are. We have a partial virtual accelerator. We build a platform and record a lot of our core curriculum components so our entrepreneurs can consume that information in the morning or late at night. We typically host multiple weekly calls with those.

I typically host a call on a Monday. It’s a discovery call. Then we run through metrics and I introduce a new topic. Thursday, we do a lot more of the implementation components. Instead of spending a lot of time delivering that core curriculum, most of our entrepreneurs are consuming that information and we’re actually helping them apply that to their business model on a weekly basis. That’s what our goal is – to reduce the amount of time that they have to spend in a classroom and instead spend a lot more time in implementation and with high level mentors.

Sramana Mitra: Give us some case studies of interesting companies that you’ve invested in. Why have you chosen to invest in them?

Sumner Douglas: We have what we call a Knowledge Locker and Know Locker. They reached out to me from UK or London. One of the reasons that we chose this company was that they had a very clear problem statement that resonated with me. I feel in today’s world we see a lot of social feeds. We see Instagram, Facebook, and even LinkedIn.

In some way, it’s a bit of a social feed but more oriented towards business. I think we’re a little bit overburdened with a lot of those social feeds. But when we go and look at acquiring new types of knowledge, there’s nothing really out there that’s designed for us to easily and seamlessly acquire.

Know Locker curates feeds of knowledge for you. So if you want to learn about Blockchain or Bitcoin, you can put those in your topics of interest and it automatically curates in what looks like a very Facebook type of feed where you can consume and learn knowledge on a regular basis. They do this for the inside of their companies as well. You can create channels on the inside of your companies to curate your thought leadership on the inside of your business and absorb thought leadership from outside of your business as well.

The CEO has a good track record. He had a couple of great successes already. He already bootstrapped this and had about $7,000 in multi-recurring revenue when he started with us. I finished up the year with about a $100,000 in multi-recurring revenue at the end of the year. This was kind of a bet on the CEO. I think he was solving a really big problem for us.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sumner Douglas of BoomStartup
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