Business Incubator Series: Troy Henikoff, Excelerate Labs – Chicago, Illinois (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Did TechStars implement their universal application idea that David Cohen discussed with me when I interviewed him?

Troy: TechStars is working with the Kauffman Foundation on implementing it.  They are working on it.

Irina: How do you process your applications?

Troy: We get hundreds of applications every year. I don’t think the process is perfect. We do the best we can. We have to balance – and this is sort of like entrepreneurship – there’s a saying, “Don’t let perfect get in the way of good.” When you’re launching company, if you want the company to be perfect, you’ll never actually launch it. You’ll always be working on your product. You’ll be internally focused. You’ll miss the opportunity.

To some extent, we have a similar challenge with our application process. If we were to try to be perfect and spend hours with each of the hundreds of applicants, the time from application submittal to acceptance would be unreasonably long. We would never get our program off the ground. We try to do our selection in three weeks from the time applications close.

Three weeks is not a lot of time when you have to go through hundreds of applications. So, what we do is we go through and read all of the applications. This year, we actually had three different people read each application. Each application was read a minimum of three times.

From that, they selected roughly 75 that they felt were worth a second look. Then, we had two people who went through those 75 and tried to really dig in. I looked at every single website. I looked at the LinkedIn profiles of the founders. I read the entire application in detail.

From that we chose – I think it was about 48 this year – 48 companies to interview. We interviewed those 48 companies. Those 48 companies each got an hour-long interview that was broken up into two sections. In most cases, it was with three people. So, there were two people in the first section, then we took a little break. The third person dug in on some particular topics we wanted to know more information about, customer acquisition or the technology or the team.

With all that information, we as a committee sat down and went through the business models, the teams, the feedback we got in the interviews and selected what we thought were 10 great teams.

Irina: What do you say to the ones who aren’t accepted?

Troy: A couple things. One, our process is not perfect. I am sure that there are many great, great teams that we missed. As I said, our process is very quick. We’re trying to do all this in three weeks. Going back to our mission, we want to help entrepreneurship as a whole in Chicago.

So, I personally wrote a note to each of the companies that I interviewed and met that didn’t get in and tried to give them some feedback on what were some of the things that we saw in their companies or models that gave us pause. We invited them to come in to Excelerate. I’m going to do one-on-one meetings with any of the ones who want to over the summer, so we can continue to follow their progress.

If I can be of help, if we can connect them to people, we’d love to. I can’t have one-on-one meetings with 300 companies. I made that offer to the people who had made the final cut, who we had interviewed. We would love to help as many of these other companies as we can. As there are opportunities, we definitely share them with the applicants.

Whether it’s an opportunity for learning at a conference, job opportunities where there are people looking to join startups, we’re trying to create a community here. We have a number of events for the applicants. We had two before the application process was over that were Friday evening social meetups, each of which had 100 to 150 applicants show up to try to reinforce the community and the people in the community getting to know them, and so on.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Troy Henikoff, Excelerate Labs - Chicago, Illinois
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