Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

John: If a company we invest in exits down the road at some point, either through acquisition or going through a public market, that equity will come back for Citrix, which would be great.

[However], that won’t be the measurement on sustaining the program. The measurement on sustaining the program is does Citrix feel that we’re learning enough, that we’re supporting the entrepreneurial ecosystem in a way we want to, that we think this is a good overall thing for us to be involved in. >>>

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. >>>

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.” >>>

Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Would you please go over the core benefits of your program one more time?

John: We give access to our deep channel of partners and customers. We have more than 250,000 customers that range from enterprises all the way down to small, medium sized businesses; access to both individuals and technology here in Citrix, but also in the much broader technology world we live in. >>>

Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How many companies do you plan to fund and accelerate this year?

John: It depends on how much we invest per company. We’re looking at something in the 12 to 15 range initially. We’re funded over the next several years. >>>

Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Do you have any particular industry preference?

John: We’re very software focused. We have seen an applicant who has a hardware piece of the solution to help accelerate it, but for the most part, we’re just going to be focused on software.

Citrix is very much horizontally focused and infrastructure focused. We tend to look for solutions that span across industries and solve core issues for businesses. >>>

Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How much funding support does Enterprise Ireland usually provide to those entrepreneurs who are qualified?

John: It’s in the low hundreds of thousands. If you go to the Enterprise Ireland site, it specifies that it changes with time. Obviously, over the past few years, Ireland’s gone through some changes. In fact, Ireland’s looking to entrepreneurship more than ever to get them through their recessionary period that was caused mostly by land speculation and real estate speculation. >>>

Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

I am talking to John McIntyre, senior director at Citrix Startup Accelerator, which is an outgrowth of Citrix Labs, an internal research and innovation organization at Citrix with offices in Sydney (Australia) and Redmond (Washington), as well as a presence in Cambridge (UK), Santa Clara (California) and Fort Lauderdale (Florida).

Lunched in December 2010, Citrix Startup Accelerator is looking to invest and accelerate early stage businesses that are doing cutting-edge work in software technology, especially in the areas of mobile and cloud computing. They have a physical location in Santa Clara, but it’s a global program. They don’t want to be seen as exclusive to Silicon Valley. >>>