The 3rd class of Launchpad Accelerator boot camp is over. It was a great two weeks packed with talks, workshops and mentoring sessions. I hope we will see soon the accomplishments of what we did together with the founders. We had more than 1100 mentoring sessions (of one hour or more) and all the notes from these sessions are being saved in a set of apps that we built. This allowing us to follow up with the startups and see what is the impact that we are making (or not). I was amazed by the founders and their dedication and grit. It’s always a true pleasure to work with so much talented, focused group of people. My hunch is that we will ‘hear’ in the news on about 15% – 20% of the startups. Btw, this is a ratio that any VC would love to have.

The goal of our program is to help tech startups build a successful business. This is why we searching after these startups that already got a product market fit and funding. In this program, we are doing our best to help them boost their KPIs and become sustainable businesses.

After reflecting on these two weeks, I think we are moving in the right direction. We got lots of good feedback and we are going to (try and) do better next time, this summer. A series of videos with stories and ‘action items’ will be live soon – so we can share our learning at scale.

These are the startups that took part in this class. I had the pleasure to mentor 90% of them and it is going to be fun supporting them in the next 6 months. Continue reading →