Most of what we do at Fledge is invisible. You can catch glimpses of the business planning and financial modeling at Demo Day, but the only visible changes we make are in the (re)branding. We re-branded Chabana Farms as Kalahari Honey, to make their newfound focus on honey explicit. God Cares Farm is now Oreeggs. Now their focus is clear too, and their name distinct. We found a name for our...
Monday, April 29th begins the fourteenth session of Fledge. Or is it the 17th? Or 61st? You’d think counting would be easy, but the complexities of the real world get in the way. The simplest way to count sessions is to simply count how many times we’ve taught the Fledge curriculum with a cohort of entrepreneurs. But if we do that, we have to include the dozens of part-time Kick...
It is getting hard and harder to get into Fledge and harder and harder to pick the final invitees. Visitors to fledge.co by country For Fledge14, there were 454 applications from 85 countries. We invite just 7 companies in a session, and thus 98.5% of the applicants are not getting what they want from us. We wish we could help more, but we invest money as well as time and energy into each of our...
Malawi may be the second poorest country in the world, but the people are happy, the country is safe, traffic is reasonable, and opportunities abound. Below are three videos from a week on the ground visiting Ziweto, Ecobuild, and some other local entrepreneurs. Ziweto Agrovet shop in Lilongwe (30 seconds) Ecobuild’s prototype brickyard A day visiting a mushroom farm, a diversified...
Why are there so many fledglings from Africa? Two main reasons:
There are fewer quality business accelerators in Africa than in other regions of the world, and thus we receive more good applicants from Africa
The opportunities in Africa are enormous. It’s the last place on Earth with 1 billion people growing from poverty to middle class.
What happens in a 4-day accelerator? More than you can imagine…
The days are full of workshops, lectures, expert, conversations, with advice not only from the various speakers but also from fellow members of the cohort, as there are a dozen entrepreneurs in the room.
Above is a quick preview of what that all looks like. And coming up soon, videos of the final stories from Demo Day.
In 2013, Samuel Rigu was looking for a new challenge. Having grown up in a rural Kenyan farming family, he knew that farms in his village depended on synthetic fertilizers. On a continent where land degradation has driven millions of people out of their villages and into cities, fertilizer is often a must for farmers. However, African farmers pay two-to-six times the average world price...
There simply are few (if any) books that walk entrepreneurs step-by-step through the complex process from having an idea to having an operational, revenue-generating company. The Next Step series of books does just that. We use this book series in Fledge as the core of our curriculum. It’s the same curriculum our founder, Luni, uses to teach MBAs. And its also the core material covered by...
The following is based on a blog post from Right Side Capital. For fist-time entrepreneurs, investor updates are thought of as a big challenge, when they don’t have to be. Too often founders put them off until there is good news to share and/or put too much effort into making them look as good as their fundraising materials. Investors meanwhile are busy, and just a few statistics and a few...
It’s a good idea to look at your website every few years, look to see if it’s starting to feel dated, if its missing the look-and-feel of the latest websites. Last week’s Fledge website had a nice front page, but it wasn’t rendering well on smartphones and the overall structure needed a refresh to handle accelerators for both startups and co-ops, as well as handling...