“The Missing Middle” is what we call the gap in finance the majority of entrepreneurs face in getting from a viable prototype or early customers to a full-scale proven business. In Part 1, Luni explains who he is, and how he came to fill in this otherwise missing middle. In Part 2, Luni jumps back to the history of venture capital to explain the pervasive paradigm that leads to...
Too many first-time entrepreneurs ignore the needs, desires, and goals of investors, focusing solely on their own needs, desires, and goals. Try thinking of investors as a field of crops. Planting seeds is when you meet new, potential investors. You can’t harvest the day you plant. You have to fertilize and weed and in some climates water those crops if you want them to grow. If you just...
The best part about accelerators is how many people you get connected to while in the program. Those entrepreneurs who suck the most value from accelerators take advantage of that new network. And not just to get answers to the most pressing challenge, but to find what the mentor, guest, etc. might know that you don’t, as extracting that knowledge doesn’t just not cost the other...
A decade ago The Business Model Canvas made assumptions about business models visible. Today The Ownership Model Canvas does the same for ownership and governance. Unsurprisingly it is Start.coop that brings this tool to the world. Start.coop is the world’s first business accelerator focused on scalable cooperative companies. They have from the start questioned the common ways of doing business...
When the world gives you a pandemic, make lemonade??? Maybe, if what your city needs most of all is lemonade. Most likely it is something else. But what? Well… unless you live in China, the good news is that some country is ahead of yours in terms of dealing with the pandemic, and thus you can look to see how they dealt with their epidemic to better guess how your customers will deal with...
What do David Bowie, Jazz, and an unplayable piano have to do with the power of business accelerators? All get you out of your comfort zone, and that seems to be a secret to success. This episode of Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales explains how. Listen to the episode first. Our analysis is that one of the powers of an in-residency, in-person business accelerator is that it gets entrepreneurs...
As the 2020s begin, so do both the puns and the retrospection. Combining the two, let’s look back at the first seven years of fledglings, and learn from those 95 companies to find patterns that lead to success and which lead to failure. Failure There is a lot less to learn from success than failure, so let’s start with the bigger learnings. In no particular order: Timing really is the...
We suffer from understanding startups. Perhaps “suffer” isn’t quite the right word, but if you understand anything about entrepreneurship, you know it comes with high highs and low lows, too often both in the same week, and even sometimes both on the same day. Or perhaps why this sentence resonates so well for Fledge is that we are not the type of program that provides just days...
From talking to dozens of fund manager and individual investors we’ve come to realize the power and benefits of running a business accelerator rather than a traditional venture capital fund. From 10,000 feet away, we do the same job. We invest in young companies, providing capital to grow. But from 10 feet away the approaches are vastly different. And those differences boil down to what we...
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...