Paniel Meat Processing and Livestock Bank, two companies created by the same founder merged back together in early 2022. Business is good, growing from $35,000 in annual revenues back in 2017 to over $1.5 million USD in 2022.
In short… it works. Quite well. To see what that means in practice, below is a site visit video shot this month in Kigali, Rwanda.
The best accelerator programs invest in their invitees, but the way accelerators invest and the mindset behind their investments is vastly different than venture capital funds and Angels, and a vastly superior process. Three key differences are: Batches Accelerators run cohorts of participants and thus choose companies in batches. Venture capital funds (and Angels, which follow the model of VCs...
It’s a new year, but another year full of unknowns, pandemics, and thus challenges for scheduling startup accelerators. In 2021 most of the Fledge programs were shelved, with Start.coop and The Land Accelerator running multiple virtual programs and The Land Accelerator Africa finishing up its program in person in Nairobi in November. Those two programs will run again in 2022. Hopefully the...
A great Tweet of recent times: “This week has been the longest year of my life.” Meanwhile, at Fledge our work continues onward. We are in the middle of Fledge16 and the first-ever Angel Accelerator. Someday we’ll finish up both of those in-person. Meanwhile, as America and the world wakes up to social injustice we take a moment to look back at the faces of the dozens of...
The 2020’s are about to start, and with that, this is a good moment to look back at what has been accomplished at Fledge in its first decade of existence, the 2010s. September 2019 – Nairobi, Kenya 14 African entrepreneurs, all focused on restorative agriculture met for an incredibly intense week of training. So useful that WRI is expanding this program beyond Africa in 2020...
Twelve years ago TechStars was born. Eight years ago, we discovered Bainbridge Graduate Institute. A few months later, we were introduced to the co-founder of what today is Impact Hub Seattle. Without the existence of these three organizations, Fledge never have been founded. The mashup in hindsight is obvious. TechStars taught us how to efficiently help startups. BGI taught us that it is...
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...
So, a quality brick without fire? It’s possible! Ecobuild is on its way to producing a new brick for Malawi, a country that uses 1.7 billion brick every year, that doesn’t require firing or cement. Additionally, this method is able to put waste from broken and misshapen bricks that was previously thrown away, back into the supply stream for new bricks. Construction materials are in high demand...
Soaring through 2017 2017 was an incredible year for Fledge. What once was a small outlier accelerator based only in Seattle is now a global network of accelerators and seed funds operating across three continents, on its way toward being a leader in the industry. That wasn’t in the plan written back in 2012, but as we teach the fledglings, all plans are wrong. What we don’t tell them...
Given the variety of the fledglings, Fledge’s challenge is how to measure their collective impact. This is a long-standing industry debate, how to measure the impact of a company in a single number, and how to aggregate that number across a portfolio of companies/organizations. 1- Pinchot Impact Index Fledge has been using the Pinchot Impact Index since its inception, in part because it...