Why would an entrepreneur drop everything to be in Seattle for two months? How can that be best for a young company? Simple, success for startups lies beyond the founding team. Success lies in finding customers, investors, and partners. More often than not, finding such people is a serendipitous process centered around networking. To build a bigger network, you need to get out of your circle...
Humans have been wearing clothes for millennia. Every piece of clothing for the history of mankind has been worn, washed, and ultimately thrown away. Some may get reused by others for a while, but until today, all clothing has eventually become trash. That all ended today. Today Levi Strauss & Co (better known as simply “Levi’s”) announced the first ever pair of recycled...
The seventh session of Fledge has started. Seven new teams hailing from five countries: Uganda, Malawi, Tanzania, the Philippines, and the United States. Seven more mission-driven, for-profit fledgling companies, with big dreams. African Chicken is a distributed grower of chickens in Tanzania, working with dozens of smallholder women farmers, providing them chicks, then aggregating and...
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reported that companies waste 30% of the energy they consume. For many businesses, this is equivalent to overspending on energy by that amount to achieve current production levels. You’d think that increasingly sophisticated technology would help reduce this waste. However, overspending is often the result of decentralized and siloed decision...
Yusuf Tura came to Seattle as a lone refugee from Ethiopia at age 16 to escape war and conflict in the country at the time. Today, the Seattle cab driver’s life has been transformed by a decision he made after returning home in 2007. When he got to his home town, he was shocked. All the trees had been killed off and stripped away by pollution from stoves that burn wood and dung. The dirty...
As the sixth session of Fledge nears completion, it’s time to remind the world that the program would not be as useful without all the visitors. In the world of accelerators, we call all these people “mentors”, whether they meet with the team every week or just stop by to share some advice. Having that one single accolade keeps everything simple and egalitarian, but...
Fledge begins at minute 21
www.startingupatstartups.com/podcast/startup-roadshow-episode-4-seattle
Fledge6, as in the sixth session of Fledge, the conscious company accelerator. 170 applications from 45 countries arrived. We invite just seven to participate. And this seven are incredibly existing. For the first time ever, the invitees include not only no teams from Seattle, but no American teams at all. Seven startups hailing from five different countries: As always, seven impactful...
Stacy Flynn of Evrnu stepped up in front of a crowd of 700+ people at the Social Venture Partners’ Fast Pitch Seattle competition tonight, along with 14 other nonprofit and for-profit innovators, and blew them all away, walking home not only with a $140,000 investment (by far the biggest prize of the event), but also with the Audience Choice award of $3,500 in cash. Fledge, the fledglings...