Fledge

Conscious Company Accelerators

Fledge is a global network of conscious company accelerators and investment funds, helping entrepreneurs create impactful companies and co-ops at scale through intense, short programs filled with education, guidance, and a massive amount of mentorship.

Each city runs (up to) one session per year. Each city’s program is a bit different from the others’, but all are focused on mission-driven for-profit companies, and all invest in their fledglings.

Th educational curriculum is based on The Next Step books and online classes, taught to fill in any gaps in the key skills entrepreneurs need to know to succeed: strategy, financials, marketing, sales, funding, etc.

All our cities share a global network of hundreds of mentors, who share their experiences, advice, and connections in 1-on-1 meetings with participants.

Every day, week after week, we push the participants forward, iterating business strategy, financial models, marketing and sales plans, funding options, and investor and sales pitches, plus we put a special focus on storytelling. The result is intense and creates lasting value for years after the companies return home.

We have been refining this service since 2012 and, to date, have helped hundreds of companies from dozens of countries. We’re eager for more. Our goal is to help foster a wave of companies that make a measurable impact in the world, collectively improving the lives of everyone on the planet.

We invest $15,000 (Peru), €15,000 (Europe), or $20,000 (U.S.) into each company we invite to participate, using revenue-based equity, which aligns our interests with the founders, avoids any pressure to “sell out”, and lets us invest in just about any market segment and most any country in the world. Plus, we make introductions to impact investors and make follow-on investments from our family of seed funds.

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Latest stories

Happy 6th Birthday to Fledge

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Today is Fledge’s sixth birthday! Company start dates are usually rather fuzzy, so specifically today is the sixth anniversary of the day Fledge LLC was incorporated in Delaware.  That is thus a date after the business plan was deemed viable and before the day we opened our first application and months before we started our first session with our very first fledglings. Six years later, the...

Academic Research on Accelerators

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Brad Feld, co-founder of TechStars, author of many books for entrepreneurs and investors, and prolific blogger posted a list of academic research on accelerators. Academic Research on Accelerators The links include: Accelerators and Crowd-Funding: Complementarity, Competition, or Convergence in the Earliest Stages of Financing New Ventures?, Smith, Hannigan, and Gasiorowski, 6/13 Accelerating...

Visiting We-Convert in India

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Normally its the fledglings that fly to visit Fledge.  This month Fledge’s founder, Luni, was passing through New Delhi, India and had a chance to stop by We-Convert, meet the team, get an update, and share a meal.

The unspoken joke was that back in the States, we call this “Indian food”.  In New Delhi, it’s of course just “food”.  Either way, it was delicious.

Chickens can make you a lot of money

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Back in 2016, Bill Gates said that if he were a poor person living in a developing country, he’d grow chickens.  Chickens can feed your family and chickens can make you a lot of money. Perhaps that hypothetical Poor Bill would figure out how to pay for the chicks, the feed, and the vaccines to grow those chickens.  Poor Bill might even be savvy enough to find a buyer for his first 500...

Welcome 2018, Welcome Vancouver Fledglings

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Vancouver is one of the best places in the world to start and grow an impact business. And unlike all previous Fledge programs, the IMPACT StartUp Visa Program (a.k.a. Fledge12) has seven new fledglings who are not just impactful startups, but startups who are expanding and moving to Canada. Moving from UK, France, Switzerland, and Brazil, thanks to a partnership with the Canadian StartUp Visa...

2017: 3 Cities, 3 Continents, 22 new Fledglings

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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...

A taste of Fledge11 Demo Day

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Seven fledglings took to the stage on December 14, 2017.  Videos of all those talks will be posted on the Fledge YouTube channel.
Meanwhile, this video is a few highlights of that night’s events.

And don’t miss the behind the scenes view of “… everything changes more better” posted last week.
 

Everything changes more better

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At Demo Day, the fledglings make public speaking look easy. It is not easy.
The talks delivered on Demo Day are the result of weeks of creativity and hard work. Finding a great opening line is one of the challenges, and this video shows a tiny bit of fun and excitement in that process.

This opening line, and six others can be seen on-stage in Barcelona on Thursday, and online in the coming weeks.

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