Introducing the Start Station Accelerator

I’m excited to announce the Start Station accelerator. A free, 5-week virtual accelerator program to help build scalable, non-VC backed businesses.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, how many scalable, non-VC backed businesses are there in the world? Well, there’s a lot out there, you just may not recognize them right away. Companies like ConvertKit, Patagonia, and Spanx never raised traditional VC money. Yet, they’ve scaled and have been incredibly impactful on the communities they are involved in.

Since they made the decision to scale and not take on investors, they’ve been able to make decisions that VC backed ventures just cannot make. Things like twice a year profit sharing to employees, essentially donate the entire company to save the planet, or creating a foundation to support women.

Scalable, non-VC backed ventures have a tremendous value in the communities they impact, yet, we rarely ever talk about them. Entrepreneurship programs are consistently teaching people how to raise funding and that’s just wrong. Venture capital funding is not a foundational piece to entrepreneurship.

Most people should never raise funding for their business idea and a lot of aspiring or early stage founders would be fulfilling their mission more effectively by not raising funding.

This expectation of having to raise funds to be a “successful” founder is one of the many reasons why I believe entrepreneurship is looked at as inaccessible and why it has been on a decline for the past 30 years in the United States.

That’s why I’m starting this free, 5-week virtual accelerator program for scalable, non-VC backed ventures.

What the sessions look like

In these 5 weeks of content, we’ll be covering a different area each week: Experiments, Customer Discovery & Target Markets, Traction Channels & Sustainability, Financial Modeling and Napkin Numbers, and finally, Goals and Stages.

Every week, we’ll meet virtually for at least 60 minutes. We’ll focus on these different areas.

In this weekly sessions, you’ll learn how to build a scalable, non-VC backed venture and meet others trying to do the same.

These sessions won’t be just me lecturing either. That’s boring. I’ll talk a little bit, but in each session, we’ll be actively working on your venture. Engagement and participation are required in these sessions.

Expectations outside the sessions

Outside of the live sessions, the expectation is that you are working on your venture for at least 10 hours per week.

In these 10 hours, you should be talking to customers, working on your product or service, meeting with other founders in your cohort, and completing the prep work required for each session. The prep work will not take longer than 60 minutes each week.

If you’ve read this entire post and are excited, I would love to see your application to be a part of the Start Station Accelerator.