Recently, Digital.NYC has been speaking with New York City based groups helping non-U.S. companies set up in New York City and gain access to the U.S. market. VentureOut runs a one week accelerator program versus a typically months long program. Marcos Dinnerstein, Editor of Digital.NYC spoke with Brian Frumberg, founder, to learn more about their program.
What companies do you typically work with? Is it based on sector or stage of development - both?
At VentureOut, the majority of our programming is sector agnostic within tech, while we also run a number of sector focused programs, including fintech, edtech, enterprise software, AI, hardware, IoT, healthtech, new media/AR/VR and more. In terms of stage, we focus on companies that have found some measure of product market fit, so stage is typically post-seed and pre-growth, with one of a number of maturity metrics that we consider: revenue, clients, users, pilots, product development, team experience.
We began to focus on companies at this stage because our initial focus was exclusively international companies launching in the US market (we now feature dozens of US-based companies in our sector programs), we learned quickly that we needed startups that had already achieved a certain level of maturity. It is not a good idea for an entrepreneur to try and launch a business and gain initial traction in a market with which they have no experience or network. They are much better suited finding success at home and then working with us to replicate that success in the US market.
Our focus on post-seed startups continued, as we expanded our offering to include US startups, because we have found there to be a massive lack of resources and support for companies at this stage. Each year, thousands of companies slip into the chasm between accelerator/seed and series A. That is where VentureOut is having an impact, helping post-seed startups learn the fundamentals of scaling once, which is the critical next step after finding product market fit.
How does your one week program work vs. a more traditional three month program? Is it fair to compare these two types of programs?
Our initial innovation was on distilling the most valuable aspects of a 3-month accelerator program into one massively impactful week. A 3-month program is not a fit for many companies. Nor is giving up 3-9% of their company at a valuation that is rarely fair to founders. There has been a lot of disillusion with the typical accelerator model over the past few years, especially abroad, as results fall short of expectation for most companies. The exceptions are blue chip programs, like 500 Startups, YC and TechStars and hyper-focused programs like StartEd (edtech), XRC Labs (retail/e-commerce tech) and others. But whether or not even these top programs are a fit depends on the company, their stage and what they need to focus on in the near term.
The same is true for companies considering a VentureOut program, but given our programs are non-dilutive and mostly short (4-5 days), our relevance to companies in our target market is much higher than that of a typical accelerator. And this structure allows us to have an outsized impact in a brief amount of time. Whether you are a fintech startup in NYC trying to scale into the financial services ecosystem in NYC or an edtech company from Ireland trying to figure out how to replicate your European success in the US market, our programs will give you the knowledge needed to scale sales and marketing, the strategies needed to successfully target investors and connections with two to three dozen thought leaders, entrepreneurs, corporates and venture investors that will become the backbone of your network here in NYC.
And we are launching our own 3-6 month programs in 2018, although these programs will be custom, built around each individual company, and focused on creating a soft-landing for promising foreign startups that are ready to launch in the US today. We tested this with the NYCEDC earlier this year with their GBX program and, after requests from dozens of our alumni, are excited to begin helping companies in this new way!
What else should prospective participants know about VentureOut New York?
The most important thing is something that our companies cannot truly understand until they join us in New York City: we really care. We are not focused on just cranking another 100 companies through their program that we never talk to again. Our long term mission is to help companies launch into new markets, raise capital, create jobs and have an impact on the ecosystem. These are the metrics by which we measure our own success. And we have plans to launch a fund (eventually), so creating as many alumni success stories as possible is critical to our long term plans. So we spend a ton of our time working with our alumni, which most of them are shocked by given they only joined us for a week. And we do our best to only include mentors in our program (investors, successful founders, corporate execs, etc) that care. There are a lot of assholes in tech and venture and we pride ourselves on having built a network of the nice guys and girls. It may sound like fluff but ask any of our founders and they will confirm it is the truth.
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