Details
While others have decided to “scale” and take on more companies or launch more cities, we have stayed true to our original goal: Find a bunch of awesome companies with founders we would like to work with and spend three very intense months with them. This focus has paid off, AngelPad has risen to be the #1 Accelerator in the U.S. (at least that’s what a real study from MIT/Brown University says) and Strictly VC called us the “Anti-Y Combinator“.
During the program, we work on everything from finding product market fit, defining a target market to getting first validation for the company. We are also instrumental in helping companies prepare for fundraising and of course for our investor demo day.
AngelPad is Thomas Korte and Carine Magescas, a husband-and-wife founder team (who met while sharing the same title and the same job in a start-up back in 2001)
Carine spent 15 years in High Tech, working mostly for start-ups but also for Business Objects in France and Informatica in the US pre-IPO. Her career encompasses an unusual – and particularly useful when coaching start-ups – span of experience from Technical Sales and hard core Information Systems Project Management (Pre-sales, Project Manager and European Technical Account Manager for Unilever at IRI Software) to Marketing (Director of Marketing Communications in Information Systems start-ups) and Strategic Alliances (she created and ran the Strategic Alliances Department of Business Objects France in 1996). In 2003 she launched a home design e-commerce website, with 400 clients in just the first year and wholesalers like the MoMA and W Hotels. Carine also managed to find time to become a successful and accomplished fine art photographer, with gallery representation in the US and Europe. She has multiple solo and group exhibitions under her belt – in New York, London and San Francisco.
Thomas was Google’s first International Product Manager, responsible for all the Google Product Launches in Europe dating back to 2002. He spent 7 years at Headquarters and was at the origin of Adwords, Google Maps and Google Shopping. He also filed two patents which are still a crucial part of Google search ranking and ads monetization products. After leaving Google, he became a “super-angel” making dozens of investments in just one year. Quickly realizing that investing in startups and working alongside with founders is not exactly the same, he launched AngelPad. Thomas is known for his vision and creative ideas. He loves the thrill of early stage companies, when everything has to be figured out and the energy runs high.
AngelPad does not have “mentors” – well, we do, but in a different way. We don’t believe in the “one-size-fits-all” advices that founders only get when they meet with mentors once and even find damaging contradictory advices founders often get from different mentors. A startup, especially through the intense three months of an accelerator, moves very quickly – things are tried, changed, modified, tried again every day and a mentor has to be part of that daily journey to be valuable. At AngelPad Carine and Thomas work alongside the startup founders every day. We roll up our sleeves and figure stuff out – everything – together with the founders.
There are a lot of “Friends of AngelPad” who come spend time with us during each session. Really, really smart people who we have known for a long time and trust to provide valuable insights. Those include, among others, Keval Desai (Interwest), Naval Ravikant (AngelList), Bryan Schreier (Sequoia), Wesley Chan (Felicis), Tom Tunguz (Redpoint), Satya and Hunter (Homebrew), Elad Gil, Dave McClure (500 Startups).
Apply to AngelPad or read one of our alumni’s “Insider Scoop to AngelPad” or “What happens at AngelPad”