In spring of 2010 we ran a post-seed accelerator program with startups from YCombinator, TechStars, Seedcamp, Facebook Fund, The Founder Institute, and Launchbox and the mentors listed below.
The focus of the program was to educate founders about challenges and opportunities that come with trying to partner with large companies. We brought founders together who were all interested in the same problem, so that they could collaboratively share solutions and challenges and brought in mentors who had experience with these kinds of partnerships from both the startup and corporate side.
The program allowed us to test many of our assumptions and learn a lot about how we can best interface with founders and positively affect the trajectory of seed and series A stage startups. We recently executed a pivot and have been working with a few companies in our pilot program and a handful of new ones with our new model. You can read more about our new model here:
Companies That Participated:
Facebook Fund
YCombinator
Techstars
Launch Box
Seedcamp
Founder Institute
Mentors With Experience Partnering With Startups While at Large Corporations
Dave Drach – Managing Director, Emerging Business Team at Microsoft
Josh Elman – Product Manager at Twitter, Former Program Manager of Facebook Platform
Roman Bukary - Principal at RBA Consulting, Former VP at SAP, Ecosystem Business Development, Strategic Accounts
Peter Trudelle – Former Senior Software Development Manager at Yahoo
Mentors Who Have Successfully Partnered With Large Companies While at a Startup
Neil Patel – Founder of Crazy Egg, and KISSmetrics
Bob Christopher – Former CEO of Ugobe
Jon Gillespie-Brown - Author, CEO, Entrepreneur. Stanford & UC Berkeley Mentor/London Business School EIR
Jude Gomilla and Immad Akhund – Founders of HeyZap
Dan Greenberg – Founder of Sharethrough. Viral Video Marketing, Social Marketing.
Amir Nathoo – Founder of WebMynd
Tyler Willis – Director of Marketing & Business Development at Involver
Jessica Alter – Former head of Business Development at Bebo
Tristan Harris – Founder of Apture
Jonathan Greechan – Business Development for The Funded & The Founder Institute
Sean K. Murphy – Strategy and Customer Development for Software Startups
Michael Cerda – Founder of Threadbox
David Weekly – Founder of PBWorks
