By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi Kerry: The public funding that DreamIt receives is not contingent on how many of our entrepreneurs are successful. I think that is probably because our investors agree with us that this model of succeed fast or fail fast is valuable. They understand that some of the companies
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi Irina: Do you have any special initiatives at this time? Kerry: I would say our expansion in New York City, which should be our first time operating in the city, this summer. We brought on a locally-based managing director, Mark Wachen, an entrepreneur who was the founder
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi Kerry: Scvngr is our best-known company. They are a mobile game platform that is used both in the B2B space, in that museums and cities can host Scvngr hunts for residents who can explore a community, and also a consumer game, where users can check in at
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi Irina: What tools do you use to accomplish your mission? Kerry: Because we don’t specialize in a specific industry, protocol, or niche, and we don’t specialize in a particular stage – they are obviously all early-stage companies – we don’t think they need a curriculum or set
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi Irina: How many applicants do you accept? Kerry: We will take 15 companies in [each of] the upcoming sessions, and that is the maximum we accept because we think there is really good interaction between them at that number. It will be a maximum of 60 people,
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi Kerry: So, if we take a company like Scvngr, which is among our alumni, when they applied [the founder] was a 17-year-old from Princeton who was a technologist, very savvy, visionary, but he really needed someone to build out more of the front-end sales and marketing operations
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi Irina: What are your core benefits? Kerry: We provide a lot of the same types of services that you will see in other accelerator programs, but I will describe them just to make sure we talk about them, and then we will talk about a couple of