An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What other business development tools do you use?

Debera: There are lots of tools for developing business plans. We use those. That’s fairly structured. Then, around [such tools] is the fairly chaotic experience of the other people in the incubator as well as all the mentors we have. >>>

An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How many companies were funded by angels during their incubation period?

Debera: At this point, Sam Cochran, [the CEO of SMIT, which runs] the Solar Ivy company got about $250,000 in angel funding. The other companies are less needy, less technology based. They’re not actually looking for angel money.

They’re looking to keep their businesses. We encourage them to hang on to as much as possible. They may go into a friends and family round. We don’t necessarily encourage them to try to get financing. >>>

An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How many companies have you incubated since inception?

Debera: Up until now, we’ve been involved with 20. We just brought in four new companies. The fourth will be coming in March. Of those, 16 are still in business. >>>

An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Can students apply to your incubator?

Debera: They cannot be students. They have to have graduated. I don’t want to interfere with their education. So, we take people either when they’ve just graduated, who we feel have the ability and are energized and smart and have the characteristics of an entrepreneur and are willing to take it on and learn a lot and work hard. >>>

An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Today I am talking to Debera Johnson, founder and executive director of the Pratt Design Incubator for Sustainable Innovation. The incubator is a part of the Center for Sustainable Design Studies at Pratt Institute, which is an art, design, and architecture college in New York City.  Since its inception in 2002, the incubator has supported the launch of 15 companies, of which 12 are still in business. In 2010, its companies generated more than $4.2 in revenue and are currently employing 36 employees. >>>

1M/1M: Alternative Financing For Startups Using A Sales Channel Partner

In this post, I want to discuss today’s news: 1M/1M Announces Partnership With Persistent; CrowdEngineering First Beneficiary, and explain the thought process behind it. It is a creative sales channel strategy that acts as alternative financing to mitigate some of the severe limitations of early stage startups.

In my experience, building a marketing channel/sales channel is one of the most expensive pieces of a startup P&L, and a notorious contributor to small companies running out of cash and going out of business. Typically, this happens for a number of reasons: >>>