Roundtable Recap: June 23 – The 3-month Acceleration Model for Startups is Bogus

During this week’s roundtable, our guest was T.M. Ravi, Managing Director and Co-founder, The Hive, a venture studio. The discussion touched upon a couple of key issues: the prevalent incubator/accelerator model of 3-month classes, we agreed, is bogus; and the Future of Work: Utopia or Dystopia?

CloudKnots
As for the pitches, first up, Prajit Arakkal from Dubai pitched CloudKnots, which is a concept arbitrage on Task Rabbit and UpWork. I shared my skepticism of why a new platform is necessary. How would it compete with the incumbents?
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287th Roundtable Recording On Dec. 17, 2015: With Engineering Capital Founder Ashmeet Sidana

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

Roundtable Recap: December 17 – Focus on Proteins and Whole Wheat Bread, Skip Candies

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest, Ashmeet Sidana, Founder of Engineering Capital, a seed-stage venture fund focusing on infrastructure technology. Ashmeet had a lot of insights to offer, and delivered one particular piece of wisdom that is close to my heart. He says, funding is like candy. Don’t eat too much candy. Whole wheat bread and proteins are customers and revenues. That’s what you should focus on. Brilliant analogy, don’t you think?

Schedule101
As for the pitches, first up, Martin Kossman from Montreal, Canada, pitched Schedule101, a SaaS solution for restaurants to manage their workforces. Martin has a particular expertise in doing partnerships, which is all very well, but Ashmeet and I agreed that we’d like to see more focus on revenues.
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Is Y Combinator Asking for Too Much Equity for 120k Worth of Funding?

I don’t think it’s a bad deal. $120k is decent seed funding, 7% is reasonable equity for that amount. Their previous deal, I thought, sucked (6-10% equity for $15k-20k). This one is reasonable.

Recently, Sam Altman released some statistics … they’ve funded about 900 companies of which about 7 unicorns have emerged. That part of the story is great.
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Incubators and Accelerators FAQs

This post answers some commonly asked questions about incubators and accelerators. I have answered these questions on Quora as well.

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Why Do I Keep Getting NO From Investors?

If you want funding, you need to start with a business that is fundable.  Ask any serious advisor or investor and you will get an absolute truth: 99% of the ideas as they come are NOT fundable.

From here you have only three choices. One is not so smart. The other two are just fine.

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When Should You Move To Silicon Valley?

The question continues to come up often in our work with global entrepreneurs, so further to my earlier Harvard Business Review piece, I will add more color to it. First, here’s a recap from the HBR piece:

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Looking Forward to the Real Silicon Valley

I am one of those people who doesn’t like bubbles. Right now, we’re experiencing a bubble in Silicon Valley with funny money driving weird, unproductive behavior.

Some people want this party to go on.

I don’t.

Francisco Dao has written a poorly analyzed post on VentureBeat titled What will happen to Silicon Valley when demographics strangle the global economy:

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