Reflections from a Tech Accelerator Judge

Recently I had the opportunity to read a big chunk of the 100 applications to the 2024 Remarkable Tech Accelerator. In addition to being blown away by the level of rigor and intentionally we’re now witnessing in Disability Tech, the experience also left me with a few observations about what made the best applicants stand out in a very competitive pool.

Knowing that next year’s process is likely to be an even higher bar and that founders are applying to accelerator programs all the time without getting much feedback, I wanted to make sure we captured some of those thoughts for next time. I do suspect though that the advice is pretty universal for anyone considering applying to an accelerator program!

So in no particular order, here are some general things that helped the lucky few stand out:

Point 1: Help your reader understand how your startup has managed time

One often overlooked piece about Accelerators is that inherent in their name is the idea that they will literally “accelerate” your business. In order to prove this, they had to do two things:

1) They needed to demonstrate that they knew how to manage their own time well

2) They needed to give us some sense of how they were hoping to change the momentum of their business

The most impressive applications were the ones that showed that they could move and execute quickly AND that they knew time was their most precious resource. This does not mean that the company’s journey had to be linear, but rather that the founding team knew how to move on quickly from a dead end.

Point 2: Give your application personality

I think a lot of founders applying to accelerator programs fail to appreciate that at the end of the day a program is trying to build a cohort of many companies. One of the factors they have to consider is how different personalities will interact in a room together and/or whether they will help one another become greater than the sum of all of their parts.?

It was much easier for us to be able to imagine specific companies in the cohort because they were pretty clear about who they were not only as organizations but also as people. In other words, they didn’t shy away from highlighting what made them get up every morning on the hard days and get to work on the problems they cared most to solve.?

There is a fine line here between too little detail and too much confidence, but the best companies stuck to highlighting their passion and care for the work and added depth to their organizational theses through examples.?

One note on this….. Distinct always won out over General. Distinct at its core means Different. TLDR: The best companies did not shy away from showing how they were different.

Point 3: Be super, duper clear on the problem / solution relationship

One of the biggest traps a lot of companies fall into is that they try to chase too many problems at once. I would say at least 50% of the applications we read had founders who ultimately were trying to boil the ocean. This meant the feasibility of the solution was out of sync with the size of the problem.

Particularly in Disability Tech, the size of the problems founders are trying to solve are massive and urgent. But this does not mean that a founder should spend the bulk of their limited word expenditure trying to explain the largest possible scope. Rather, the best applications were very clear utilizing the following formula:

1. We’re trying to solve this immediate problem…
2. We’re going to solve it by doing……?
3. If it doesn’t work, we’re also thinking about….
4. If any of these work, here are the implications to solving the bigger problem….

A lot of applications started with #4 and not #1 and by doing so lost control of the narrative.

Point 4: Avoid AI

This is silly, but the number of people whose application likely included some AI generated text was staggering. One easy tell is that the language loses all personality (see Point 2) and as readers we get lost in the sauce.?

Point 5: Highlight Your Intellectual Curiousity

We did everything we could to remove bias from our process including de-emphasizing names as a way to gauge who someone was outside of the application.

But that meant I did try to understand what someone was likely to be curious about vs. stubborn about via their application. Ultimately a program is building a cohort of different types of experiences and voices, and if an application gave me the sense that a founder wasn't inclusive in their approach to life, they immediately got put into a different category.

I'm not convinced that all of my fellow judges would agree with me on this point, but it was something I tried to understand when reading. Ultimately our brand is only as good as the people who choose to dedicate their time to it and Intellectual Curiousity, at the risk of being wrong, is a pretty key North Star for our work in the Disability Tech world (a world where we are constantly learning from others).

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These are just some general ideas that may help future applicants and/or you consider your own applications to accelerator programs. If you’ve ever judged for something like this, I’m curious if this resonates and/or what else tends to stand out about the best applicants!