Time to Boost

Suffice to say, the past year has been exciting, frightening and down right brilliant as a bunch of us set out to create a global pre accelerator to help early stage tech startups to get accepted to accelerators, raise seed capital and get revenue ready.

Taking time out to think back on all of this days before our application deadline it feels (in a good way) like I’m in the eye of a storm! By this I mean the past year of setting up, working with awesome city directors and spotting startup talent for our first ever cohort this October has been the first part of the journey in to the unknown. Now days in advance of our deadline (26th September for Dublin) I’ve a little bit of time to think back on this year before we work with, shape and Boost a pretty cool batch of founders for the next part of this yet to be chartered journey of Startup Boost!

Always, I’m asked the same question. Do you have a cloning machine? Are you part of a set of triplets? Why did you take on putting in your extra time in to this program. It’s no joke, it’s a lot of work. In saying that much for the same reason that I love putting time into Startup Weekend, previously Startup Next now Startup Boost and all the other meetups or programs I get to work on, being able to spend time with great founders working to solve interesting problems is incredibly interesting.

Really it comes down to getting to see that inception of an idea grow in to something pretty special and that’s why I love working with early stage startups.

Taking that point a step further it also gives me a great opportunity to make sure skills I’ve learned in the past don’t get forgotten and I got to learn an awful lot in the process.

Ultimately it’s something that I love so working on Startup Boost is a natural fit I guess!

Presently though that eye of the storm time is only going to last for another five days before it’s straight into team evaluations, interviews with potential candidates and the horrible job of telling people that didn’t make it this time around or the great job of inviting teams that made it through our evaluation process, on to program kicking off in our city chapters around the world from the week of October 9th!

Beginning the program, however, is a different story all together.

Over the space of six weeks teams get the opportunity to spend time with great speakers and mentors along a specific program to prepare teams for the next steps on building their startups.

On each program module teams are learn from great weekly talks, pitch week in week out in front of mentor panels to improve their value propositions and finally get one on one time with mentors to tease out key areas of their business.

Suffice to say it’s been a lot of work to get to this point and it will be even more to make sure we have the best program for teams currently applying. Thanks as allows needs to go to our speakers, mentors and supporters in each of our cities and to our city directors who work around the clock to make this a key pillar for early stage startup success in their own cities.

To apply simply clickety click this link here to get to our application page and maybe we’ll get to meet and chat in a few weeks on the first ever Startup Boost program in Dublin!

PS: Making sure each first letter of these paragraphs spelled out Startup Boost was no easy job!