What a Difference a Day Makes

I’m walking back from the office chatting with Blake my Co Founder of at the Startup Boost Pre-Acceleator around 14 weeks ago about all of the news starting to circulate around Covid19. I remember mentioning to him what would we do if maybe one or two of our partner venues couldn’t host us, as at that time the new reality of how we would be operating hadn’t dawned yet. 

24 hours after that call it was very clear from the messages of venues postponing events due to Covid19 that the likely hood of being able to support with a Spring program was very unclear. 

I’m still shocked at the amount of change that we were able to put in place in the proceeding weeks to move to remote.This included reviewing 35 different online platforms to run the program (thank you Blake!) the production of new process’s and playbooks which was coupled to the absolute grit and determination of our city directors to change to a new online model, still is something that I don’t think I have really given enough praise to so as we could make our Spring 2020 cohort a possibility. 

Blake made a good point that “entrepreneurs aren’t going to stop and neither will we,” and in the proceeding weeks in Chicago (thank you Adam and Nirav), LA (thank Tania, Mark, Blake and Jessica), NYC (thank you Alice and Georgie), Pittsburgh (thank you Kit, Jim and Maddi) and Toronto (thank you Aashna and Miguel) our Spring cohort was able to support 37 founders spread across those cities to get to the point that this Wednesday June 17th they will get to pitch at Demo Day sponsored by Dentons.

Meet some of our city directors who really are a uniquely amazing bunch of people

I will take a beat here to give a little more background to what Startup Boost is and who those people are I just mentioned. Startup Boost is a pre-accelerator that is mission driven to help early stage tech startups prep for accelerators, investment and revenue. It’s run by amazing volunteer chapter directors who find great speakers, mentors and partners to help startups in their ecosystem. Recently we just added an online component called BoostX headed up by Natalie Novick our Chief Community Officer with the mission to help any founder anywhere take their best next step in building their company. 

37 startups, 5 cities, 1 day — June 17th Spring Cohort Demo Day sponsored by Dentons

Over the last 3 years we’ve have had 2900 applicants, 160+ companies selected for program, which have gone on to the worlds top accelerators and raised $45m to date. In the past two weeks we have announced our first chapter in Africa with Startup Boost Zambia and Startup Boost Newcastle has also joined the family with more due to open. 

It’s funny that when you take a minute to write everything down that you realize a lot has been achieved by a few to make an impact for many. 

Here’s a selection of some of our founders pitching at Demo Day

Personally I would love your help please to spread the word about Demo Day this Wednesday June 17th sponsored by Dentons. It’s a pretty unique culmination of work to stay on our mission with some big challenges, it’s going to be a great experience as it’s an exciting format where you can chat and interact with the teams vs clicking through a bunch of videos and honestly you may be the person to help one of our teams through your own knowledge or your own contacts.

Thanks for reading this far and next steps are to sign up here but outside of that if you want to get involved in what we do at Startup Boost just reach out to me at [email protected] and let’s have a chat. 

In closing I can’t stress enough how proud I am of our teams for the progress they have made, our city directors for making this possible, the mentors and speakers who have brought their amazing brains and experience to task to help our founders unlock paths to success faster and to all of the team I am very lucky to work with at Boost with Blake, Natalie and Marcel. 

Stay safe, look after one another and see you at Demo Day.