The 3 principles of our startup support program
Tailor-made, "a la carte" and participative: 3 pillars at the heart of our program
5 years ago we had 6 startups and limited resources like most university-based incubators. The ecosystem in France was extremely competitive, it had become a wide-spread joke that France had more accelerators/incubators than startups.
We decided to set up 3 fundamental axes to guide everything we do to support our startups. We designed the program to be tailor-made, “à la carte” and participative. These cornerstones have stayed the same but we are actively building on them to bring the best value for money for our startups.
Today we support more than 70 startups and host 200 interactions - office hours, partner meetings, events - weekly with our startups. Let’s dive deeper into these 3 principles.
Tailor-made
As a business school, we chose to develop a generalist incubator with the rationale that we should leave it up to our students, alumni and more generally entrepreneurs to decide which startup they want to build instead of the opposite. We currently cover 20 different sectors within the incubator.
Each startup also grows at its own pace, enters the incubator at it own maturity stage and with its own reasons. As our goal was to help entrepreneurs over the long term and not only for a limited period of time, we quickly realized that it was impossible to have a rigid preplanned program that will fit all the expectations of startups with radically different needs. We needed to adapt as fast as the startups we are helping were.
That’s why we opted for an evolutive tailor-made program. As a matter of fact, we adapt our program on a weekly basis, bringing in new experts depending on the startups’ needs.
Determine individual needs on a daily basis. The first critical task is to spend time with our entrepreneurs whether it be formal “checkpoints”, discussions on Slack or at an event - to understand their immediate needs and their long term vision. The more our startups come to see us, the more we can be beneficial to them.
Go hunting for the right resources. Once you understand the needs of the startups it is time to go hunting for the right person or the right resource to meet this need.
Reach a critical size. By increasing the volume of startups we are helping, we are sure that one startup’s need will likely be exactly the same as another’s in our portfolio. When we set up meetings with experts it is easier to fill in the slots with 70 startups rather than 6.
Onboard startups. Startups need to understand all resources at their disposal as quickly as possible to make the incubator their own.
By adapting our program weekly we stay relevant to startups’ needs, we are constantly in a “test mode” mindset which enables us to try new and improved formats. Actually being too complacent just generates boredom. Self satisfaction is the beginning of decline. Right now our objective is to continuously bring value to our startups during their entire growth process, not just at the start of their venture.
À la carte
Enjoying high levels of autonomy and being accountable for your success (at least that’s what you’ll think at the beginning, as you’ll never really succeed or fail alone) are two of the most common incentives to become an entrepreneur.
Then by creating a program which imposes certain resources on startups, you’re basically doing exactly the opposite of what your entrepreneurs want. Within our program, we have a 45 minute long mandatory meeting every two weeks to check up on our startups and better apprehend their needs (see 1st principle: tailor-made). In reality we don’t even make them mandatory, startups come on their own because they find them useful, at least we hope so.
Our job is to make the maximum number of ressources available to startups and to multiply interactions. After that, it’s their responsibility to choose which resources they need at any given time. This “à la carte” principle reinforces the “tailor-made” principle as well and enables us to create a really dynamic program.
This is also a good way to see which resources work or not depending on how attractive they are to startups. If we bring in a particular expertise and the expert is fully booked as soon as we advertise his office hours, we deduce that this is a critical unmet need. Over time this principle helped us understand at which frequency we should provide which resources. For instance, you probably don’t need to have office hours with accountants every day…
We always look to improve the quality of our resources through feedback. This is the only way to have the best menu.
Participative
This is probably the most difficult principle to set up. The goal is to create a community of startups that help each other to grow faster. Why? Because it’s useless to start from scratch every time and our guess is that more than 50% of problems startups encounter have already been solved by a more mature startup. The best experts are entrepreneurs that went through the same thing you did but 6 months earlier.
We highly encourage startups to participate in the community. Here are some examples but the list goes on:
Our startups can sign deals or perks on behalf of the incubator so all 70 startups can benefit from them.
If the 220 people currently present in our space were all to recommend the best expert in their network we would automatically increase our pool of experts by 220 new members.
Startups create groups of collective intelligence.
Alumni start to invest in our younger startups.
Today 40% of our deal flow comes from recommendations of our incubees.
This pillar is the most difficult to set up because you have to imagine 70 startups with 70 different business cultures, 300 new people coming in yearly. Two easy tasks you can implement to foster this community :
As we are based in France, we managed to use the 3 main breaks throughout the day: breakfast, lunch and dinner. These are as many occasions to create social events and foster serendipity. We institutionalize them: one networking evening every month is called “The forbidden Thursday”, don’t ask us why. And every week one of our startups organizes a breakfast.
Onboard every employee of the startup. A common mistake we made at the beginning was to focus only on founders. A company’s success depends on its employees and their ability to learn, take initiative and develop the business. By onboarding all new employees once a week, we were able to explain how the incubator works to them, what’s in it for them and also help them create meaningful connections right from the start.
Our main goal right now is to develop a tight-knit community feel as we are extending our program with a full online offer.
To experience our program, you have until the 28th to apply!
In a future article we will tell you why we think we are still at 5% of our potential.