NEW - New Venture Capital Models – The Rise of Business Accelerator Seed Funds
March 22, 2009
UPDATE - March 25th! - Spark Capital announced an exciting new program targeted at this same seed stage space . Also great that they were clear about their committment to the broader ecosystem and programs like TechStars, in their own words:
“Start@Spark is also part of a broader effort by Spark Capital to drive greater innovation in the Northeast. Our initial focus on the Boston and New York areas is predicated on our belief in the talent in these areas and our desire to foster collaborative start-up communities. In addition to Start@Spark, we helped to form the Alliance for Open Competition - an organization established to eliminate non-competition agreements. We are also proud supporters of Tech Stars Boston. In other words, we are dedicated to fostering entrepreneurism and innovation. We hope you will join us to build something great. Please submit an application, follow this blog, or follow us on Twitter.”
What is happening to the seed-early stage investment model? A question on the minds of many people right now. And there has been much inspiring conversation about the various options - along with some real innovation by programs like TechStars (including their new Boston program) and YCombinator. Certainly feels like this challenging economy plays into the hands of programs like these as entrepreneurs are looking to be part of something larger to gain from the aggregation of expertise, resources, networks and even some camaraderie!
Recently I have been in two locally organized conversations on this topic. One was at last week’s eCoast angels meeting (NH’s most active and progressive angel group) and before that the “First Fridays” group started by a few of us earlier this year which focused our monthly session on this topic. That discussion was kicked off by Jim St Jean of First Ascent Ventures who has spent some serious time looking closely at these models, see below the 3rd and final in a series of related posts on this topic by Jim. Jim’s work was toward determing if these models can work, read the post to find the answer - here is a hint on one of the programs - and consider this post the first of many on this topic!
New Venture Capital Models – The Rise of Business Accelerator Seed Funds (Part 3) - 03/15/2009
