“Seed Accelerators” are investment funds that supply small sums of capital (typically up to £50,000) to extremely early-stage start-ups in return for small amounts of equity (typically up to 10%) and provide an organised support program for a limited time period following their investment.

Launching in the summer of 2005, Silicon Valley-based Y Combinator (YC) is the pioneer of the Seed Accelerator model. Following in YC’s footsteps, there have been more than a dozen other such programs created since 2005, all of which have focused on the Internet, software and mobile industries due to the low capital requirements and short amount of time needed to launch a product. In the future, I expect the model will be adapted to fit other industries, but for now these funds are likely only to be relevant if you are starting an Internet, software or mobile company.

What are the benefits of doing this sort of program?

1. The network
   Over 3 months you will build a network of other start-up founders and mentors that might otherwise take years to build up outside of a Seed Accelerator.
2. Fundraising assistance
   The program will typically culminate in a “Demo Day” where you will get to pitch your business to a room full of Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists. In addition to this opportunity, you can call on the organisers of the program for introductions to other investors.
3. Brand
   Having the brand of the Seed Accelerator behind you will help you in a variety of ways including when it comes to hiring, raising investment, getting written up in the press and, depending on the market, signing up new customers.
4. Money
   The investment itself will pay your living costs for a few months, which gives you more time before you have to self-reliant or raise more funding.

What do I need to have achieved before applying?

Generally you will need an idea and at least one technical co-founder in your team. If you don’t have a technical co-founder then it may be more difficult to get a product launched with the very small amount of funding you receive.

Ideally you will have a team of 2-3 people and a demo (or mock-ups at the very least) by the time you apply, as this will improve your chance of getting accepted into the program.

Y Combinator, Seedcamp and TechStars

While there are now more than a dozen Seed Accelerators out there, three have risen to prominence above the others and these are the ones I would recommend checking out first. Below is a summary of the key facts about each program, along with what I believe to be their key differentiators or selling points.

Y Combinator

Location: Silicon Valley
Founded: Summer 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell
Start-ups funded to date: 118
Program length/dates: 3 months, Jan-Mar and Jun-Aug each year
Funding amount: $11,000 + $3,000 per founder
Equity taken: 2-10%
UK-founded portfolio companies: Songkick, Webmynd, Auctomatic, Clickpass, Snaptalent, Propable, Heyzap, Scoopler, DailyBooth.

Key differentiators:

1. Arguably the best team and set of mentors out of all the programs. Founding Partner Paul Graham is one of the global thought leaders on start-ups and the weekly dinners held usually include a guest speaker from Silicon Valley’s “A-list”.
2. For most Internet, software or mobile start-ups, Silicon Valley is the best place in the world to be. However, for non-US citizens, obtaining a visa to continue working in Silicon Valley after the program can be very difficult so you might not want to get too attached! Even with a successful application, this is an expensive and time-consuming process.
3. The Y Combinator alumni network or “YC Mafia” contains hundreds of founders who you will be able to call upon. This is a richer and more diverse network than with any of the other programs.
4. Due to being the pioneer Seed Accelerator and establishing a strong track record, the Y Combinator brand will arguably give you more credibility than any of the other programs.

Seedcamp

Location: London
Founded: Autumn 2007 by Saul Klein and Reshma Sohoni
Start-ups funded to date: 21
Program length/dates: 3 months, Sep-Nov each year
Funding amount: €50,000
Equity taken: 5-10%
UK-founded portfolio companies: MyBuilder, HyperNumbers, Basekit, BoxedIce, Patients Know Best

Key differentiators:

1. While fewer than 10 companies are funded by Seedcamp each year, 20 are selected to participate in “Seedcamp week”, which takes place in London during September. Seedcamp week will expose the 20 teams to hundreds of mentors from across Europe, and increasingly from the US as well. No other program can match the quantity of high-quality people to which you’ll gain exposure.
2. More cash than most at €50,000, although this is offset to some extent because living costs in London are higher than almost anywhere else.
3. For UK founders, there are no visa issues if you want to stay put at the end of the program.
4. The selection process for Seedcamp has been said to focus more heavily on the business models and prior progress of applicant start-ups, whereas many of the US programs are more concerned with technical talent. Depending on your skill-set and the stage to which your concept has developed this may or may not be helpful for you.

TechStars

Location: Boston, Boulder and Seattle
Founded: Summer 2007 by David Cohen, Brad Feld, Jared Polis and David Brown.
Start-ups funded to date: 37
Program length/dates: 3 months, Mar-May in Boston; May-Jul in Boulder; Aug-Nov in Seattle
Funding amount: $6,000 per founder, up to $18,000 total
Equity taken: 6%
UK-founded portfolio companies: Graphic.ly

Key differentiators:
TechStars probably has the second strongest brand of the US-based Seed Accelerators, after Y Combinator. It provides many of the same benefits such as a strong team, high-quality mentors at weekly dinners and mentoring sessions, and a good track record (four of the first 10 companies funded have already been acquired since they were founded in 2007). However, partly because it was started later than Y Combinator and isn’t based in Silicon Valley it is still considered by most entrepreneurs to be second best.

There are several other good Seed Accelerator programs that you may wish to consider applying to – here are my choices for ‘best of the rest’:
- DreamIt Ventures, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- LaunchBox Digital, based in Washington, D.C.
- Shotput Ventures, based in Atlanta, Georgia
- Capital Factory, based in Austin, Texas
- fbFund, based in Silicon Valley. Only for ideas using Facebook Connect.

One of the best examples of a start-up that has been positively impacted by a Seed Accelerator program is Auctomatic. Started by cousins Kulveer and Harjeet Taggar while studying at Oxford University, the company was part of Y Combinator’s winter 2007 batch. Having started the program working on Boso.com, a marketplace for students to buy and sell things online, they finished the program with a new idea in Auctomatic, which provides tools for eBay auctioneers and they teamed up with an Irish software engineer called Patrick Collison. These decisions were heavily influenced by advice they had received from the Y Combinator mentors. Within six months, they received funding from some elite Silicon Valley-based Angel Investors and just over a year after starting the program, they were acquired by Vancouver-based company Live Current Media for $5 million. That’s some serious acceleration!

So, if you want to give your start-up a boost, I’d strongly recommend applying for some of these programs. In particular, if you are a first-time entrepreneur based somewhere short of Angel Investors, or you could do with giving your entrepreneurial network a makeover, joining a Seed Accelerator could well be the best way to kick-start your journey.

The deadline for the summer 2010 Y Combinator and TechStars program is coming up in March and applications for the 2010 London Mini Seedcamp are expected to open in June.

In this article, we’ll explore one potential solution: Angel Investors. These are usually wealthy entrepreneurs who are looking to invest their own money in early-stage businesses. In addition to offering your business money, they can also offer their advice, experience and knowledge.

[Note: my advice throughout this article is tailored towards raising money from UK-based Angel Investors, however many of the principles apply elsewhere]

What do I need to have achieved in order to raise funding from Angel Investors?

This can vary a lot between investors so my main piece of advice is to speak to some Angel Investors as early as possible, in order to find out what they would want to see before investing. They will generally want to see a prototype (or detailed product mock-ups at the very least), some market analysis and potential ways your product can make a lot of money.

One way to significantly increase the chance of getting investment is to demonstrate some early traction in your market. If you’ve been able to develop a basic prototype web application then get some early users, or if you require investment before you can finish building your product, see if you can get a letter of intent from a potential customer saying that they will purchase the product once it has been developed.

How long will it take?

Allow 6 months from the time you start putting your plans on paper to the day you get the investment in your bank account. 3-6 months is the typical timeframe – for GroupSpaces, we started this process at the beginning of August 2007 (I graduated in June 2007) and received money in the bank on 21 January 2008, so we took about 5 months. If you’re already growing your user-base / customer base very fast and have a lot of investors interested, it might only take you 2-3 months.

How much should I raise?

As a rule of thumb, you should raise enough money to get you to the next level financially. Usually this means being able to raise more money at a higher level, for example raising enough money from Angel Investors to be able to raise money from Venture Capitalists before you run out. If you’re able to generate significant revenue early on with your business, this may even mean raising enough money to become profitable.

To calculate a number, you’ll need to work out how long you’re likely to take to get you to the next level, and how many people that requires. From this you can work out your costs over the time period, subtract any revenue you’re confident of generating, add in a ‘fudge factor’ of an extra 3-6 months as you’ll probably take longer than you think and hey presto, that’s what you need to raise.

For example, let’s say you think it’s going to take 12 months for 4 people to launch your web startup and get 100,000 users, at which point you fancy your chances at raising Venture Capital. Since you’re a web company your overheads are minimal and you’ve worked out your costs are 75% salaries. You need to pay £25,000 salaries and you want to give yourself 18 months so you have some breathing room. That means you should look to raise about £200,000.

Salary costs for a year and a half: 4 x £25,000 x 1.5 = £150,000. This is 75% of anticipated costs, so total anticipated costs: £150,000 x 100/75 = £200,000.

What valuation might I receive?

Something that initially surprises many entrepreneurs is that valuation is typically an output rather than an input to negotiations. In the above example, you need to raise £200,000. If you are speaking with Angel Investors, they are likely to collectively want to own 20-30% in return for investing their money. Therefore your valuation after the investment will be between £666,667 and £1,000,000.

Taking investment from personal friends or family members often means you can get away with them owning a lower percentage in return for their investment, however this is usually negated by them being able to afford to put in less money than Angel Investors.

How do I find potential investors?

1. Angel Investment Networks
   These are what Dragon’s Den is based on – you’ll get 10-15 minutes to pitch your business idea to a room full of Angel Investors, probably followed by 5 minutes of Q&A, and an opportunity to speak personally with interested investors over an hour of drinks afterwards. It will likely cost you ~5% of any money you raise and you might have to pay a few hundred pounds to pitch. If you’re successful, this will be money very well spent.

   We raised GroupSpaces’ angel investment round via an Oxford-based network and strongly recommend seeing if you can get a spot at one, particularly if you can find one local to you. There is a list of 25 of the main networks in the UK on the British Business Angel Association website.

2. Personal Introductions
   Approaching Angel Investors with a ‘cold call’ email is unlikely to get you very far as it is very difficult to establish trust out of nothing. You are much more likely to be successful if you can get personally introduced. The best type of introducer is, in order of preference:
   (a) another investor who is already keen to invest in your round,
   (b) another entrepreneur who the Angel Investor has backed before,
   (c) your lawyer/accountant,
   (d) your friend who met the investor at some event last year.

If you are struggling to think of someone who could introduce you to a prospective investor, try looking on LinkedIn or Facebook to see if you have any mutual connections or friends.

For a list of some prominent UK-based Angel Investors, check out this list on the Seedcamp website.

How do I go about the fundraising process?

First, create your “deck” and prepare a demo. A deck is the word used to describe a PowerPoint presentation of 10-20 slides summarising the key areas of your business. If you haven’t created one before, read The 10/20/30 Rule by Guy Kawasaki for a quick tutorial. For the demo, if you have a prototype product ready to demo, great; if not, then create some basic mock-ups of what your product will look like and how it will function. Your objective here is to capture your investor’s imagination and get them to envisage how the product could work in the future.

Before showing your deck or demo to any investors, I would strongly recommend you practice your pitch with a few other entrepreneurs, friends or family members in order to get some initial feedback and gain familiarity with your materials.

Next, create a shortlist of 10-15 target investors / investment networks that invest at the level you’re looking to raise, making sure that for each individual investor on the shortlist, you have identified someone who can introduce you to them. In the above example, you might be looking for Angel Investors that invest £50k or more, with the hope of finding 1-4 to make up your round.

Once you have your deck, demo and shortlist ready, call in your introductions and start meeting your prospective investors.

What’s the best way to pitch?

There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to pitching. I would encourage you to be yourself as investors are generally very smart and will see straight through any act you put on. If the investor has a website, blog or Twitter account, I would encourage you to read that to see what areas of your business they are likely to care more about.

Don’t worry if your first couple of pitches don’t go that well. As you pitch more people, you’ll learn what works and start to see what questions you keep getting asked, and how to best answer them.

Some common mistakes I’ve seen young entrepreneurs make are:

• Not thinking big enough (i.e. answer the question: how big could your business become?)
• Not appearing determined/focused enough (show the investors how passionate and driven you are!)
• Getting too caught up in details about the product and not seeing the big picture
• Not having tested any assumptions around marketing channels

Above all else, try to make sure you get on well with the investor – if they don’t like you, they’re not going to invest!

Which young entrepreneurs have successfully raised angel investment recently?

Here are some examples of 6-figure angel rounds that were recently raised by UK-based startups with student or very recently graduated founders:

• Spoonfed (www.spoonfed.co.uk), a web and mobile what’s on guide to London, was started by LSE students Alexander Will and Henry Erskine Crum in 2007 and raised 6 figure angel rounds from UK-based Angel Investors in summer 2008 and summer 2009.
• Songkick (www.songkick.com), the online concert database, was started by Cambridge University graduates Ian Hogarth, Pete Smith and Michelle You in 2007 and raised 6 figures in March 2008 from a consortium of UK- and US-based Angel Investors, having taken $15k from the Y Combinator seed fund in summer 2007.
• GroupSpaces (www.groupspaces.com), my startup which takes the pain out of managing groups, was started by Oxford students Andy Young and myself in 2007 and raised a 6-figure angel round via an Oxford-based Angel Investment Network in January 2008.

Resources

To read more about what’s involved in raising angel investment for your startup, check out the following sites:

1. www.venturehacks.com – the best guide you’ll find on startup fundraising, albeit with a slight bias towards US-/Silicon Valley-based deals
2. www.paulgraham.com – a collection of the best essays ever written about startups, fundraising and hacking
3. www.bbaa.org.uk – the British Business Angel Association

I would also strongly encourage you to speak with other entrepreneurs you know who’ve raised investment at a similar level to you. Finally, you can get in touch with me in the comments or via Twitter if you want to ask any further questions – I’ll be happy to help.

Last week Joseph Ajilore (Founder, Your Hidden Potential) interviewed me for his young entrepreneur blog. He asked me about how to be a successful entrepreneur, why I rejected multiple corporate job offers in favour of pursuing GroupSpaces full-time and who I find inspiring. Following a lot of great feedback we’ve both received on the interview, Joseph’s kindly allowed me to re-publish it for the readers of Freed From the Matrix.

Can you quickly give us some background information about yourself?

I’m a 24 year-old Internet entrepreneur, born and bred in Wimbledon, currently based in Oxford having completed a Mathematics degree at Oxford University in 2007. In addition to working on my startup GroupSpaces, I also write for The Gateway newspaper as their Entrepreneurship Columnist and train for my current sporting passion: triathlons.

So David, tell us about your company and what inspired you to start it?

GroupSpaces is an Oxford-based Web startup which takes the pain out of managing clubs, societies, associations and other real-world groups.

I started GroupSpaces in 2007 with my co-founder, Andy Young, based on our personal experiences on the committee of various clubs and societies at Oxford University.

We observed that every real-world group we came across was managing itself using a mash-up of disconnected tools and processes. This was really inefficient and meant these groups were spending an unnecessarily large amount of time on admin, distracting them from their group’s core purpose.

The status quo was a mailing list on Gmail or a Yahoo!/Google group, a membership database in Excel, events on a Facebook group, payments being collected by cheque or cash and a website which was time-consuming to update and disconnected from everything else.

Andy and I thought that it would be much quicker and easier to manage all these things from one place, which is what inspired us to start GroupSpaces.

What makes your business different from other competitors?

GroupSpaces’ main competitors are Excel spreadsheets, Cc email threads, cheques and some other Web applications solving one specific problem for groups e.g. Eventbrite for event management.

GroupSpaces differentiates by providing an intuitive, all-in-one Web-based solution for group management.

What role do you perform in your company?

We currently have a small team which means I perform many different roles. A typical week for me involves wearing several different hats such as user support, marketing, sales, finance and operations. I currently work on every area of the business except for coding the actual software which I leave to our brilliant team of developers.

How difficult was it getting funding for your business? Is there a right way for young entrepreneurs to get funding?

Prior to raising our angel funding, we had already built a prototype product, had a few hundred groups using it and were generating revenue so we had a fairly good ‘proof of concept’, something which angel investors often look for. We ended up receiving multiple offers of funding for our angel round and the one we took came via the Oxford Early Investments business angel network. It took us about 5 months from our first conversation with prospective investors to getting the money in the bank.

If you’re a first-time entrepreneur and you think that you are going to need to raise funding for your business, I would encourage you to start building relationships with potential investors as early as possible and ask them what they will be looking for you to achieve before they would be comfortable investing in you. This can vary a lot between different investors, countries and markets, so the best thing to do is to just start talking to potential investors.

David you’ve worked in some pretty big companies so far such as Lehman Brothers, JPMorgan and McKinsey. Why didn’t you go down that route and get yourself a safe, secure job?

Having done some courses and internships in the corporate world, it was crystal clear to me that being an entrepreneur was my best option. There were several strong reasons for this:

• I could do what I love and am passionate about every single day.
• I could have far more positive impact on the world by starting my own company and this was personally a very important factor when considering how I would spend years of my life.
• The long-term financial upside was greater if you are successful and I don’t think that it’s anywhere near as important to have money in your early twenties versus when you’re older and have a family etc.
• Andy and I were already underway working on GroupSpaces and were very excited about its potential so we definitely wanted to continue working on this to start with.
• I could spend every day doing what I thought and felt was most important. I didn’t have someone telling me differently.
• I’m not sure how safe and secure taking a job with Lehman Brothers would have been…

What are key ingredients that you think makes a successful entrepreneur?

Persistence, persistence and persistence. One of my favourite entrepreneurial books is Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston (Founding Partner, Y Combinator) – it’s composed of 32 short interviews with successful technology entrepreneurs such as Steve Wozniak (Apple), Max Levchin (PayPal) and Evan Williams (Blogger, Twitter). The book concludes with a quote from Ron Gruner, founder of Shareholder.com and Alliant Systems:

“The key to success, if you had to sum it up in one word, is persistence.”

Also from my personal experience both as an entrepreneur and interacting with hundreds of other entrepreneurs over the past few years, it’s clear that the ones who do the best are prepared to do anything and everything to make their companies successful and they don’t give up. Whether that means changing their initial idea, changing team members, raising more money, whatever is required, the most successful entrepreneurs don’t give up, they persist and keep persisting until success comes their way.

I asked Jessica about this quote a couple of years ago after I had first read the book and she said that it was a deliberate decision to end with this. From her experience at Y Combinator having invested in dozens of startups, it was clear to her that the ones with the most persistent founders were the ones which went on to succeed.

Do you feel that there are things which entrepreneurs are doing wrong to break into the entrepreneurial world?

I think anyone starting their first company should try to meet and build relationships with other entrepreneurs. This might mean relocating somewhere with a greater density of entrepreneurs but I believe this can be done in other places besides Silicon Valley. You just need to seek out a couple of other entrepreneurs who are slightly further down the line than you are and can share with you some of the lessons they learned and offer you advice on the challenges you are facing.

I also think peer pressure can be a big motivator for first-time entrepreneurs. Y Combinator companies benefit a lot from this – I remember Paul Graham saying that not screwing up at Demo Day in front of all your friends is a much bigger motivator than getting rich. Similarly if you can just find a couple of other young entrepreneurs at a similar stage to you, it will give you a significant sense of urgency to get shit done if you think their startup is progressing faster than yours.

Why do you think is so difficult for young entrepreneurs to get funding for their company? In the US there are tons of investment opportunities e.g. in Silicon Valley

There are a couple of ways of looking at this. On the one hand there are far more angel investors and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley than anywhere else in the world, but there are also far more startups there. Obviously this results in a lot more startups being funded in Silicon Valley than anywhere else but there are also quite a few active angel investors and venture capitalists throughout the UK, you just have to look a bit harder to find them.

I’m not in a good position to comment outside of the UK or Silicon Valley as I haven’t spent any time being an entrepreneur there, but certainly in the UK if you are a first-time entrepreneur, you should be able to draw up a shortlist of 10-15 investors who do deals at the size you are looking for. These lists of VC firms for UK-based startups and sources of angel financing are good starting points. If you put in the effort to network and get personally introduced to all these investors, get meetings, and still are not able to get funding, then your business is probably not far enough developed for the stage of financing you are trying to raise e.g. if you’re struggling to raise angel financing, you might still need to get more of a ‘proof of concept’ and if you’re struggling to raise your first round of Venture Capital then you probably don’t have enough early traction.

What are your hobbies?

When I’m not working on GroupSpaces, I enjoy working out, spending time with my girlfriend and heading to the occasional drum n bass rave.

In particular, I am a firm believer in ‘healthy body, healthy mind’. This old adage was in fact scientifically proven recently. A lot of people I speak to say that they are too busy to work out but I don’t believe that this is a healthy attitude. My mind functions faster when I’m at peak fitness and that means exercise is an essential part of my life. I make time to keep fit, even if this means sacrificing on sleep sometimes. In the summer I enjoy training for and racing triathlons and in the winter I tend to spend more time in the gym.

If you ever believe that you are too busy to work out, I would encourage you look at Barack Obama. The President of the United States is probably busier than you, even though you may be very busy. However, in a recent interview of Men’s Health magazine, Barack said:

“Most of my workouts have to come before my day starts. There’s always a trade-off between sleep and working out. Usually I get in about 45 minutes, six days a week. I’ll lift [weights] one day, do cardio the next. I wish I was getting a 90-minute workout.”

Who has been your greatest inspiration so far?

I find the most inspiration in people who are able to repeatedly apply themselves to a world-class level in multiple disciplines. As a mathematician, I often see patterns when I abstract parts of my and other people’s lives and I think the ingredients that make one successful in business, sport, politics, entertainment and most other fields are actually very similar.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers does a good job of explaining this – Gladwell claims that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practising a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. There are obviously other factors in play, but I would relate the point made back to my earlier point about persistence being the key driving factor of successful entrepreneurs.

Specific people who have inspired me in this way are:

• Arnold Schwarzenegger for becoming the best bodybuilder in the world then turning his hand to acting and becoming world-class at that and now building a fantastically successful career in politics, becoming Governor of California.
• Mark Zuckerberg for changing the way hundreds of millions of people understand their relationships with their friends. What particularly inspires me about what Mark has achieved is that Facebook isn’t so successful because he executed one idea really well. He has continually innovated and adapted his company to grow and succeed, all at such a young age.
• Marc Andreessen for starting two billion dollar companies (Netscape, Opsware), being on the way to having started a third (Ning, valued at $750M last round) and having now started his own venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, which seems to be on the way to building a world-class portfolio.

If you had a chance to have a cup of coffee with anyone dead or alive, who would it be and why?

Winston Churchill. By all accounts his determination and data-driven approach to strategy were second to none. Some people laugh at books like Sun Tzu’s Art of War for Executives but I firmly believe that the characteristics of a successful leader in war are very similar to the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. I’d love to experience Churchill first hand and compare with some of the most inspirational people I have met in my life so far.

Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?

My primary focus is building GroupSpaces into a world-class company and I’m not really thinking beyond that at the moment. Long-term I’d like to probably do at least one more startup, write a book, travel the world and perhaps start a venture capital firm. We’ll see what happens.

Do you have any tips for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Before making important decisions, double check that both your heart and head are in agreement.

If you aren’t already in regular contact with other entrepreneurs at a similar stage to you, go and find some – the peer support and peer pressure this will generate is really important.

Once you’ve settled on your initial idea and founding team, focus on core and be the most persistent person you’ve ever met.

Finally, I’ll offer a quote from Dharmesh Shah, founder of OnStartups: “The shortest piece of startup advice ever: GO!”

Here is a summary of the key changes I made:

Template

I wanted something clean and simple, so decided to customise Clean Home by Missouri Web Design.

Sharing

I purchased the short URL langer.ly to make links shared about my content more distinct and registered it with awe.sm (for $99/yr) to track clicks and integrate with the places where my content will most frequently be shared. (I’ll be interested to see how bit.ly Pro compares with awe.sm when it launches.)

A couple of other bonuses with awe.sm are that it offers customised integration with Twitterfeed (what I use to send my Google Reader shares to Twitter) and Tweetie 2 for iPhone so URLs I share on those will also be langer.ly from now on

Widgets

Other than the usual widgets for feed subscriptions, Twitter, LinkedIn, categories, search, archive etc. I incorporated:

• A widget of my 5 most popular blog posts of all-time to give new and existing readers quick access to what is probably my best content.
• A Facebook Fan Box and Skyscraper for GroupSpaces to promote what I’m working on.

Comments

I implemented Disqus because, well, what else is there that comes close and can be done in 2 minutes?

I’d love to hear what you think of the new setup and also what you’d like to see me write about in 2010. Please let me know in the comments below or via Twitter.

This year I’m aiming to blog much more frequently, my target is 2 posts/month — a significant increase from my 2 posts in the second half of 2009!

Wishing you a successful Twenty Ten!

P.S. If you’re not already subscribed to this blog, you can subscribe via RSS here and email here.

Victoria Lennox

The NACUE concept was conceived in late 2008 by Victoria Lennox (right), a former President of Oxford Entrepreneurs society. Last week I caught up with Victoria to get the lowdown on what NACUE can offer student entrepreneurs and where the organisation is headed in the future.

How can budding student entrepreneurs benefit from NACUE over the coming year?

From participating in enterprise societies and accessing our online directory to attending inspirational and informative events and pitching for funding in front of interested investors, NACUE provides a one-stop-shop for budding student entrepreneurs to get inspired, develop skills, gain experience and start a venture.

A one-stop-shop for student entrepreneurs sounds like a great idea. What does this involve?

NACUE offers three programmes/services aimed at three specific audiences. NACUE Groups for enterprise societies; NACUE Entrepreneurs for young entrepreneurs; and NACUE Ventures for early stage start-ups. Our innovative model, which serves as a global best practice for student-led enterprise promotion, supports students step-by-step through their enterprise journey.

NACUE Ventures
One of the biggest barriers that young entrepreneurs face in growing their ventures is access to funding. Moreover investors often find it difficult to navigate the bureaucratic institutional structures within most universities. NACUE Ventures is the UK’s intermediary between young entrepreneurs and investors. NACUE provides young entrepreneurs within 5 years of having graduated with resources to explore funding options, learn from the best, and online and offline platforms to pitch to investors.

NACUE Groups
Student enterprise societies in the UK have long suffered from the challenges of sustainability, programming and finance, and have operated until now as isolated bodies. NACUE Groups provides the leaders and committees of enterprise societies with training and resources, online and offline communities, mentorship, and access to a national network of sponsors, mentors and speakers.

NACUE Entrepreneurs
In response to the need for a central online hub for young entrepreneurs in the UK to learn about enterprise events, resources and opportunities, NACUE Entrepreneurs provides an online directory for enterprising young Brits to get inspired, develop skills, gain experience and start a venture. Our online portal is equipped with a national calendar of events so that students can be in the know about upcoming events at their university and in their area. As part of NACUE Entrepreneurs we are also hosting the NACUE Student Enterprise Conference in February 2010 and the National Varsity Pitch Competition in May 2010 to showcase the hottest young entrepreneurs in the country.

How many universities are on board so far?

We work with over 80 universities across the UK, support 52 enterprise societies that engage more than 25,000 enterprising students and budding young entrepreneurs, and are currently mentoring the development of a further 25 societies.

How are you helping these societies to pass on NACUE’s messages to their members?

Enterprise societies drive our work, programmes and objectives through our Regional Networks and our National Student Enterprise Advisory Board, which is made up of passionate enterprise society leaders and university entrepreneurs. As a result, NACUE’s messages are the messages of enterprise societies and societies are always willing to pass on our messages to their members. Through inviting their members to join the NACUE Community and attend NACUE events across the country, enterprise societies are able to offer more to their members by not only providing them with membership to their society, but also access to a rich national network and resources.

We rely heavily on online communications – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GroupSpaces – and also work with enterprise educators to further communicate our opportunities and messages to students who may not be part of an enterprise society. Member societies showcase their membership to NACUE through logos and links on their websites.

Who else is NACUE working with?

NACUE works closely with Microsoft and Tata as our leading corporate partners. We work with enterprise educators across UK universities and have developed strategic partnerships with leading organisations such as Make Your Mark, the Prince’s Trust, Enternships, Shell Live-Wire, Entrepreneur Country and School for Start-Ups. We also sit on the advisory boards of the UK India Business Council Next Generation Network, and SFEDI and have international affiliate societies across Europe, North America, South Africa and South East Asia.

I noticed you had some rather high-profile entrepreneurs on board. Can you tell the readers a bit about them?

NACUE is privileged to have the support of some high-profile senior advisors, each of whom has been absolutely instrumental to our development since our launch in May 2009.

Julie Meyer is the Founder of Entrepreneur Country & First Tuesday, is the CEO of Ariadne Capital, writes a weekly column for City AM and is the new online Dragon on the Dragon’s Den. She has been recognised as one of the World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders of Tomorrow and by the Wall Street Journal as one of the Top 30 Most Influential Women in Europe.

Doug Richard is the Founder and Chairman of Library House, Founder and Vice Chairman of Cambridge Angels, a former BBC Dragon and more recently has founded the School for Start-Ups. Doug is the Chairman of the Conservative Party Small Business Task force and brings over 20 years of entrepreneurial experience in technology and software ventures in the US and UK. In 2006, Doug was an honorary recipient of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion.

Where do you see NACUE in 5 years time?

In 5 years time, NACUE will be fully sustainable, have made a difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of young enterprising Brits in further and higher education, and will be widely recognised by the highest levels of industry, government and education as the national voice for young entrepreneurs and as the leading intermediary between investors and early-stage student start-ups. By this time we will have also exported our innovative to model to several countries in the EU and North America whilst retaining is grassroots, student-led, enterprising culture.

Where can students go to find out more about NACUE?

Students and recent graduates can start engaging with NACUE by visiting www.nacue.com and young entrepreneurs can gain access to an unparalleled library of online resources, investment-readiness events and connect with our network of interested investors at www.nacueventures.com.

Last question: do you personally have any tips for budding student entrepreneurs?

Quite simply, “just do it”.