Corporate Accelerator Programs
At MOX and China Accelerator, we run corporate accelerator programs. Right now we have relationships with around 85 corporates. You need to be very careful when deciding to partner with a corporate. Because a corporate can sometimes limit your flexibility and your ability to change strategy and enter into different markets. What we do at MOX is that we select multiple corporates. So we hear what specific problems they are facing. Then we match them with companies within our portfolio that can help solve that problem.
Getting Funding
A research on CNBC shows that around 60% of the companies that exit from an accelerator program gets funded. The reason for this is that accelerator programs have a network of investors that surround them. They have a network of mentors and media connections that can help get the company more visibility which can be a great help in getting the company funding. The network of investors around SOSV alone is over 3,000. They also have the biggest mentor community in all of Asia with over 280 mentors. We leverage the investor community and the mentor community in order to create a perfect product market feed for the startups. This is very helpful when the startups go for their fundraising.
Vertical Accelerator Programs
Thousands of accelerators are being born all over the world. What I am starting to see is that the trend for the future of accelerators are that most will become very specific. So they will provide to the startups a very specific help and a very specific advice in order for them to grow. An advice I give to companies is to do your homework and understand through networking tools like LinkedIn what the accelerator community is around the founders of the accelerator. Understand what is the background of the mentors that you have, and try to get as much value as possible from an accelerator program. When I think about an accelerator program I think of a very very expensive MBA. Startups give up 5-6% of their company to join the program. So this time and this money need to be spent very carefully.
