9 hardtech startups started their accelerator journey!
The teams just pitched to the investors in our Product Impact Fund and I feel good. I see some perspiration, some of it is nerves but mostly tropical temperatures — 90F. That was early June and in Chicago, mHUB’s home base.
I remember talking to two of our California based cohort startups about cold Chicago — we wanted to have startups moving to Chicago for our 6-months acceleration program. We never discussed the high temperatures. We discussed Covid. Bottom line is that regardless of temperatures and Covid we have nine startups from all over the USA and Europe that moved to Chicago six weeks ago. The result of almost 500 applications and rigorous selection.
With just three weeks into the program, the founders did a great pitching job.
For some co-founders pitching is routine as they are serial entrepreneurs (nine of our co-founders are not first-time entrepreneurs), for others it was a first .
Let me emphasize: the teams loved to pitch real-live and in-person! What a change after all the zooms or Teams pitching.
Regardless of experience, all of them signed up because our program offers what they need: access to hardtech prototyping equipment and product design services, to manufacturing and corporate partners, to pilot customers, to experienced mentors, and to investment dollars. I won’t cover all of these in this post, so follow me on-line as we navigate our journey. Let me focus on two important elements to kick off.
The first is opening doors to our ecosystem and community. mHUB has almost 300 member startups. All of them are experts in their domain, gone or going through start-up or scale-up phases.
The value of being part of the mHUB community is enormous, the learnings are fascinating — just ask peers what their experience was, don’t reinvent.
We also have over 25 handpicked mentors that are domain experts and super-networked individuals that guide our cohort entrepreneurs — nine mentors have been matched with our cohort companies and will guide them throughout the program and hopefully for the long-term. The other mentors will jump in where needed. And our sponsoring corporate partners Avnet and Panduit have introduced liaison officers for each startup. All these introductions ended up in some form of happy hour — celebrating the start of a new relationship. Cheers to that!
The second element I want to highlight is a fundamental one.
It’s going back to business basics — what problem is my business focusing on, and who is my customer.
For some of our cohort participants it is validating the problem to solve — is there a deeper underlying problem, what is really that job to be done? Teams get so focused on solving a problem that they fail to see what the job is that needs to be done — adding a sensor to know if a machine operator is in a toxic environment helps but fundamentally one tries to save that operator’s life. For others it is exploring different market segments — are we focusing on the right segment, what is a good pilot customer? In what industry segment do we have a much bigger impact and create more value: is it automotive, medical, industrial? Reaching out to (potential) customers and interviewing them has been the focus for the past weeks.
We just started our journey, and it already feels we are part of a big family. The mHUB family.
Thierry Van Landegem is the Executive Director of mHUB’s Accelerated Incubation program. He has a broad experience in setting up new businesses within corporations and launching startups. mHUB is the Midwest premier hardtech innovation ecosystem based out of Chicago.
