This morning we had our last partner breakfast for Shotput Ventures to debrief on the year, discuss lessons learned, and talk about next year’s program. Each partner talked about things that worked well and things that needed improvement. Here are some of the takeaways:
- Try to better discern which teams are “all in” vs those that see it more as a hobby or summer job
- Mentor the teams to make the investment money last six months, instead of the just the three months during the program, so that they have more runway to be successful
- Ensure each team has at least two programmers (we only required one programmer per team)
- Don’t allow teams greater than three people, unless it is a special circumstance
Of course, we discussed several more lessons learned that can’t be discussed here. Overall, I’m very pleased with our first year and I really enjoyed working with the awesome Shotput partners.
David Cummings on Startups 