Accelerator Program Without the Capital

A friend of my brother (who’s a Spanish Dictionary entrepreneur) reached out to me to talk about my experience running Shotput Ventures in Atlanta as he’s thinking about putting on a similar type of program in another major city in the Southeast. Only, he wants to do the program without providing any investment capital. I told him it wouldn’t work.

He cited these benefits for joining his program:

• Pre-negotiated deferred legal fees
• Office space with conference rooms
• In-house data center for co-location
• Mentoring

This, of course, is in exchange for a small amount of equity. I said that resourceful entrepreneurs can get the items he mentioned on their own, and that if they aren’t resourceful, they probably aren’t going to be successful.

In addition, without capital, he’s going to have a hard time getting entrepreneurs to move to his city to participate in the program. For Shotput, the majority of our companies moved to Atlanta for the program. Entrepreneurship isn’t a geographic endeavor.

My advice to him was to raise money to be able to invest in the companies as part of the program. Money talks.