Accelerate your Startup

We had a very fruitful summer taking part in the 500 Startups accelerator program, which provides seed funding, shared coworking space, mentorship, design reviews and a great network.  There are a number of such programs that would be valuable to an early stage startup, so I wanted to provide some links to incubator/accelerator programs in the US starting in Winter 2012:

• 500 Startups (next batch Jan. 2012) http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-apply-to-500-Startups
• YC (due on Oct. 10, 2011) http://ycombinator.com/apply.html (Checklist)
• AngelPad http://angelpad.org/more/
• Tandem (due Dec. 1) http://www.tandementrepreneurs.com/
• I/O Ventures http://io.theapplicants.com/home.php
• TechStars http://www.techstars.com/program/schedule/

One more program is Startup Chile (due Oct 27, 2011): http://www.startupchile.org

Hope this helps!  Good luck!

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P.S. We’re hiring for mobile developers.  

500 Memories

It’s hard to believe that the summer has gone by so quickly…   From Drunk Pitch (a fun icebreaker event where we had a few beers and had to pitch someone else’s startup based on the name only) to the actual pitches at Demo Day, it was seriously great to have a group of really awesome people to go through the ups and downs of the startup process together with.  

Best wishes to all, and big thank you to the 500 Startups team (Dave, Paul, Christine, Enrique, Melissa, Bedy, and others) for making this happen!

Notable memories:

• Enrique’s super-helpful bootcamp, design reviews and design events
• Awesome mentors such as UXRick, James Levine, and Maneesh (who seemed to be always giving Ray advice on metrics at 1am)
• Watching the Shoreline fireworks in a big group from the office on July 4th — great view, but no sound!
• Several startups going through mid-summer radical pivots.
• Delicious Culture Kitchen snacks in the kitchen
• The soundtrack to our lives was console.fm full blast at 11pm each night.
• Watching everyone’s pitches improve drastically with expletive-filled loving advice from Dave.
• The Snapettes and their color-coordinated table and cupcakes at Demo Day
• Ray’s hilarious pitch for Singboard alternately starring Justin Bieber, Darth Vader and Michael Jackson.
• The post-Demo Day party with Singboard karaoke, a CVS shopping cart filled with alcohol, and two dancing horse heads!
• And then we took the show to out east to 500 Startups Demo Day NYC