🛠️The last 5 years I’ve slowly build Validate as a consultancy aimed on making better entrepreneurs, while also prioritizing being around my small children.
We’ve done everything from pitch training, workshops, ecosystem analysis, accelerators, incubators, 1-1 coaching and have ended up advising roughly +200 entrepreneurs every year.
And we’ve managed to work with a lot of different organizations and customers and in a wide range of different collaborative constellations.
Especially the last year has brought a lot of food for thought. 🤔
🎶 🎙️ On the one hand in making the Soundtech accelerator we’ve managed to create one of the best accelerators in Europe as an accelerator program partner with Sound Hub Denmark and SoundInvest. This being the culmination of what Validate are capable of achieving, so far. It’s a program we are immensely proud of and is highly rated by the startups.
On the other hand, the last years reflection has brought me to the conclusion that the majority of projects we’ve participated in are underperforming compared to what we can achieve.
The problem lies not in the quality of what we deliver but more in how it’s being delivered. And the root cause of that can be identified in our business model. So we’ve spent a lot of time analyzing past assignments to uncover when we are producing most value or impact.
One if the things we’ve found is that the higher quality startup we work with the higher we get rated. Why?
Because our method fundamentally set the standard extremely high. To get value from working with lean methodology you need to work hard. You need to get real data, from real people, in the real world. It doesn’t work if you never translate the theory out of the workshop. So we need a more elite mentality that sets the bar high for entrepreneurs and helps them to get out of the building. 👌🏽📈
Unfortunately, this mentality is not a requirement for 4 out of 5 entrepreneurial programs. They might say they expect hard work. Or they want them to engage with customers. But they don’t hold startups accountable for it. Which ultimately makes it hard for us to perform.
Sure, we could just sell workshops and basically just be a vessel for knowledge transfer. But we can’t teach anything that isn’t freely available on the internet. For instance – Y-combinator has made all their teaching material accessible online. Why do you need us to say what you can read or view online yourself?
What founders struggle with is to make the theory actionable in their company. To apply new knowledge and put it to action making the necessary changes to their startup along the way. This is what Validate excels at. But because of the way the European startup ecosystem is structured it prohibits us in doing exactly that.
One of the reasons has to do with how KPI’s are designed in the public funded programs.
❌There’s fundamentally no incentive to have startups succeed.
❌The only incentive is to make them show up.
And if you as an organization gets measured by “showing up”, you’ll end up focusing on eliminating barriers to that. If you have bad performing workshops, you make them a little shorter. A bit easier. Maybe less of them.
Thus, the number of interactions with founders goes down and similar the demands on startups to participate goes down. And the quality of our startups follows. And in the end the startups end up not getting the help or intervention needed.
Ultimately this approach leads to a Europe that is sagging behind our counterparts in US and China. Not because of lack of talent, culture or ideas. But mentality and poorly designed KPI’s.
Validate will not participate in it anymore 🙅🏼
Thus, we are changing our business model💡
The best programs we’ve done the last five years has been with programs backed with private funding, as a direct accelerator program partner
So, working with private venture funds, accelerators and others who seek to make money and create impact by backing entrepreneurship will be our strategy going forwards.
It’s the only way we can truly help startups. 👏🏼💯
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