Seed Hatchery is Memphis’ mentorship-driven seed stage accelerator, providing the resources needed to develop great founders, and successfully convert concepts into startups:
- An intense 90-day program- called ‘bootcamp’ for a reason- that pushes entrepreneurs through the discovery process, to scaling and pitch perfecting;
- Mentors representing a wide array of backgrounds that provide business and industry experience, and domain expertise;
- $15,000 in seed capital.
Seed Hatchery is gearing up for its Spring 2012 cohort, and is taking applications through January 7. While there is no set criteria for the type of idea selected, their programming and level of funding is usually most suitable for information technology-based products and services.
Learn more about Seed Hatchery’s process and programming, and check out their inaugural companies. Also take a look at an excerpt from this blog post from Work for Pie’s Cliff McKinney, as he shares from experience why Seed Hatchery is not for the faint of heart…and why that makes it a game changer:
…It was an awakening, to say the least. Turns out everything I thought mattered didn’t, and everything I thought was true wasn’t (except for the bit about the genius co-founder), and everything I had learned wasn’t relevant anymore. By the end of that first week, I was huddled in a corner with my rifle, crying, hoping the whole thing would just blow up and take me along with it.’
But I kept coming back, because it was the most awesome thing I had ever done. Humbling, yes, but awesome nonetheless. I was doing THIS. I was being brought to my knees HERE, doing OUR THING. We didn’t answer to anyone but ourselves. We were keeping late nights because we wanted to, not because some freaking busybody micro-manager in another department needs her TPS reports by noon tomorrow. We were living the dream!
And we were getting better. Bit by bit. By week two the pitch had improved. We met mentors who had been there and were willing to guide us through the trials and tribulations. We were doing customer research and starting to turn our crappy little idea into something that just might work.
We had this amazing, awesome group of cohort companies, each with great entrepreneurs and talented individuals, helping us along the way. We were making progress, and we were doing it at a speed that my counterparts in “the real world” wouldn’t even be able to comprehend.
Don’t forget to mark your calendars and submit your idea by January 7. And spread the word!