How To Choose The Right Incubator To Fuel Your Entrepreneurship Goals?
Mukund Mohan
CEO,
Jivity
Jivity
Mukund Mohan is the CEO of Jivity, an ecommerce company. Previously he had founded BuzzGain, and is currently the CEO of EOVL. Mohan has also served on the board of advisors for iConclude and the board of directors of Semantic Defense and Kinetic Brains.
A big trend I have noticed in the last few months is that almost every Venture Capital (VC) company in India is looking to either invest in or build an "incubator", which can help early stage entrepreneurs. There are already several of them in India, including Morpheus, The Startup Center, CIIE at Ahmedabad and others. I would imagine that by December of 2012, we will have at least 10 very well funded incubators all looking to guide, mentor and help young entrepreneurs through their initial stages. This will go a long way to help the startup ecosystem in India.
The flip side to this is the amount of choice that startup entrepreneurs will now have. I can easily see many entrepreneurs spending days and months trying to figure out which incubator is the best for them. The answer to the "right one depends on multiple criteria including your background, what space you wish to build a company in, how big do you wish to build your company into and other related factors. Outside of these criteria, there are others that are dependent on the incubator itself.
Most Indian incubators offer a combination of some cash and mentorship in exchange for 8-12 percent of your company. Some incubators require you go to their office location and spend three to six months with them, yet others will prefer you stay at your own office / location. Some do offer design talent, technical resources, and others offer a bevy of informal advisors.
So how does an entrepreneur evaluate incubators? I decided to put together a simple (not comprehensive, initial cut) spreadsheet of the list of things to consider before you decide on your incubator. I would imagine an entrepreneur would use this sheet to write down things that are important to them in an incubator by and then rank their choices by their evaluation of each incubator.
While I personally believe the top 3 criteria are (a) ability for the incubator to help your company gain momentum (customers, hiring, resources, etc), (b) ability for the incubator to help you raise money and (c) quality of the network the incubator possesses which provides you access to other entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and resources that you might need to scale.
A big trend I have noticed in the last few months is that almost every Venture Capital (VC) company in India is looking to either invest in or build an "incubator", which can help early stage entrepreneurs. There are already several of them in India, including Morpheus, The Startup Center, CIIE at Ahmedabad and others. I would imagine that by December of 2012, we will have at least 10 very well funded incubators all looking to guide, mentor and help young entrepreneurs through their initial stages. This will go a long way to help the startup ecosystem in India.
The flip side to this is the amount of choice that startup entrepreneurs will now have. I can easily see many entrepreneurs spending days and months trying to figure out which incubator is the best for them. The answer to the "right one depends on multiple criteria including your background, what space you wish to build a company in, how big do you wish to build your company into and other related factors. Outside of these criteria, there are others that are dependent on the incubator itself.
Most Indian incubators offer a combination of some cash and mentorship in exchange for 8-12 percent of your company. Some incubators require you go to their office location and spend three to six months with them, yet others will prefer you stay at your own office / location. Some do offer design talent, technical resources, and others offer a bevy of informal advisors.
So how does an entrepreneur evaluate incubators? I decided to put together a simple (not comprehensive, initial cut) spreadsheet of the list of things to consider before you decide on your incubator. I would imagine an entrepreneur would use this sheet to write down things that are important to them in an incubator by and then rank their choices by their evaluation of each incubator.
While I personally believe the top 3 criteria are (a) ability for the incubator to help your company gain momentum (customers, hiring, resources, etc), (b) ability for the incubator to help you raise money and (c) quality of the network the incubator possesses which provides you access to other entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and resources that you might need to scale.
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