The Heritage Group Accelerator
Program at a Glance
The overall goal of The Heritage Group Accelerator is to help you scale your business. Once you arrive at The Center, we hit the ground running to ensure your startup is in better shape than when you arrived.
For most startups, better shape translates into three things: to have a better product, a pilot for first customer (or prospects) and to have more options for raising money.
Startups at all stages benefit from the intensity of our program. That’s probably the best word to describe the atmosphere. For 3 months, it’s all startup, all the time. Everyone around you—us, the other founders in your cohort, the alumni, the speakers, the investors—wants to help your startup succeed. In that atmosphere it’s hard not to be highly motivated. And that kind of extraordinary motivation is what one needs to do something as difficult as starting a startup.
Overview
Much of what takes place at The Heritage Group Accelerator happens during office hours. Mentors and Friends of the Program (FoPs) make themselves available for 1:1 meetings, we host workshops, panel discussions and networking events designed to help our founders create opportunities.
Cohort Team Building
Within the first few weeks of the program we host a 2-day, off-site retreat. The retreat gives founders the opportunity to get to know each other and the THG Accelerator team.
Customer Discovery + Pilots
The Heritage Group Accelerator works with each of our startups to find stage-appropriate opportunities. Sometimes that work includes customer discovery contacts or site visits and sometimes those efforts result in pilots. It all depends on the readiness level of the technology and the stage of the business.
Weekly Meetups
Throughout the program, we enjoy networking events. Some of these events are hosted by partner organizations but all of them are designed to expand our founder’s networks in relevant and meaningful ways.
Founder’s Stories
Once a week we invite a hardtech startup founder to speak to the cohort. Most speakers are successful THG Accelerator alumni who often come back to tell the inside story of what happened in the early days of their startups. Talks are strictly off the record to encourage candor, because the inside story of most startups is more colorful than the one presented later to the public.
Investor’s Stories
We find that one of the best ways to demystify the fundraising process is to talk to investors. That’s why we host several different kinds of events for our founders. From workshops on “How to Read a Term Sheet” to panel discussions to 1:1 meetings with our Investors-in-Residence, The Heritage Group Accelerator enables founders to get familiar with the goals and needs of HardTech investors.
Beyond the Program
The Heritage Group Accelerator doesn’t stop after the 3 month program ends. Here are some of the resources available to our alumni as their companies grow.
ADVICE - Ongoing office hours
Office hours don’t stop after program. We have office hours year round, and startups from all previous cycles can book time whenever they want.
NETWORK - Alumni Network
The Heritage Group Accelerator is a growing community in the hardtech world. It’s powerful not just because of the ever-expanding network, but also because its members have a strong commitment to helping one another. A culture of helpfulness has been an important part of The Heritage Group since the beginning, and this culture has extended to our Accelerator founders. It has been an ongoing value to our founder to know that if they ever come across a challenge they need help with, they have 5,000+ industry experts they can call on.
COMMUNITY - Cohort Connection
Founders have access to WhatsApp groups to stay in touch with their cohort and a larger THG community.
Hardtech Showcase
On the final day of programming, we host The Heritage Group Accelerator’s HardTech Showcase. This is a 250+ person audience of specially selected investors, industry professionals and press.
In the weeks and months following HardTech Showcase we keep in close touch with the startups as they negotiate the fundraising maze, and help them decipher the real messages in investors’ sometimes deliberately ambiguous responses. Often we talk to the investors ourselves, to find out what they’re really thinking about a particular startup.
