At work we’ve been sitting on some excellent news since before Christmas: Bethnal Green Ventures, our for-profit accelerator programme, is going to be back in 2013, bigger and better than ever.
What we’ll be doing, along with our partners the Cabinet Office, Nesta and Nominet Trust, is taking super early stage teams and giving them office space and a bit of investment, along with an excellent list of mentors, partners, and speakers, to help them build software that addresses things that really matter – social, environmental, education, and healthcare.
We’ve learned a lot – and we’ll continue to learn – from the twelve teams that we’ve supported so far. Our basic premise is the same: We’ll start with a big call for ideas, choose the best 8-10 teams that apply, invest around £15,000 in each venture and run a three month programme with them, getting the teams to work together as a cohort, learning from each other and our mentors. They’ll also get free office space (at either Nesta or Google Campus) with a Demo Day at the end. We’ll need to get a bigger venue this year as we were really over capacity.
We’ve got some other ideas for how to make the programme better over time, but it all comes down to teams working, being clever, and being hungry for change.
We’re going to talk about what we’re doing and the insights on the BGV blog, here, and on Lily and Paul’s personal blogs as well.
Applications for BGV summer 2012 will open on the 6th of March – but if you want to have a chat about your idea or just about the programme, get in touch with us at hello@bethnalgreenventures.com – we’re always up for a coffee.
(And no, we’re no longer in Bethnal Green. That joke will stay funny forever. And the pubs there are rather good)