Starting a company in Austin? Join the club. As one of the most active startup communities in the entire US, Austin has entrepreneurs (or 150 people per day) coming to the city every day to try and make their entrepreneurial dreams come true.
Luckily, these entrepreneurs have plenty of accelerators in Austin to help them “accelerate” their companies from small, one man and woman shops to profitable enterprises helping to spur the Austin economic engine. Whether your startup is looking for its seed round, or has been through two different accelerators and is looking for that extra push, Austin offers an accelerator for everyone.
Capital Factory
The largest accelerator of the bunch, plenty of startups you see all over Austin have gone through the Capital Factory accelerator program. While most accelerators are three months long, SchooLinks founder Katie Fang spent eight months in the program and found that “once you’re in the program, you’re in it for life.”
For Fang, she wasn’t sure if three months was long enough for an accelerator when she relocated her company from Los Angeles. She also was attracted to the deal terms at Capital Factory, where the accelerator only owned two percent of her company, compared to 6% for other accelerators. She went through plenty of unstructured mentor hours during her time in the accelerator as she built her product.
The real speciality about the Capital Factory accelerator, according to many entrepreneurs, is the network. Sam Ulu, the founder of Kandid.ly said that Capital Factory helped to “mold him and connect him to the tech ecosystem in Austin.” He joined Capital Factory because in his mind it was more “grassroots, and helped me figure out my business model and other things I should be focusing on.” He also wanted to raise $250,000 to $1 million.
Joe Troyen, founder of PenPal Schools, got a lot out of his Capital Factory accelerator experience; he managed to find both his cofounders and multiple investors.
Many of the entrepreneurs interviewed said that Capital Factory was perfect for the early stages of their company. Bryan Thomas of PopUpPlay went through Capital Factory in 2015, taking advantage of meeting with mentors and partners while also working on their product, which they actually launched at Capital Factory.
Some of the more successful companies that came out of the Capital Factory Accelerator include Sparefoot, uShip and Aceable, among others.
Techstars
If you get ahold of a few startup founders in Austin, you’ll find that some of them participated in the Capital Factory accelerator, some did Techstars, and some were in both of them, though not at the same time.
For Ulu, he harbored dreams to raise a larger round through Techstars than he did at Capital Factory. TechStars gave him that “kick in the butt” he needed and Ulu “lived, breathed, and ate Techstars” for three intensive months, getting a master’s in startup education through classes geared toward driving sales, creating products and streamlining operations. He ended up finding a key investor who understood the nuance of his product in the marketplace, and that investor ended up being the key businessperson on the Kandid.ly team.
While some accelerators want the entire company to participate, Techstars allows for a “divide and…