E1070: The Power of Accelerators E7 Ravi Belani, Managing Director of Alchemist Accelerator on why the best entrepreneurs love the process, risk-taking, sourcing & investing in Justin.tv at DFJ & more

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2020

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

0:20 Jason intros Alchemist's Ravi Belani
3:41 Why is Alchemist named after Paulo Coelho book? What is the biggest benefit of Accelerators?
5:47 Ravi's background at DFJ, sourcing the Justin.tv investment
15:02 Why Ravi left DFJ to start Alchemist
21:52 How many companies have gone through Alchemist and what is their standard deal?
28:21 Why accelerators take more risk than VC firms
35:07 The best entrepreneurs love the process
38:35 How are Alchemist's programs structured? Did they have trouble transitioning to remote?
44:38 Have virtual meetings been resulting in checks from investors? Dealing with investing in competitive companies
49:59 What is Alchemist's diligence process like?
55:01 What does venture capital funding look like in the medium-term

Transcript

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0:00.0	This Week in Start-Up's The Power of Accelerator series is brought to you by
0:06.0	LinkedIn Jobs a business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters
0:12.2	to post a health care or a central service job for free
0:15.9	visit LinkedIn.com slash power.
0:20.0	Hey everybody welcome back to this week in startups I'm your host Jason Caliccanis you can follow me on Twitter I'm at
0:24.4	Jason or Instagram at jason or tumbler jason dot tumbler com that's just me showing
0:28.8	off and I have the first name on a lot of these services I don't have the first name on a lot of these services. I don't have the first name on
0:34.4	clubhouse though unfortunately. We have been cooking with oil with our power of
0:40.5	accelerators series and accelerators and incubators
0:44.5	are a very important function in the ecosystem.
0:47.7	If you're a new founder and you're starting
0:50.3	your first company, you probably are wondering, why would I go to an accelerator?
0:53.8	Why would I go to an incubator?
0:55.4	Well, they really serve a small number of, there's a small number of reasons of why people go to them.
1:02.8	Number one, it's to raise money.
1:05.0	Both from the accelerator itself, which usually accelerators give you 25K to 150K.
1:10.8	Second, they introduce it a lot of investors, so that might help. They also give advice. But what they really do at the end of the day, according to venture capitalists and downstream investors, is they act as a sorting function and an anointing function.
1:25.5	The people who run an accelerator typically get 50 applications or 100 applications for every
1:31.0	person they accept.
1:32.6	So when we accept seven people to the launch accelerator,
1:35.0	you can be sure we're going to have, you know,
1:37.0	over 700 people apply.
	...

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