The Neutrino Donut will be conducting a training seminar on grant programs, fund raising, and planning for the Austin Technology Incubator SEAL program. This program will be delivered online on 9 July 2020.
SEAL’s core value is vetting emerging university startups from the market’s perspective, not the entrepreneur’s nor university ecosystem’s perspective. A by-product is to shift founders’ mindsets to be market centric instead of technology or product centric.
To accomplish this, SEAL coalesces a group of hand-picked, experienced startup mentors to assist each startup in identifying the next potential Go / No-Go Decision. SEAL then builds a set of industry-specific mentors to work with each team over the course of two months to do the work to rigorously answer the analyses underlying the Go / No-Go Decision. Additionally, SEAL brings in experienced entrepreneurs and technical experts to talk about their real-world experience in confronting some of the most common
Go / No-Go Decisions. This is particularly useful as startups confront an on-going sequence of these types of decisions, so SEAL primes its participants to have a baseline of knowledge as many of these common decisions will emerge in each of their journeys.
Most startups participating in SEAL have already removed significant scientific or technical risk through lab prototypes, pilot deployments, and occasionally, early sales. Given that, most Go / No-Go Decisions center on “scalability” questions around the underlying technology, go-to-market, team, funding requirements, firm economics, and other core business model components.
In prior years, SEAL has also facilitated ecosystem engagement opportunities to jumpstart the process of university-based entrepreneurs building out their ecosystem network. For many student founders, this represents their first “in-the-wild” professional networking experience. Austin’s startup ecosystem is overflowing with organizations, activities and people that support entrepreneurs and startups, so quickly learning how to navigate and engage with it is critical to the long term prospects for each
startup.
