Last night was the launch of the 2016 cohort for the LBS incubator, again sponsored by Deloitte. The ten companies are chosen from the school’s alumni and covered quite a cross-section of financial, social enterprise and food areas. Interestingly, many are “real” rather than tech businesses, one of which, a short-term lettings agency called Pass the Keys, already has nine employees and not an app in sight!
Jane Khedair and the bundle of energy that is Jeff Skinner have built an incubator with much higher success rate than most having a low failure rate and Spyn from the class of 2014 having already exited in a trade sale. We were also encouraged to use Hiver from the 2015 cohort which is a geo-location based networking app, very useful for collecting names at events. Go and have a look at www.hivertech.com.
My takeaways, reminders really, included working as a team (three founders have a much higher likelihood of success) and to be very, very focused. Remember to separate the product development/market matching from the growth phase. Of course, every new venture is one of not only vision but also hard work and perseverance.
For the sake of completeness and to give the founders (or speaker when there were other co-founders) a bit of a puff here are their websites:
Alex Ryvkin
www.assetbar.co.uk
Tom Haywood
www.autorose.co.uk
Alexander Lyakhotskly
www.PasstheKeys.co.uk
Ryan Kruger
www.poundwise.co
Stefan Humphries
www.reddendi.com
Kevin Meehan
www.rocketsmoothies.com
Sreejita Saha
www.savewallets.com
Richard Watson
Sonic Mixers for Spirits
Tahreem Arshad
www.sosie-app.com
Zipporah Gatiti
www.kenyancoffee.ie
A very good evening was had by all with lots of networking, support and introductions being made and, as Jeff said, God’s speed to all the companies!
