ForgeUp Ventures Takes Aim at the Accelerator Model by Ditching One-Size-Fits-All Curriculum
SOUTH FLORIDA, June 16 (Hypepotamus) – Jeff Knight sees a gap in the accelerator model that dominates the startup space.
Venture studios can cook up an idea and then recruit a seasoned entrepreneur to run the company. Or accelerators can take equity in a founder and run them through their specified curriculum. But neither of those options fully supports founders in “the messy middle”: The post-validation stage where they have a product, early traction, and some capital, but still need hands-on help turning that momentum into repeatable growth.
“With studios focused on validation and accelerators on funding, that leaves a whole lot of empty space,” Knight told Hypepotamus.
So Knight, who is based in Florida, and his team have come up with a new model with ForgeUp Ventures.
Tech Square Ventures is an Atlanta-based firm investing in enterprise (B2B) and marketplace technology companies.
About The ForgeUp Program
The Forgeup program is designed for “the founders who have validated, built something, and raised some funding behind it but now they are left to navigate the open seas alone to make it to Series A,” said Knight.
The remote program is expert-led, instead of curriculum-based, meaning it can be customized to each founders’ journey. Each cohort company works with five domain experts (in sales, marketing, product, and two flavors of legal) who join their teams.
Knight has 21 scouts across the US looking for potential cohort companies, and they screen upwards of 100 companies a month.
Ultimately, each cohort is just 3-4 companies each, helping to ensure its personalized approach.
“Given how inherently different every company is, we designed a more customized approach that starts with a deep audit on all the major topics in our program by each of the five experts and then a customized plan or strategy on how to spur faster growth and optimize,” Knight added.
In its first year, ForgeUp has worked with companies around the country, including ones led by Southeast-based founders like TernWheel and CloudPlzr.
One Year In
“This marks our 1 year anniversary so its too early to expect to see exits but we have seen lots of granular signs of growth!” Knight added. “We saw one company grow new revenue by $500K in 30 days during our cohort! There are many companies with great revenue growth through our program. We also saw a company’s demo conversion rate go from ~15% to over 80% through the work of our experts and dedication of founders.”
One thing the ForgeUp has learned in the first year?
“Founders “focused on fundraising” are not a good fit for our program because they can’t be singularly focused on growth. That is our lodestar,” Knight said.
He added a “free piece of advice” for other founders. “Focusing on fundraising” is bad signalling. It means you’re either not ready to raise because of lacking traction or you’re talking to the wrong investors (industry, segment, geography, etc). In any event, we are eyes off fundraising for 3 months of our program and all hands on deck for one thing: execution velocity.”
Knight has assembled a team including Chief Value Officer Jake Shaefer (previous exit to GrubHub), product expert lead JC Grubb, growth and marketing advisor Nic Figari, fractional CFO Cortland Brigham, and GTM/sales expert Jonah Lewis. Law firm Foley Hoag, who sponsors the program, contributes two experts per cohort.
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