Prepare 4 VC Accelerator and Demo Day

Welcome everyone. This is our first Prepare for VC Accelerator Demo Day. Excited to have all you guys join us. And yeah, excited to share all of our companies' hard work that they've been doing over the last 8 weeks of our program and give you a little more insight into What we're doing at Prepare for VC and how you can all get involved. So just if this is your first time on Airmeet, we do have a chat box on the right as well as a questions box. Anytime you want to submit some— or you have a question or want to submit something there, yeah, feel free to do that and, you know, we can answer as quickly as possible. You can also raise your hand and we'll directly message you as well. And yeah, so I'm going to go through quickly a little bit about the Demo Day today. So I'll give you an introduction to prepare for— basically to the event here, and then each of the steps we're going to walk through. So first we're going to start with an introduction in this section to prepare for VC. I'll keep it short, about 10 minutes or so. Then we're going to have— so the cool thing about Airmeet here, in addition to the presentations, you know, the presentation now and then the ones you'll be seeing from all of our startups, is in between each session there's a networking area. So you'll see like After we close out each session, you'll see an area with tables. You just click on a seat and join, and up to— I think it's either 6 or 7 people can join in a small video chat within the platform. So you get a chance to meet some of the other attendees and startups. So yeah, there'll be some short sessions. I think this one will go through, you know, wrap up the introduction. And, you know, the next 10 minutes and give about 5 minutes or so for networking before we kick off the first session. Then we'll have a little bit longer break before the second session. We'll start at 12 for the last group of— The last group of startups presenting. And then, you know, we're going to wrap up with a little bit more networking and also want to make sure everybody has a chance to follow up with each of the companies we connect with, or yeah, each of the companies you're excited about that you want to connect with further. So what is Prepare for VC? We started in 2016, and, you know, it started more as fundraising documents as a service. That's still a big part of our business, creating pitch decks, financial financial projections, other fundraising materials, and really helping startups figure out how to present to investors and what you need to get, to get in front of an investor to get them excited about your business. So my background is in the venture capital space, working with both angel groups and early-stage venture firms. And a lot of our team either has expertise in the venture side or as entrepreneurs going through the fundraising process themselves. So that's still a major component. We also have general— more generalized startup and venture capital advisory, you know, helping with more of your launch plan strategy, other implementation processes along the way. And then this is our first cohort of more of an accelerator, our equity-free accelerator program. And yeah, it is a paid program. Our model is basically we want to have you keep the equity in your business, get all the expertise our advisory team has to offer, and instead of, you know, more of the consulting services where we're going out leveraging Leveraging our experience and tools to create materials for you. We're giving— we're more teaching you each week a new step to build out or, you know, learn, learn from us and build out the materials yourselves and have that knowledge base going forward as a startup leader for your company. So I'll go into a little bit more of some of the topics we'd We cover, but basically we have 2 halves of the program, 8 weeks, 16 weeks total. And yeah, so we're in week 8 right now, and all of our startups have done an amazing job so far. So excited for them to be able to share their stories with all of you here today. And the last part I want to highlight is that, you know, we don't just want to build this as a consulting company. We really want it to be a startup community and ecosystem. We have a Slack group that all of you are free to join. We have, you know, private channels with our cohort and consulting clients and our team, but we have a few open channels just for the general startup community, and we share some resources, events. I can send the link to all of you guys after the call here as well. And yeah, definitely join, check it out, you know, connect with some of our members there. And then, yeah, you know, any of the— I'll go into a little bit more of this as well, but any of the companies you want to get a little bit more involved with, or, you know, something that really excites you here today, would love to have you as part of our ongoing community, you know, for this cohort and beyond. So it's a little bit of our team. I have 2 slides here. Basically, you know, as you'll see, a pretty mixed background in terms of angel and venture side, some more creative positions, and then startup and corporate roles that we can all apply to the companies we're working with. We also have partners that come on and join in from other consulting or social media partners, more, more alternative financing partners, and other areas where we can tap into a larger network and bring people on to help the startups we work with even further. So we call this first phase of the program, this first 8 weeks, our Prepare for Launch program. You know, a lot of these companies have already, already have a product on the market, but it's just basically more of the first phase to really focus on the internal aspects of your business, whereas the second 8 weeks of our program are more focused on the fundraising. aspects, you know, a little bit more in-depth into the financial analysis and different types of investors to go after. But basically, these are some of the topics we've covered so far: going through elevator pitches, creating your customer persona, how to identify the customers and learn from their experiences, learning from competition, market sizing, creating a business model and pricing strategy. Crafting your presentation, and then here today, you know, we prepared everybody for our demo day where they get the chance to go through their full presentation and share their stories with you. And each week we break it down. Every Sunday we send out a syllabus to our cohort. It'll have resources and articles they can review on the particular topic that we're focusing on. We have an interactive webinar where we do a presentation like this, keep it interactive, so we'll actually go through and focus on each of the companies in our cohort and how it can apply to their business and, you know, what tools they can use, use to create the materials that we're focusing on that week. We have an ongoing Slack discussion, send them an assignment, So it could be creating a business model or creating your ideal customer persona, and then we go back and forth on one-on-one chats or, you know, a group discussion as needed until they have their final versions at the end of the week. So what do we want from you guys? We want, again, you to be part of our community. We're offering— we want to offer as many resources. If there's an area you can come in and help with, or, you know, with any of the companies here, or just the startup community in general, let us know. Early access to innovation— a lot of these companies are looking for corporate partners, customers, investors, other areas you can get involved and help out with. Making an impact— so, you know, a thing we really noticed is all of these founders have some sort of mission of helping out In an area that they're really passionate about. If you share that same passion, you know, love to build a connection there. Getting inspired if you're working on a venture of your own, you know, learn from, learn from the community here, what they're doing, and see what you can apply to your own ventures. And then you can also apply for our next cohort. And I'll share this link through AppSuccess at the end as well. So yeah, we'll keep applications open for about the next month or so, and then as soon as the last— as this cohort wraps up, we'll be launching our next program from there. So yeah, that's a quick introduction. Just want everybody here to enjoy the demo day. We are gonna take, yeah, we'll have a few minutes here just to, if you wanna sit down at one of the tables and get to know some of the other audience members, and then we'll get started pretty short, in about 5 minutes with our first session on, with the first 2 presentations. So yeah, thanks everyone for joining.