that he can only speculate on some of the key factors:
—The founding team is crucial. The TechStars employees, he writes, “do not shy away from the fact that they are ALL about the team. Do you HAVE a team? Do you get along and have great rapport? Do you play nice with others? Can you execute, or have you executed?”
—Microsoft established the program—known officially in some quarters as the “Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure powered by TechStars”—to cultivate the ecosystem for Azure, the company’s cloud-computing platform. “Embarke’s been using Azure for a year and a half, and we love it,” Bsharah writes. “You don’t HAVE to be using it to get in, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt our odds.”
—“Finally,” he adds, “it probably didn’t hurt that at the time of [our] application we had just hired two developers, got our first customer, were working through a partnership deal, and were selected by SDVG [San Diego Venture Group] as a “Cool Company.”
When I asked Bsharah if he has any advice for other San Diego startups interested in the Microsoft Accelerator, he replied: “The application process is a great experience, it’s a well-oiled machine and they take it very seriously. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t have some fun with it. Be amazing, but be yourself (they’ll see right through it if you’re not)… Have an open mind, and be prepared to accept some truths you might not want to hear. We are 1,200 miles away from our families, and we’ve got 100 days to go. This is not easy!”
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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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