think that the traditional ones seem to be a bit more about a beauty show and glamour versus evidence. They need to be ‘lessons learned and evidence gained’ days, especially in healthcare.”
I met Dunn a few months ago, when I sat in on a TMCx accelerator seminar for the class of medical devices startups at the Texas Medical Center that graduated in November. He stressed to the founders that such programs are not one-off exercises—make it to demo day to pitch to investors, get money, success—as much as they are experiences to learn from. In fact, Dunn envisions what he calls a better demo day where companies walk through their assumptions, how those proved out, and what they did different based on lessons learned along the way.
“We need to focus on what a startup needs to learn before they invest more time and money and correlate to that level of learning an appropriate investment readiness level,” he says.
Melanie Jones, who spent two years helping to run the Surge cleantech accelerator in Houston, says adding discussion of lessons learned or failure points would be “a really neat way to add depth to the content that happens at the demo day.”
But she understands why accelerator programs shy away from doing so. “Accelerators are so worried about their rankings, so there is that hesitation,” says Jones, who now runs Marketing Interface, a consultancy in Houston. (She is also a mentor to the Rice University and UH startup programs.)
That attitude could change, though, says Yael Hochberg, a Rice University professor who is also the managing director of the Seed Accelerator Rankings Project, an independent research entity of academics who aim to objectively evaluate accelerator programs in the country. She says startup failure actually matters: “As long as you learn something from that failure, it’s totally ok.”
To acknowledge that idea in the project’s rankings, Hochberg says the survival rate of a program’s startups is now given less weight, in
