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Angel investor Bill Warner is launching a three-month incubator for startups, located inside the Cambridge Innovation Center. Unlike existing incubators, such as Techstars and Y-Combinator, Warner’s project, called the Anything Goes Accelerator Lab, will not take equity in the startups it admits, and it will not evaluate candidates based on business plans, he said.
Warner said starting this fall, the program’s 80-or-so so slots will be filled by founder teams that show potential. Each will pay $350 a month for three months to get office space in the CIC’s coworking environment, access to tools developed by Warner and colleagues, and a network of informal mentors.
Warner and collaborator Nick Tommarello, a co-founder at Cambridge startup Sparkcloud, in which Warner is an investor, plan to base the three-month program on agile development concepts typically used in the software industry. Tommarello will work part-time on the project, as he remains on the founding team at Sparkcloud.
Warner talked with Mass High Tech’s Galen Moore about his ideas for the Anything Goes Startup Accelerator.
MHT: What’s the need this project will fill?
Bill Warner: The gap is that all the accelerators to date are designed only for one kind of company, which is pretty much an Internet-enabled company. And further, it’s an Internet-enabled company that can either get VC or angel investing and have an exit in a short period of time. And that’s great. That’s fine. But the problem is that at a very early stage, you don’t know you’re going to be creating things where that’s a possibility.
The whole idea of Anything Goes is really that it is anything goes. We’re not going to say what the form of the company coming out is, or let that determine whether you’re going to get in. Instead of investing in your company and getting stock, it’s really meant to be a very low-cost way to get your startup off the ground.
MHT: Without taking equity, will it be self-sustaining?
BW: It’s meant to be very low-cost. The idea of this is actually to build something that is much more sort of crowdsourced, people helping each other. It’s not meant to require as much resource to run it. But on the other hand, I believe it will have a big impact.
We are building on top of CIC. They’re playing a very important role. They gave us this space, and people pay $350. Two hundred and fifty dollars goes to them, so really our program is $100 a month.
MHT: How will the program benefit founders?
BW: The main thing they’re going to get is the tools I’m developing, which is, how to build your startup from the heart. It’s going to be based on creating your story and your milestones. It’s sort of a storyboard-based model of you setting out what you want to do, and it’s to create a lot of pressure, for one thing, but sort of push, to make amazing things happen in a short period of time, and to be very open with the other people in the program. It’s meant to be very much creating a network with the people in the program. My belief is you can mix all these companies together in a useful way.
MHT: How will you decide who gets in?
BW: At the concept stage, in some ways, all startups look the same. They’re all about figuring out what is the human need, how am I going to fulfill the need? Anything Goes is more about developing entrepreneurs than developing companies. It’s going to be based on what is their potential, and what is the mix of people. Somebody that we might take in one semester, the next semeseter we might not take that same person because we have five people like them.
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