Awesome, Inc. - Yet Another Seed Accelerator?
October 4, 2008
In early September, I heard of Awesome, Inc. Details are light, both through the company web site and other sources, but it appears to be a new seed fund accelerator. According to the web site, applications will be accepted starting January 1, 2009, and the program will run in Lexington, KY. SitePoint, an Australian-based web development publishing company, has a blog post on Awesome Inc. They are advising caution until further details are provided - I’d have to agree at this point. Given the multiple existing programs which have been tried and shown to be successful to different degrees, I think Awesome Inc will have to provide a great deal of additional information for aspiring entrepreneurs to see their program as a credible opportunity that can really take their venture to the next level.
The SitePoint blog post also draws emphasis to the Details page and a particular section that I missed on my first pass through:
But what really makes Awesome Inc sound strange is a sentence on the Details page of the site explaining the program: “During the first week each participant will be oriented to their living space, office/work space, hosting services, administrative assistant, and reality TV crew and cameras.”
Looking for more credible seed fund accelerator programs? SitePoint has a comprehensive list, reproduced below, from their post 5 Ways to Fund Your Web Startup:
- Y Combinator in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the San Francisco Bay Area
- TechStars in Boulder, Colorado
- Seedcamp in London, UK
- YEurope in Vienna, Austria
- Summer@Highland in Lexington, Massachusetts
- LaunchBox in Washington, DC
- Founder’s Co-Op in Seattle, Washington
- DreamIt Ventures in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Bootup Labs in Vancouver, BC, Canada
- Bootphase in Atlanta, Georgia (though it seems still unlaunched)
- CIIE iAccelerator in Gujarat, India
- Awesome Inc in Lexington, Kentucky
- Startup@PARC in Palo Alto, California (more about intellectual support than cash funding)
