Accelerators
The intake, in numbers#
| Figure | What it is |
|---|---|
| 150–2,000 | Applications per cohort, from a regional program's team of two to a global intake's team of five |
| 2–3 min | The read a founder's six months of work gets under deadline pressure |
| #447 ≠ #1 | Late applications get a different read than early ones — recency and fatigue |
| 0 | Substantive feedback most rejected founders receive |
The five steps#
1 · Keep your intake. Founders keep applying through F6S, Typeform, YouNoodle or your own form; the batch is ingested — structured answers, decks, video links. Batch export (CSV plus files) works today; platform connectors are scoped during setup. Or use a branded application page instead. Nothing changes for founders.
2 · The full read, every application, every page. Form answers and decks are read in full with coverage logged, so you can verify what was read. Application #1 and #1,400 get the same rules on the same day quality.
3 · Independent reviewer roles score on your rubric. Independent AI reads — team, market, feasibility, traction — that cannot anchor on each other: each scores without seeing the others' numbers. Evidence comes before the score, and incomplete evidence moves scores down, never up. Where reads split by more than a band, the case escalates to your team as an open question instead of being averaged.
4 · Your committee decides. Your mentors, partners and screeners keep scoring and arguing exactly as they do — starting from evidence-linked reports instead of raw applications. Confirmations and overrides are logged; the shortlist is built from human decisions. Selection Day time goes to the borderline cases.
5 · Feedback and the record. Feedback is drafted from the evidence and approved by your team before anything is sent, so every rejected founder gets a real answer under your name. The program keeps a selection memo and full decision log — the audit trail LP-funded and publicly funded programs are asked for.
The retro-test#
Do not take a vendor's word for how it would perform on your cohort. Test it against decisions you already made.
| Day 0 | You share a batch from a closed intake — 20–50 applications from a previous cohort, NDA first if you prefer |
| 48 hours | Evidence-linked reports and a ranked board, on your own rubric |
| The call | A side-by-side against your committee's actual decisions: where the panel agreed, where it diverged, and why — with page references |
Your last cohort is ground truth you already own. The retro-test measures agreement and misses against it before you commit to anything. Larger batches are scoped as a managed pilot.
What a score unpacks into#
A worked example on Team readiness: score 7.8 — finding two founders shipped a comparable product at their previous company, quote "…led the payments team from prototype to 200k users…" · page 11, confidence high, and a drafted interview question: "Walk us through what you shipped there."
Every quote is verified against the source document. No quote, no finding. The next time a partner asks why you passed on someone, the answer has a page number.
Day 0 versus Selection Day#
You bring: your criteria and weights — and if the rubric currently lives in your committee's heads, the setup session turns how you already decide into a written rubric, which is yours to keep either way. Plus your existing intake form and this cohort's batch.
You hold on Selection Day: every application fully read with a coverage log; an evidence-linked report and interview questions per team; a ranked board with the borderline flagged; a shortlist built from your committee's scores; approved feedback for every founder; and a selection memo and decision log for the board.
Next steps#
- Criteria and weights — writing down a rubric that currently lives in people's heads.
- Score and shortlist — how the committee's decisions build the ranking.
- Security and privacy — the block your IT office reads first.