We don’t have an industry focus, but what we do, what we have identified as our focus for our fall cohort is companies that are coming out of academic institutions, medical, or R&D institutions, or spinning off of privately held companies to be able to support, provide them the resources that they need as spin out companies, and then in the spring we will run a cohort based on female-founded companies to help ameliorate some of the well-known concerns that exist in terms of supporting and helping female-founded companies access capital. We are focusing this year on two different types of businesses generally speaking. So what types of businesses work well with you? So we look at the other programs that are running which we would say are earlier in the funnel in terms of developing companies, but the other thing that we looked to do is partner with institutions and academic entities to say, what’s out there where you’ve worked with people and they understand who their customers are, what their customers’ needs are, and they’ve got a team in place that could execute if they had the right business model and the support of mentors. We scour every Top Gun graduate that comes out each year from across the state. We ask MTI who’s come to them, an MTI is the Main Technology Institute, who’s come to them for funding that they see that might be appropriate. One of the things that we try and do is be very, very active in the statewide ecosystem for entrepreneurship, and so we leverage our partners a lot. So there’s a couple of ways that they know. I know a lot of companies must feel like they’re ready for that first run of investment, but how do they know and then how do you connect with them? Rich: So how does a business know that they’re ready for you? You talked about the fact that they’re just about to ramp-up. We’ve had eight graduates so far and anticipate seeing another 10 to 12 companies this year participate in Scratchpad. We ran one in 2015, we’ve run one then again in 2016, running into 2018, and are working our way towards running two annual cohorts for the next, for the foreseeable future. Jason Harkins: Sure, so Scratchpad was started in 2015, actually as a sabbatical project of mine, which was the least stressful sabbatical you could possibly participate in. Yury: And how old is Scratchpad? How many classes or cohorts, or companies that successfully graduated?
As a co-managing director, I’m responsible for pulling together the program, recruiting companies, raising funds and generally supporting our startups and our mentors, and making sure that the companies that participate get as much value as humanly possible out of the time that they’re a part of Scratchpad. So these are companies that are going to tend to be immediately preceding an investment round, which we would call a seed round, and they have a product, they have some done customer discovery, and they’re basically looking to build on the early traction they have as they move forward. So Scratchpad Accelerator is a seed accelerator which looks to work with companies, that as Rich just said, are scalable and investment-oriented at the latest stages before they start to scale into their growth. Yury: Jason, the first question, can you tell us more about Scratchpad Accelerator and what your role is there? He has a teaching and research interests related to the intersection of strategy and entrepreneurship. He’s also an active contributor to and consultant for entrepreneurial companies throughout Maine. He loves working with startups, with a focus on developing the business side of new ventures. He is on the advisory board of a number of scalable businesses in Maine and is on the board of UpStart Maine, which is building a community that fuels entrepreneurship in the Bangor region. He is an associate professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Maine, and also co-owner of CoVort, Bangor’s coworking space. Rich: Our guest today is the co-managing director of Scratchpad Accelerator, a seed accelerator running multiple programs each year for scalable investment-oriented companies. In this episode, we talk to Jason Harkins about Scratchpad Accelerator’s role in helping Maine business scale up, and quickly! If so, then Scratchpad Accelerator may be for you! Looking to grow your Maine-based business? Are you scalable and looking for investment? Ready for your seed round?
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