I always get concerned when I hear of a large corporate wanting to get involved in the startup community. There’s a bunch of reasons, but I always come back to the question of why? What do they want in return? What’s in it for them? Paranoid? Yeah, maybe, but I got the scars, man, I could tell you stories…
Therefore, I’m really genuinely happy to report on the RAC Seedspark event, which did so many things right (getting the right people involved, having the right internal politics, allowing the entrants to do their own thing without trying to make them conform to an agenda, and handing over simple cash at the end). This is how a corporate runs an accelerator and does it right. Congratulations to everyone involved, but especially Nathan for getting the ball rolling in the first place.
Over 200 people registered for the accelerator, there were 50 pitches, 44 submissions and it came down to 9 finalists, which isn’t bad for a mining town on the edge of the desert. The winners walk away with decent, useful lumps of actual cash, as well as a Spacecubed scholarship (always useful!) and there are some other prizes for participants who didn’t make the big two places.
1st Prize – Today We Learned
The major prize winner of $25,000 was Jason O’Neil from the Today We Learned team.
Today We Learned is an awesome tool to solve the problem of “what did you do at school today little Johnny?” “nuffing, just boring stuff”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone grin so hard as Jason after he’d been told he’d won. His face must have been aching for the last week. Good job, now go make it happen 🙂
2nd Prize – Circadyn
The 2nd prize winner was Felicity Millman with Circadyn, which has been provided with $15,000 to assist in further development of their idea, which involves using collected data to assess sleep patterns and manage fatigue.
Felicity’s story is pretty amazing – she entered FI with a slightly different idea, pivoted that idea after feedback from the FI team and graduated FI, dressed it up slightly differently for this competition, and walked away with $15K. I look forward to reporting on her IPO sometime in 2015! You can sign up for her mailing list here
3rd Prize – FreeWheeler
Elvira Strombach(FreeWheeler) was awarded the third prize of $2,500 – enough to get a basic MVP up, so not bad. Their site is here and their idea is to encourage people to ride their bikes to work instead of driving. A slightly odd thing for the Royal Automotive Club to help build, but then that shows the spirit in which this was done: top marks for integrity RAC chaps.
This is the actual presentation from the RAC CEO, please excuse the sound:
