When I was snooping around some nascent incubators in the city I stumbled upon one by women for women. They don’t put any money into your startup, instead, they join your staff and share their experience with you. The incubator has the clever name of The Big Push.
I spoke with Sharon Zohar, the founding partner last week.
They have a strong value proposition. Most incubators promise you mentoring, but The Big Push basically gives you a seasoned expert in a business lane (finance, marketing, operations, public relations, sales, partnership development, legal, HR). I can’t tell you how much I could have done with an expert salesperson who could help a junior team ramp lead generation and filtering prospects. Instead, we were hiring endlessly and always got someone willing to learn because we couldn’t afford the high-salary and commission of a veteran sales rep. Then the endless hours training. Clearly, there is something here.
The one weakness in this model is that the founding team bringing the startup to The Big Push, needs to truly accept mentoring and giving up part of their big idea to seasoned co-founders. Just seeing the number of obstinant male-led teams who wanted to do it their way, my guess is they would have no one knocking on their door. But, that obstinacy might be more present in males. All of the women founders and co-founders I have worked with were willing to learn and were eager to work with partners. Now that I think of it The Big Push looks even stronger when you realize it’s women for women. I didn’t get a sense that men will be excluded as the company develops, but instead, that this was a very positive and broad action to help women become strong founders.
The program runs 4-6 months. They currently have 2 startups and want to have that up to 10 by the end of the year. Zohar said, “we have 10 senior execs within every lane.” Their 10 experts might be tasked if they grow to 10 companies, but she added: “there are plans to grow their management bench to 50”.
They are also looking for Angels and VCs who understand the value they offer (from their service-for-equity model) to help build out their follow-on abilities with a Series A.
If you’d like to meet with some of Zohar’s team or see what The Big Push is all about, they have an event at Uberflip on Dufferin on the 31st of May – Hiring Practices to Increase Diversity and Inclusion.
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I think the model is sound, the niche is receptive, and there should be a considerable interest from the follow-on environment when the start-ups develop.
Sharon Zohar was interviewed by Andrew Opala.