We’ve been pretty blown away by the initial response to our Everyday Economy Virtual Accelerator that we announced two weeks ago.  Both the volume and the quality of submissions have far exceeded our expectations, and we are starting to schedule and conduct interviews this week.

One of the core reasons for creating this accelerator was to expand the aperture of the founders we have a chance to interact with.  One of the tendencies in fearful markets is to only back proven entrepreneurs in one’s own network, which has a particularly negative effect on founders who are under-represented in the startup-ecosystem. To this end, we took a quick look at out top-of-the-funnel metrics so far to determine how we are progressing with six days remaining before the application deadline.

Among the teams that have applied to the Everyday Economy Accelerator, 16% have a female CEO and 35% have diverse founding teams. This compares relatively favorably to the overall startup market, where only about 11% of companies have female CEOs and something like 20-30% have diverse founding teams.

That said, our aspiration is to do much better, and that starts with expanding the top of our funnel.  Although this mix is likely to change as many applicants will submit shortly before the deadline, we are asking that everyone continue to spread the word about our program, especially among founders with under-represented backgrounds.

We are going to quickly take some proactive steps to try to promote the program among audiences that may be outside our typical channels, and we would welcome any other suggestions of things we can do to bring in a more diverse set of applicants (please share suggestions in the comments below).  The deadline is end of day May 11th and you can read more about the program and how to apply here.

Also as a reminder, below are some of the themes and ideas we are pondering.  We are looking for all consumer and B2B companies within our broad thesis of the Everyday Economy but our individual partners are also thinking specifically about the topics/problems below:

David: Consumer paid subscription business models, conversational & next-gen marketing, healthy living & eating

Melody: Democratization of data analytics, next-gen commerce/commerce infrastructure, modern loneliness

Rob: Second-order effects of COVID on Health tech, “peace of mind” business models, senior and child care, sustainability

Lee: Future of transportation (people & goods), sustainable commerce

And as we like to say, we invest in a lot of other wacky stuff too, as long as it is pulling forward the future that we want to live in J

Thanks for reading, and we look forward to hearing from you!