By Lindsay Siegel, Head of Impact at Company Ventures

“VCs who say ‘How can I be helpful?’ should take notes from the Boost program,” said Namu Park from The Sloth, a founder in the inaugural cohort of the Boost Founder Fellowship at Company Ventures.

June marked the end of Boost’s first cohort. Boost was part of the NYCEDC Founder Fellowship program, which supported 100 startups across the city. Our 4-month pre-accelerator program worked with founders from historically underserved communities who are leading venture-scalable startups and raising pre-seed or seed rounds of funding.

Our goal with Boost has been to help address the funding gap by supporting our founders holistically, both head and heart. Boost focused on the technical needs of first time founders, and the community support for navigating the personal challenges of the startup journey. Boost Founder Fellowship has provided an opportunity for our fund to partner with city government to help build a more equitable and inclusive tech ecosystem.

Programs, events and engagement

At the start of the fellowship, each company received an individual work plan highlighting specific resources available to them to help them achieve their goals during the program. We hosted 23 workshops led by professionals in our network and community, ranging from topics like running a tight fundraising campaign, to GTM workshops and strategies, to building a compelling investor deck, featuring partners including Gunderson Dettmer, Catalog, Diversity Marketing Coalition, Two Sigma Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and others. These workshops were accompanied by project sprints and expert office hours.

We held 15 community events for our founders, including four community dinners, six coworking days at Company Ventures' offices, a happy hour with our GCT founders and Gunderson Dettmer, a headshot photo shoot day, and finally, Demo Day on June 6, when our founders presented their businesses to the public, including dozens of investors.

Additionally, in an effort to engage with other investors on how we can work to better support historically marginalized founders, we hosted an investor breakfast: Investing in Founder Diversity. I co-hosted a discussion facilitated by Candice Morgan from Google Ventures to help NYC investors share best practices on the topic. The group of 22 investors, LPs and ecosystem builders who attended shared salient points, including:

  • The importance of setting up founders for future raises
  • Opening up the founder funnel, starting with the selection process
  • Being transparent about criteria for funding founders—and honest about the subjectivity of “conviction”
  • Sharing performance data for diverse teams
  • Coordinating among pre-seed and seed funders to surface data upstream
  • Creating greater transparency and alignment with LPs

The impact of Boost

Since the start of the program, Boost founders have built momentum behind their companies, including successes like:

  • Raising their seed round
  • Onboarding major partners
  • Launching their products and booking revenue
  • Providing expert witness at the White House
  • Onboarding new co-founders
  • Securing multiple government contracts

Here’s a breakdown of the Boost Founder Fellowship by the numbers:

  • $1.4M in capital was raised by Boost founders during the program
  • 45% moved their products to the next stage
  • 25% onboarded new team members during the program
  • 95 NPS score on the program

We received glowing feedback from our founders, despite the challenging fundraising environment for early stage startups.

Bahia El Yafi from Easy trademarks said: “The Boost program was a combination of a mini-startup MBA, tailored executive coaching, high quality consultations, targeted PR activities brought together by a thoughtful team who believe in you as a founder and trust in your ability to succeed."

“Boost helped Enrich narrow our focus to critical growth areas and provided us the resources to execute on those areas. Enrich is unquestionably in better shape after the program than we were beforehand. The Boost team has been critical to our recent successes,” said Alfonso Carney III from Enrich Scholars.

According to Namu Park from The Sloth, “Fundraising was a hard and arduous process for me … When I was having doubts, being accepted to and going through the Boost program literally boosted my spirit and gave me a vote of confidence. I tell my friends that the Boost program CPR'ed me back to life.”

We’re thrilled with the feedback we’ve heard and the outcome of the inaugural Founder Fellowship program, and we look forward to new initiatives to support underrepresented New York City founders.

We’re especially thankful for our partners: NYCEDC and Gunderson Dettmer, with support from the Diversity Marketing Coalition, Goodie Nation, Bolster, Catalog, Two Sigma Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Time is Now Consulting, Lyonshare, Ngozi Ogbonna Morgan, Exbo Group, Mezzanine PR, and Plenty Search. This program would not have been possible without the partnership from our Venture Advisor Onyeka Obiocha, and the many mentors, investors and advisors who engaged with our founders this year.