How to explain to your mother what Techstars is

As has finally been announced today, we are absolutely delighted to have been accepted onto the Spring 2016 Barclays Accelerator powered by Techstars. It is an honour for us to join the best fintech accelerator in the world and we are incredibly excited about the next three months.

The one thing we have been struggling with (apart from not telling anyone) is how to explain precisely what it is, why it is difficult to get on to and why we are really excited about it... to our mothers.

Us: We got into Techstars! Our Mothers: Darling how wonderful! Us: I know you don't know what that is... Our Mothers: No I don't.

The reason for this is that accelerators are very odd beasts and have no analogous organisation in the non-tech world, why would a company exist just to give you office space, a bit of cash, a couple of freebies and some column inches? how much value can you possibly deliver like that in three months? and we have to give them equity!?!

For us, and all of the other teams those are just the visible symptoms of having joined, the real value is taking our business, model, team and everything else and letting over 100 people who have done it all before, run their internal pattern recognition reflex and see if they can course correct us. It's like we magically become second/third time founders. We can avoid the simple pitfalls that can slay a start-up in its tracks, we can get it right more often than not and that is more than likely to be the difference between a dead company and an alive one. That's why we are excited, we get a three month long unfair advantage over everyone else and unfair advantages are how really great businesses get built.

Alas, despite this description my mother is still telling all her friends we've won Techsters...

Check back here for more updates about how we are getting on, and if you want to come change insurance with us we're hiring.