First, the important stuff. If you are a food and beverage startup, Madworks Accelerator's spring cohort will be dedicated to food and beverage. YOU SHOULD APPLY. This Spring cohort is in conjunction with Slow Money Wisconsin; the companies participating in MadWorks will also be invited to pitch at the Slow Money Wisconsin Investor Showcase.
OK; with that out of the way, what's going on here?
I have been peripherally involved in both Madworks and Slow Money for the last ... ummm ... I don't really know to be honest. We'll call it the last "few" years. Both are wonderful programs.
Madworks is a seed accelerator dedicated to nascent entrepreneurship. It has changed focus over time with the changing demands of the Madison entrepreneurial community. At first, it was dedicated to true, brand new, nascent entrepreneurship. Today, it focuses a little further upstream helping companies already in the "pipeline" so-to-speak to better understand nuanced governance issues that are demanded of young CEOs with small teams and limited budgets. In other words, these teams don't yet have a staff CFO to generate financial statements; they don't have a general counsel to call shareholder meetings and record board minutes; they don't have sophisticated brand managers to think strategically about marketing plans. So, Madworks helps to get them up to speed - getting them to at least speak the language and understand the obligations that their companies will need to undertake.
Slow Money Wisconsin is a regional network of the national Slow Money organization. It is a non-profit comprising investors throughout Wisconsin that are "dedicated to catalyzing the flow of capital to local food systems, connecting investors to the places where they live and promoting new principles fiduciary responsibility that "bring money back down to earth." In other words, not every business is unicorn. Indeed, to be a responsible corporate citizen you probably shouldn't be a unicorn. By definition, not every company can be a unicorn. More importantly: not only is it probably bad company policy to want to be one, it is better for society and the environment if you aren't.
In startup ecosystems, not aiming to be a unicorn is heresy. Most cogs in the startup ecosystem machine are built on the fundamental premise of delivering the unicorn to investors. I understand that; I'm OK with that. But, hear me out. Unicorns require growth - and not just steady you're-doing-great profitable growth, but crazy, if-you're-profitable-you're-doing-it-wrong growth. In other words, if you are going to be a unicorn, you are, by definition, losing (a lot of) money.
On the other hand, it's possible to take time and grow a company organically - to design a business model that is cash flow positive relatively early on. You can build a company that not just hires people, but makes a point of hiring diversely from your own community thus building capacity in the local employee base. Interestingly, local hiring also has the effect of keeping the money the company makes in the local economy, thus it builds sustainable economies. Agricultural companies can (and should) use regenerative (or at least sustainable) agricultural practices. The effect of building businesses in a fundamentally sustainable way, though, is to depress profitability at the expense of corporate, economic, and environmental stability. Slow Money recognizes that these companies are as important, if not more important, than the unicorns. Investors in Slow Money want to put their money into companies that build stronger systems for overall economic wealth, not just seek to exploit those systems to build shareholder wealth.
So, Slow Money and Madworks are teaming up for a cohort of food and beverage companies. It'll be a wonderful partnership and I can't wait to work with this next class!
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