StartupRealities

Startup No 199 - #StartupRealities 2020 series ApprenticeEntrepreneurs is an education and training company which runs rotational 5-year apprenticeship placements at startups for entrepreneurially-minded 18-year-olds. After 5 rotations at 5 different startups, the graduates of the programme receive a diploma which the company deems equivalent to a university degree. The programme duration varies in some cases: occasionally 16-year-olds get admitted into a 7-year entrepreneurship apprenticeship. For university graduates with an arts and humanities background the programme is shortened to 4 years; while university graduates in business and engineering complete the programme and receive the diploma in 3 years. The last year of placement is usually combined with a stint at a world-renowned accelerator, e.g. Y Combinator, TechStars, 500 Startups, SeedCamp or Wayra. CEO QUOTE "Learning by doing is our motto. Budding entrepreneurs are best taught by being put in the thick of it, rather t...

Startup No 182 - StartupRealities 2020 series InHouseSkunkWorks is an innovation and startup accelerator company that helps established corporations launch and manage their own corporate accelerators for startup projects in their industry, unimpeded by corporate bureaucracy. The company's slogan is "We Try Out Your Crazy Ideas". The company uses a standard template accelerator structure (a white label / original equipment manufacturer OEM-type format) and adds modifications depending on the project. The name is inspired by the original Lockheed Skunk Works . CEO QUOTE "Some people think our name comes from the Ali G Indahouse movie. No! We are for real! The best way to describe what we do is to draw an analogy with Rocket Internet: we create a scalable fail-safe project execution environment where it is safe to iterate and pivot business models and innovations." - said  InHouseSkunkWorks founder and CEO Inna Skundberg. The original Skunk Works in Palmdale, Cali...

StartupRealities No 80 ScienceTransfer is a technology transfer and entrepreneurship promotion company that pairs up scientists, computer programmers and business people and encourages them to set up science-based startups. The company serves as an accelerator for such startups: it first identifies feasible scientific ideas through a range of competitions held around the world; then it matches the scientists and researchers with IT- and business-savvy co-founders to form a founding team; and then it helps the team scale up the idea into a business. CEO QUOTE "We match scientists with three types of people: hackers, hipsters and hustlers. Hackers are the coders, also known as computer programmers. The hipsters are the design people: those who tinker with user experience. And the hustlers are startup founders skilled in sales and marketing. Our motto is simple: SHHH! This stands for Scientists, Hackers, Hipsters, Hustlers," said ScienceTransfer founder and CEO Scirocco T...