Acceleration Co-op

A global, filtered community of domain experts, motivated to focus on your challenges.

• Acceleration Co-op is a global, virtual community of "been there, done that" industry veterans and market, business, and technology experts.
• We have created a private, virtual interaction space, where businesses ( "acceleratees") can engage with our expert crowd in a variety of ways.
• With a novel business model that makes it worthwhile for our experts to dig deeply into your challenges; 
• And a membership filter that separates the "experts" from the "not-so-expert".
• We think our crowd of experts are particularly valuable for a business attacking something new: new markets, new geographies or a new venture.
• The value proposition is "Cross the finish-line faster, with less expenditure of capital and time, and fewer mistakes and missteps along the way, by leveraging the experience and market wisdom of our expert community.”
• We can help businesses in any geography. It does not matter where you are. 
• Our community draws from experts all around the globe. We want to attract the world's best, and don't care where they live. 

Community of experts

While there are lots of experts out there (and lots of people who claim to be experts but are not), good ones are hard to identify. And while one-on-one interactions are great, often the "wisdom of crowds" provides unexpected insight that goes beyond that of a single expert.

Our initial vision for Acceleration Co-op is simple. We are building a "crowd of (real) experts", and making it easy for people to harness the collective insights of the Acceleration Co-op community. 

• Many of the "networks" that are out there lack a "quality filter". We apply a filter to our network, and do our best to make sure our community is full of people who have "done it" and not just "read about it". We think this is very important.
  Expertise criteria (learn about our membership filter)
• Our emphasis is on people with deep application and market expertise, as that is what so often seems to be lacking in the businesses we see. However our community also includes technical experts in a variety of fields, and experts on topics like IP, product development, globalization and various regional markets, and supply chain management.
• The community is designed to grow organically and have expertise in diverse verticals. If we don't already have experts in the field you care about, there is a good chance one of our experts will have a colleague with the right domain knowledge, and will be able to bring that expert into the community.
  Fields of expertise & backgrounds of experts 
• We are always interested in expanding our expert community. We are looking for world-class “experts”, who are interested in new business opportunities; global recognition by peers and acceleratees; a share in the Acceleration Co-op revenues; and the fulfillment of helping entrepreneurs “conquer the world”.
  Benefits of expert membership

Business model

The Acceleration Co-op has a "collective" business model. A major portion (for 2010 it's up to 50%) of the revenue that comes into the Acceleration Co-op is set aside to be paid out to our members in proportion to their contributions to the community. Expert members earn fees in proportion to the quality and quantity of their interactions with acceleratees; and acceleratees, experts, and ecosystem members can all earn fees for inviting new members into the community.
Learn more about participation fees

There are a number of networks of mentors, and non-profit organizations focused on connecting experienced business mentors with early stage ventures. These are great. But they only go so far, and the reason is that they are built on a "philanthropy" model, in which the experts donate their time. While successful people are often keen to "give back", there is a limit to the amount of time and effort they are willing to contribute under this type of model.

We wanted a business model that incentivized the experts to dig in deeply, and that aligned everyone's incentives. So we chose a simple, profit-fueled business model. The Acceleration Co-op community gets compensated by the companies we help (in cash and / or equity).

There are several sources of revenue into Acceleration Co-op:

• Acceleratees pay monthly subscriptions to access premium interaction privileges;
• Some services (eg "feedback on your business concept") have an additional fee;
• Members who opt-in to the advisor connections program pay fees when they enter into new business relationships through the Acceleration Co-op.

Learn more

Services (learn how to put Acceleration Co-op to work)
Expertise (view the backgrounds of some of our experts)
Benefits for experts
Confidentiality, conflicts, and "layers of interaction"