Making Capital More Catalytic: Filling the Support Gap for Seed-Funded Enterprises

It’s no secret that startups don’t always spend their seed capital in the right places. Non-essential perks, a sales person before product-market fit, or inflated compensation before business model validation.

But it’s not fair to fault entrepreneurs for this. Even the best run institutions make blatant mistakes in allocating capital. But entrepreneurs don’t have big cash reserves and they haven’t yet learned the best practices to utilize their seed capital most effectively. In addition to capital, startups need access to markets, an effective team, and the right knowledge – all of which can be provided without raising more capital.

Funders, investors, and accelerators have an opportunity to help improve the success rate of seed-funded entrepreneurs (and in so doing, make their funding go further) by providing non-financial support alongside their (hopefully) catalytic capital – without being paternalistic and imposing additional costs.

This interactive and networking-motivated conversation will unpack how funders, impact investors, accelerators, and corporations can help entrepreneurs access the markets, humans, and knowledge they need to increase the success rate and velocity of their enterprises.