Weekly Accelerator Updates

Week 1: Welcome!

Week 1 update

  • Welcome to the 2024 Tufts Venture Accelerator!
  • Important Information
  • Ten-Week Overview
  • Refresh your venture creation artifacts

Welcome to the Tufts Venture Accelerator!

A warm welcome to our 2024 Tufts Venture Accelerator cohort! Each of you have been building your venture for months, if not years. This summer, we invite you to take stock of what you know and what you’ve accomplished, test your hypotheses, prove purchase intent and accelerate the process of building the necessary knowledge to help you decide how to take your venture forward beyond the summer – and for all three cases, what are actions you can take each day, each week to move the needle.

Important information

  • TVA Landing Page:
  • Mentor Matching:
    • You should have been introduced to 3-5 dedicated mentors by now. Please be sure to make contact with your mentors and set up an introductory call ASAP.
    • We will be inviting your mentors to our midpoint presentations on July 11 on your behalf – also mention this to them when you meet.
    • We will introduce mock board meetings, where you will create a mock board based on your mentors to date and learn to interact with them in a structured manner in the style of a board meeting. Stay tuned for what that all entails.
  • Bootcamp: The TVA 2024 Bootcamp is scheduled for June 13-15.
    • View Bootcamp Calendar here. Pro-tip: Subscribe to the TVA calendar or add the Google calendar to your own account for ease of management.
    • View Session descriptions here. Additional workshops are being planned – subject to change.
    • Ensure you create / update the following artifacts for your venture.
  • OptimizeU – Entrepreneur Leadership Development Program:
    • We have engaged Dr. Ali Hill, A98, Cofounder & CEO of Sound Advice Consulting, to run a leadership development program for our TVA entrepreneurs.
    • We will introduce this service when we meet during the bootcamp.
    • In the meantime, visit the landing page to watch Ali’s introduction video and testimonials from student entrepreneurs who took advantage of this personal growth opportunity last year.

10-Week Overview

Here is a preview of coming attractions.

  • Week 1 is Bootcamp Week. Through a series of hands-on workshops, you will review and refine key elements of venture creation with your own venture as the focus.
  • Weeks 2-5 is the Foundation Sprint. You will reprise your customer discovery journey and continue to test your riskiest assumptions. You will build a strong foundation for every aspect of your business. You will pitch your ventures to an internal audience comprising your cohort members, mentors and coaches, and about 100 high school students from our Entrepreneurship and Marketing Pre-College programs at the halfway point.
  • Weeks 6-9 is the Refinement Sprint. You will be testing your product in the field and generating validation of purchase intent at your proposed pricing model from paying customers. You will refine key aspects of your business in 1×1 working sessions with subject matter experts in marketing, sales, product development, finance, legal and more. You will reprise your business planning materials. You will build a plan towards fundraising if necessary
  • Week 10 will lead us to Demo Day. If you are in the Full Time cohort, you will pitch your ventures to an external audience comprising entrepreneurs, funders and supporters in the greater Boston ecosystem, at Tufts and beyond.

Apply bootcamp content to your venture and help each other

For some of you, the content we cover is new and overwhelming. For others, you may have spent untold hours working and reworking every aspect of your venture. To get the most out of the bootcamp, use the topics covered in the bootcamp to break down your business fundamentals into actionable blocks that you can review, test and iterate. Help other teams in the cohort do the same. Look forward to seeing rapid weekly progress from all our teams!