Mentoring Process

Areas of focus

Health & Biotechnology

Government Technology

Educational Technology

Technology Commercialization

Energy Technology

Defense & Aerospace

Commercialization of Research

Government Sales & Procurement Process

Military Technology

Scaling in Emerging Markets & Global Growth

Joining iDesignproject

We have a standard agreement with all of our companies. We receive 6% of founder shares in return for participation in iDesignproject. We work hard on your behalf to connect with you the capital you need to grow and scale.

As an entrepreneur, you must ask yourself if joining iDesignproject is worth the equity. If you think your company is worth $3M to $5M (a typical seed round valuations), you have to believe that we can add $100K to $200k of value to your company. Having worked with companies, we have a proven ability to help our companies acquire customers and accelerate their fundraising process. The majority of our companies would state that the value we have added has been exponentially greater than the equity they gave up. Time is typically an early stage entrepreneur’s most limited resource and we help you move faster to your sales, fundraising and team development goals.

Note that we receive equity based on the founders’ shares, not including shares in the option pool or that investors already hold. After option pool dilution and your first investment round we will typically own less than 4% of your company.

Although we set personalized goals for each company we work with – below are a few of the ways we help our portfolio companies accelerate their growth:

What You Will Get

Guidance

Every investor provides some combination of money and help. In our case the mentoring is by far the smaller component. The mentoring we provide is purely to help our companies. The most impactful thing we do is working hand-in-hand with our companies to grow their businesses. The type of advice we provide cannot be bought, because anyone qualified to do it is already a successful entrepreneur.

Marketing and sales presentations

We work hand-in-hand with you to write the content for your marketing materials, including cold emails, pitch decks, and web site content, and will even join you on sales pitches to provide you with feedback. This is hands-on marketing and sales consulting which is hard to get anywhere else. We have a proven, rigorous process to developing engaging content that has been effective for our companies.

Access to potential customers

We have spent over eight years building a network of industry leaders and decision makers. Many of our companies have gotten their first customer through our network. Yes, we make a lot of introductions for you. Those introductions work though, because we have built a reputation in several industry for working with top-notch entrepreneurs and companies that are solving real problems.

Investor pitches

People know when an iDessignproject company is pitching. Our companies have won numerous pitch competitions. But moreover, they have been very successful at raising capital with their pitches. We work intimately with our founders on their investor deck, investment pitch and demo day decks. You will leave our program, able to clearly articulate your business to almost anyone in any setting, giving you a leg up with investors and employees you want to hire.

A pipeline of potential employees​

We have built a network of vetted talent that is looking for interesting job opportunities at start-ups. iDesignproject companies get special access to our network of talent and the ability to promote their openings on our email blast job board.

A support group of peers

Starting a company is often a very lonely endeavor that friends and family don’t understand. Our mentoring, training, workshops, and programs have consistently help our companies thrive. Also, instead of figuring out everything on your own, you have a group of peers that can share their tips and tricks and can lend a shoulder or an ear when you need one.