Changing Founder Metabolism
A few weeks ago, I wrote about why 99% of accelerators fail. The vast majority of accelerators around the world fail to live up to their expectations for the simple reason that most of the mentors who work with these programs don’t actually have the lived experience needed to accelerate startups (at least, not if we’re talking about billion-dollar outcomes).
As it stands today, the only ecosystem in the world that has enough such mentors is Silicon Valley. So how do we accelerate startups in the rest of the world?
If the quintessential requirement of a good startup accelerator is good mentorship and only Silicon Valley has a sufficient quantity and diversity of mentors to cater to a wide diversity of founders, how can we reasonably accelerate startups in the rest of the world?
By leveraging Silicon Valley’s talent.
This isn’t a new epiphany by any stretch of the imagination. For more than 20 years, governments around the world have recognized this experience gap and have poured considerable resources into trying to tap into Silicon Valley’s magic. Almost every country (and many cities/states/provinces within them) have programs that attempt to build connections between their startups and Silicon Valley.
Unfortunately, a lot of these efforts fall flat.
A for Effort
There’s the Hollywood Tour of the Stars, designed by organizers convinced that the solution to their country’s woes is to expose founders to Silicon Valley’s biggest successes “for inspiration”. Founders drive up and down the San Francisco peninsula, sampling the cafeteria fare at the world’s most prominent tech companies and visiting their gift shops. They return home excited and energized, only to realize a few days later that they learned absolutely nothing.
Another well-meaning but low-ROI approach is the Investor Dating Game, designed on the premise that the only thing missing in a tech ecosystem is funding. If organizers could simply introduce their startups to Silicon Valley VCs, everything would magically come together.
There’s only one problem: the organizers often don’t understand that there are different stages of startups and different types of investors. Founders soon realize that they’re pitching a random mashup of VCs, private equity investors and corporates, and return home without a dollar raised between them.
And, of course, there’s the Silicon Valley Bootcamp. This one is actually a step in the right direction. Rather than wasting founders’ time with tours of big tech cafeterias or low-probability investor show-and-tells, organizers attempt to design a program centered around Silicon Valley insights. Unfortunately, many of them — particularly those planned from afar — end up as little more than a haphazard collection of fireside chats with expats. Such as:
The locally-famous founder, who moved to San Francisco a decade ago only to have their company fail before the ink was dry on their work visa.
The charismatic connector, who convinced the organizers that he/she sits at the center of Silicon Valley’s power brokers — but nobody in the Bay Area knows them.
The self-proclaimed fundraising coach, who has never actually fundraised.
Employee #12,376 of Uber, who joined 2 years after Travis left but will nonetheless tell you all about the early days.
Rise of the Expats
While many “top-down” efforts to connect with Silicon Valley have struggled over the years, one type of initiative has yielded ongoing success for many countries. And each country’s version has one thing in common: they all started as grassroots efforts instigated by Silicon Valley expats.
Here are some examples:
TiE was founded back in 1992 by Ambrish (AJ) Patel and eight cofounders originally from India
In 2007, Israeli expats Moshik Raccah and Eran Wagner founded IEFF
Canada’s C100 was founded in 2009 by Canadian expats Anthony Lee and Chris Albinson
In 2017, a group of British expats led by Trulia founder Pete Flint launched GBx
And there are many more such groups. Some of these organizations receive funding and support from the “home” government and/or local embassy while others are completely independent.
Each of these organizations creates networking opportunities that bring Silicon Valley-based expats together and then leverages that community for the benefit of visiting founders (offerings that typically include a more effective version of the Silicon Valley Bootcamp, such as C100’s “48 Hours in the Valley” or GBx’s “Brits by the Bay”).
The annual C100 Summit at Halfmoon Bay
The Landing Pad
Recently, we’ve started to see the emergence of a new category of offering that seeks to make it easier for international founders to spend an extended period of time working in Silicon Valley. The “landing pad” concept blends Silicon Valley co-working with the benefits of an international cohort. One of the best examples of this comes from the relatively small startup ecosystem of Scotland.
Back in 2022, the Scottish government issued a £42 million tender, known as “Techscaler”, to find novel ways to improve the local startup ecosystem. But rather than award the contract to one of the (many) US-based pay-to-play accelerator brands that applied, they awarded it to a local organization called Codebase. What makes Codebase different from most incubators around the world is that the founders deeply understand and accept the limitations of their local ecosystem. And they’ve spent years building relationships with Silicon Valley and other ecosystems to help plug the gaps (I first met them back in 2017 when I was with 500 Startups).
One of the first proposals that Codebase put forth as part of Techscaler was both incredibly progressive and incredibly simple: they proposed a 3-week program to take a dozen Scottish founders to San Francisco…to work. Not to drive up and down the peninsula visiting big tech offices. Not to sit in a financial district office listening to speakers deliver content they probably could have watched online. But to go to Silicon Valley and work on their startups.
And guess what? The Scottish government supported it wholeheartedly. They didn’t trip over themselves panicking about brain drain. They didn’t insist that the founders needed guidance / structure / handholding. They agreed with the assertion that the best way to support Scottish founders building connections to Silicon Valley was to let them do it. Here’s how the program was originally described:
The Techscaler Silicon Valley Hub was delivered as a pilot programme throughout February 2024, to build links between Scotland’s and Silicon Valley’s start-up ecosystems. It consisted of a “pop-up” hub in San Francisco, which provided office space for 12 Scottish start-ups to use as a base for several weeks, from where they built a new business network, learned from other world class businesses in similar markets, connected with US founders, partners, potential customers and investors. The programme also offered support for founders to find their way around San Francisco and Silicon Valley, signpost relevant events and facilitate introductions as relevant.
Since that first pilot, Techscaler has delivered multiple international programs with the full support of the Scottish government (the third Silicon Valley program took place this past spring).
Game On.
Over the years, I’ve had a front-row seat for an incredible number of accelerators, incubators, and startup programs. I’ve also spent a lot of time in a lot of ecosystems around the world.
Witnessing what Codebase was able to do with their landing pad got me thinking:
What if we went a step further?
What if we combined the simplicity of a San Francisco landing pad with the intentionality of an expat program and the experience of Silicon Valley mentors?
Today, I’m thrilled to share a new experiment in velocity designed specifically for Canadian founders: Game On.
I believe that one of Silicon Valley's greatest advantages over other startup ecosystems is velocity. And the velocity gap between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world has only grown since AI came on the scene. That’s why I’m inviting 30 up-and-coming founders from across Canada to join me in San Francisco for 3 weeks in January with two objectives:
To infuse them with a deep understanding of Silicon Valley’s velocity (and teach them how to operate at that velocity)
To help them develop their own high-value networks with potential customers, partners, other founders and investors in Silicon Valley
All while working on their startup.
This is an experiment unlike any founder program that’s been done before. It won’t be startup 101. And it definitely won’t be innovation theatre. Through light-touch programming, mentorship and intentional experiences, founders will experience firsthand how Silicon Valley really works. All towards one singular goal: go faster.
We’re not just trying to change the velocity of startups. We’re trying to change the metabolism of founders (H/T to my friend Mark Dobbin for that one 😉).
Applications are open now through November 15, 2025. You can learn more at chrisneumann.com/gameon.