Kicking Off The Accelerator Series

Kelvin Crosby 0:06

Welcome to Investing in Accessibility, a Samaritan Partners podcast. We're not waiting for change. We're investing in it. Join us as we speak with entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are focused on creating a more accessible world. It's so good to see you, even though I can't see you. It's another beautiful day in the neighborhood. I'm so excited that you're here at Investing in Accessibility. I'm your host, Kelvin Crosby, and I got my co-host Chris Maher. How you doing, man?

Chris Maher 0:43

Good, Kelvin. It's good to see you and to be with you, my friend.

Kelvin Crosby 0:46

Yep, man. It's good it's going. We're on an adventure, right? It's this thing called life where we go through seasons and we're like, man, what am I gonna find today? And I I'm truly excited about today's conversation because we're gonna be getting starting our accelerator series. And I'll tell you, we got our first accelerator conversation that we're gonna have today. So I'll turn it over to you, man.

Chris Maher 1:13

You got it, my friend. And I agree with you. I love the change of seasons where I live. And you're you're in beautiful San Diego, but you're right. We are kicking off our accelerator series that we're doing here on Investing in Accessibility. A lot of people, when they think of accelerators, they think of the more traditional programs of things like Y Combinator and Techstars, and those are great. But there are a handful of wonderful, I mean, wonderful accelerators that are focused on the disability sector. So, in kind of disability and assistive tech, the first one we are kicking off today is with a wonderful group out of Toronto, and it's an organization called Access to Success. And their founder and executive director is Varun Chandak. And so, Varun, welcome to the show, my friend.

Varun Chandak 1:57

Thanks, Chris. Great to be here, and great to be here, Kevin. Thanks for having me on.

Varun’s Journey And Late Diagnosis

Chris Maher 2:00

Well, welcome, my friend. And and Varun, I met Varun very early on in my journey of getting the Samaritan Partners Fund off the ground. And I'm going to tell a quick little story here because it really does epitomize who Varun is. So I just almost exactly two years ago, I was listening to a podcast that Varun was the guest on. And I was so inspired by everything he had to say that I reached out to him on LinkedIn, total cold outreach, to introduce myself. He got back to me immediately. He said, Hey, let's set up a call and you know have a proper introduction. And we, you know, became fast friends and have been friends and colleagues ever since. But that is Varun. Like he is a helper, he is a connector. If you talk to any of the companies that have gone through his cohorts over the last upwards of 10 years now with ATS, they would all say the same thing. So Varun, it is a real pleasure to have you here and and and thank you for being such a good friend and being so generous to me over the last couple of years.

Varun Chandak 2:57

Well, I appreciate that, Chris. But I think that story also talks a little bit about you because you're the people kind of people who reach out after you listen to a podcast. And speaking of which, I guess you were the one guy who listened to that podcast. No, but I mean, you know, you don't typically associate investors with, you know, cool contacting people. So that just goes on to speak a lot about you and the way you approach this world, the way you approach investing and making an impact. So thank you for doing what you do.

Chris Maher 3:27

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. So before we get into kind of the founding of Access To Success and what you do in terms of supporting startups in the disability sector, let's talk more about you. Tell us a little bit about your background and that journey that led you to founding Access To Success.

Varun Chandak 3:44

For sure. So my background is not what you'd expect from somebody doing the kind of work that I do. I am trained as a chartered accountant. So I started off in that area, although I haven't done any accounting in a very long time now. This was back in India, and my first job was in private equity, working for a boutique growth equity investor. From there, I did global large cap equity research, moved to Toronto to do my MBA at the University of Toronto, worked on Bay Street for a bit. That's Wall Street for you Americans listening. But the thing is that growing up with a couple of disabilities in India, so I'm hearing loss in both my ears, I wear hearing aids in both my ears, and I'm relying on live captions right now for our conversation. I also have what's called Erbs Palsy, which is a form of partial paralysis in my left arm. But you don't really talk about that stuff in India, not really, not at least back when I was there. But when I moved to Canada, I was struck by the amount of emphasis on diversity and inclusion, even in the business school I was in. And that's where my interest in disability really popped up. I thought that disability needed to be a bigger part of that conversation. So I had backed my own experiences, uh, my own dreams of better assistive technology, which I can talk about in a bit. And that's where Access To Success started one month after I landed in the country.

Chris Maher 5:12

Wow. What can you talk a little bit more about your childhood in in India and living with disabilities? It sounds like culturally it was not as accepting.

Varun Chandak 5:26

Well, let me preface this by saying my experience was my experience alone. Obviously, other people might have had different experiences. This was also quite a while ago now, so things have definitely improved since then. But my experience growing up in the 90s was first, I didn't know I was hard of hearing. I didn't actually know I had hearing loss. Nobody in my family realized I had hearing loss. All we knew is that Varun can't talk on the phone. We know now that that's because as of today, my verbal cognition is zero percent based on testing, which means that if I'm speaking with you in person, Chris, I'm practically lip reading. The audio helps, but it's practically lip reading. So growing up, it was more like uh we didn't know any of this back then. So it was more like, no, stop looking at my legs and trying to listen to me. Or no, can you just you need to learn how to talk on the phone? I don't know how to do that. Is there a class I could take maybe?

Chris Maher 6:27

And so how old were you when you...

Varun Chandak 6:31

I was diagnosed at the age of 18 years old.

Chris Maher 6:35

Wait, 18, 1-8?

Varun Chandak 6:37

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I have 40 percent hearing loss, 40 to 50 percent hearing loss in both my ears, and I just lived life making my way through it.

Chris Maher 6:48

Holy cow.

Founding Access To Success

Varun Chandak 6:50

I have an amazing family, they have been nothing but extraordinarily supportive. It's just there's not, at least in my world, I come from a small town, relatively small town called Japur. It's the disability is not really something people talk about much. It's not really that comes first to mind when these kind of things happen. So, yeah, it was a journey. I remember in my first job in private equity. This guy, my boss, who was the fund manager, he came up in the trenches in American investment banks. So he had that exact same approach to doing things. And so he would be traveling all over the world for his work, and he would call me, and I would have an intern sitting next to me, writing down on a piece of paper as fast as he could what the guy was saying on the phone, so that I could respond. That's live captioning in the STI.

Kelvin Crosby 7:37

Well, I mean, I think one of the coolest cool things is you felt you were able to use you were just able to survive. And and I think that's one of the things that I found, especially with people's hearing loss. I just met somebody just recently, and she just found out she had Usher syndrome. She'd gone blind and she losing her hearing. And what was interesting is it's hard for hearing losses, one of those things, as you start learning how to talk and so forth, you start adapting pretty quickly. Start learning how to read lips and so forth, and your parents just kind of adapt to it as well. And that's kind of something I started finding throughout just the hearing loss community, is that if you're not early diagnosed, a lot of times it'll go to undiagnosed until later in life.

Varun Chandak 8:27

That's right.

Chris Maher 8:27

It's so it's so interesting. So remember when we had Ann Marie Killian from TDI For Access on the same thing for her. They didn't diagnose her her hearing loss until I think she was like 13 or 14 years old. But yeah, that that's amazing, Varun. Obviously, you did very well for yourself from the ages of up and up until the age of 18. Like that's remarkable. So that segues into your working on essentially kind of the equivalent of Wall Street up in Canada, private equity, kind of more large company stuff. What kind of what triggered you to go small and and to create an organization that supports companies at the very early stages of entrepreneurship?

Varun Chandak 9:12

Well, as I was saying earlier, Access To Success, in fact, started as a small student club when I was an MBA student at the University of Toronto. And we had started with some other initiatives supporting MBA students with disabilities. But in the course of doing that work, my team and I met a lot of entrepreneurs who were building innovations for people with disabilities. That's what reminded me of what I was referring to earlier, what I touched upon briefly earlier. When I was first diagnosed with hearing loss, since that day, I have had a dream of a future where I would have smart contact lenses. Smart contact lenses that would use artificial reality to give me live captions. Obviously, that doesn't exist. But when we met those entrepreneurs and those entrepreneurs told us that they needed help, that they've got questions they can't find answers to, that they've got problems that the existing support systems were not equipped to help them with, we realized that what we had started at ATS could be put to use to help those entrepreneurs. So we tested that hypothesis in 2019 with a pilot project, and it was just so overwhelmingly well received that by that time I knew this would be my life's work. So I can say this freely now. The years that I spent working on Bay Street were me basically plotting a life where I could quit my day job and do what I do full-time, which I do now.

Chris Maher 10:45

So, Varun, let's dig into what you folks do at Access to Success in terms of the programs and the cohorts that you run supporting startups that are focused on the disability sector.

What The Accelerator Actually Does

Varun Chandak 10:58

So Access To Success is now a Toronto-based nonprofit on a mission to enable everyone. We are an innovation hub supporting global accessibility startups and helping them scale their accessibility innovations to millions of people worldwide. What that means is that we've got an accelerator, which currently operates in a virtual format where we provide unique and tailomade programming supports, mentorship, resources, and funding, all of it specifically designed to help scale life-changing innovations for people with disabilities. What that means is, while I keep saying unique and tailormade, the reason I say that is that we don't do any generic tech accelerator style programming. We will have, for instance, master classes on topics like inclusive design, co-designing with the disability community, Health Canada and FDA processes, customer acquisition in the disability space, fundraising from investors like you, and you know you were a speaker on that session. So these sessions, just like the one that you participated in, my team is not the one doing the teaching. To run these masterclasses, we bring in the best of the best from around the world who are extraordinarily good at what they do in terms of building, scaling, and sometimes exiting from an accessibility startup. And they come in and talk about the things that they are best at. So that's the accelerator. In addition to that, we host a number of programs and events and resources that we provide for free, really, to anyone who needs it. So for instance, we are the host of the world's only open access database of investments and accessibility startups called Accessibility Investments Database, or AID, into startups in North America by 1200 investors, all of it available on our website for anyone to access for free. You don't even have to be in the program to use it. Anyone can go on that page and find mission-aligned investors and hopefully save hours and hours of their own research. Finally, we work very, very collaboratively with really hundreds of organizations worldwide who are active in the disability space, which means that it means two things. One, it means that we have a pretty solid pulse of what's going on in the disability innovation sector worldwide. And second, it means that the startups that we do work with, we are usually able to open doors for them quite quickly by facilitating introductions that might take time for those introductions to happen otherwise, or sometimes even identifying the right people and the right organizations at the right time for our entrepreneurs to connect with. All of it, you'll notice, is very thoughtfully created processes and programs with the intention of accelerating scaling of these innovations. That's what we focus on. We don't work with ideation stage groups, for instance. This year alone, to give you a frame of reference, the average annual revenue of our current cohort is half a million dollars at the time they apply to the program. So these companies have some idea of what they're doing. You want to get them, though, from their first hundred customers to the next 10,000 customers.

Chris Maher 14:26

Gotcha. And so your ex-I love the fact that you really try to create a bespoke or custom experience for the companies, kind of meeting them where they're at in their evolution. But it sounds like the companies that are accepted typically into your cohorts, and how many cohorts do you run a year?

Varun Chandak 14:46

So right now we run one cohort a year, but I know we're going with this question, so please go ahead and then I'll answer it.

Chris Maher 14:51

And and so do typically the companies that you accept into your cohorts, it sounds like they've they have demonstrated product market fit. They they are in market, they're generating some revenue, they've got paying customers. Is is that fair to say?

Masterclasses And Expert Network

Varun Chandak 15:06

Somewhat, yes. I mean, usually they would have at the absolute bare minimum an MVP, but they would have also validated the product in some shape or form. They might have done some pilots, which may or may not be revenue generating. But the thing is that, yes, this year our cohort progressed towards companies that have some level of product market fit already. But I'm very cognizant of the fact that there are a number of innovators out there doing absolutely amazing work who are at the relatively earliest stages and still need help. That's where we actually started. Again, to give you a frame of reference for why we our

Speaker 2 15:45

cohort looks like what it does this year, the demand for the program is just so high that this year we received more than 200 applications from 29 countries in six continents for 15 spots in the program.

Chris Maher 15:59

Wow, that's awesome.

Varun Chandak 16:01

So, but the thing is that we don't want to lose out on the remaining 185 innovators doing absolutely incredible work. So next year, we will be releasing more programming, public programming, more resources that people even at the earlier stages can participate in and learn from. We know what they need because they consistently tell us the same thing. They want to know how do you co-design with the community? They want to know how do you build credibility in the earlier stages so that organizations and partners will work with you so that you can take that and go to investors to raise early rounds. We know the problems sort of have a consistent pattern to them. So we want to release programming next year that will work about that will talk about this stuff and just make it available to a large number of people. In fact, this year, given just the level of demand that was there for the program, for the first time we released office hours where anyone, literally anyone who wants to talk to us, can book a call. The problem was the first time we released it was in a closed loop where we didn't publicize it and we got booked from the beginning of summer through November.

Chris Maher 17:12

Oh my gosh.

Varun Chandak 17:13

So we're still making our way through those meetings, but we will open up more blocks soon, and literally anyone in the world who wants to talk to us can set up a call with us.

Chris Maher 17:23

That's fantastic that you are thinking about it's I mean, in in a way, uh it's you're nurturing your own pipeline by offering office hours for those comp those 185 companies you unfortunately have to say no to, but you're still trying to provide them with some sort of support, guidance, advice, uh, which is fantastic. And that's you know, that I think it's good for your business, but it's also just good for the broader market that you're doing that. You just touched on there are some pretty consistent patterns you see in terms of, one, questions that entrepreneurs are typically seeking answers for, but uh that's one thing. But what do you see, or what do you and your team see? Is is there a consistency in where these early stage companies typically need the most help, or maybe where they've got the the biggest gaps in their plan?

Selection, Demand, And Office Hours

Varun Chandak 18:19

Yes, there are a few consistent patterns in terms of where early stage accessibility innovators need help and want help. Those are sometimes two different things. Need want help is the obvious one everybody wants for funding. Yeah, that's the just the most obvious answer. That was the reason why we spent two years developing the accessibility investments database. Because the first question we would get was, I'm trying to raise a round who should I talk to? And we didn't want to be a bottleneck for that question. That's why we parsed through Crunch Base and Pitchbook and just released information about who's investing in the space, and now anyone can go and find mission-aligned investors. The second question comes as I'm still early stage, I'm still finishing out, building my prototype. How do I take it from my early alpha clusters to a place where the CNIBs or the World Health, uh, the World Uh Deaf Federation and organizations will like that will work with us. That's the second level of question about the combination of building credibility and building out that prototype to a point that you can properly commercialize it. The third question is around sales, really. At least the entrepreneurs who know what they're doing, that's what they usually ask us about. Now, I say sales is a very broad topic, but it can be a combination of go-to-market strategy, sales channels, and more specifically B2C versus B2B. In certain situations, reimbursement strategy, and you know, whether or not they should pursue a consumer market route versus a medical device route. These questions are very consistent. In terms of that funding piece, by the way, I also want to emphasize that I've been a little surprised by the lack of awareness about grants. There's, I think, a bit of um an echo-chamber situation going on in the startup and innovation world where people see things in the news and think that venture capital is the end-all be-all of funding. But the best entrepreneurs that we work with usually have venture capital that they actually use to leverage and unlock non-dilative sources of funding. And now that can be depends from country to country. You've got NIH grants, granted, there are some on-the-ground realities with those kind of grants right now in the US and Canada. We've got lots and lots of grants available. Worldwide, we see the same pattern repeating that there are grants available, but people seem to forget that they can actually, even as a for-profit, enter into partnerships with nonprofits or universities or researchers to access those grants and continue building out their innovation.

Chris Maher 21:18

Yeah, I think I think that's a great point. And it's wonderful that you spend time on that in your program, because there are a lot of different, there's a very broad spectrum of sources of capital out there. And I do think that a lot of entrepreneurs think, oh, I've got a startup, I should go get venture investment. But as you know, we all know it's in any market, it's very hard to raise venture capital, especially at those early stages. In this market in particular, it's it's even more challenging. And then you throw in the fact that you're focused on the disability sector, which a lot of traditional VC investors think, oh, you're serving the disability community. Why aren't you a nonprofit? And and then you If you throw in where I think Varun, you would agree with this, I would say at least half the entrepreneurs that I've met over the last couple of years, which is probably close to 300 companies now, are women. And they get even, you know, a microscopic, you know, portion of the venture capital money. And so you need to be creative at those early stages. So I think that's fantastic that you're educating them on the different sources of capital out there. The other nice thing about grants is they can be non-dul, or most in most cases, they're non-dilutive, right? So they're not, they're not taking your equity. And so that that's awesome that you do that. My sense is that's a little bit of a differentiator, probably, for you, because I think a lot of times the more traditional accelerators are like, oh, if you're in our cohort, we're going to give you some capital and that's all, and and we're going to introduce you to more traditional VCs at our demo day. But let's talk a little bit more about, give you a chance to talk about how is Access To Success maybe different from a traditional accelerator like a Techstars, or even differentiated from some of the other disability accelerators.

Common Founder Gaps And Grants

Varun Chandak 23:05

Our strength lies in two things. One, we understand disability better than a lot of people out there. And I'll talk about that a little bit more. The second strength is our network. And I'll talk about that a bit more.

Chris Maher 23:19

Wait, say that again is on the what?

Varun Chandak 23:21

And the second one is our network. And I'll talk about that a bit more as well. In the first one, we have been talking about the power of inclusive design and the possibility of adjacent use cases by applying inclusive design principles. Let me expand on that. Electric toothbrushes, velcro straps, emails. Chris, Kelvin, you already know these are accessibility products. Hopefully, a lot of your listeners would be aware as well. But the thing that a lot of people sometimes forget is that the mass market success of those products was an accident. We are cognizant of that fact. So we try to teach our startups, inclusive design and co-design principles, about how do you build in flexibility into how your product is used so that you're not saying this product is for two to six-year-old children with cerebral palsy. You're defining it based on use cases, not the medical model of disability. And when you define it based on use cases and build in flexibility in how your products are used, you might go from cerebral palsy to stroke to quadriplegia or paraplegia and therefore have a path to scale, which, as you know, Chris very well, is every investor's first question. How are you going to take this to scale? We actually have seen our companies do that. We bring in people who have successfully done that and they talk about implementing that. We've got a whole role in our organization for an inclusive design lead whose entire responsibility is to help our companies apply inclusive design and co-design principles and actually help them design their products better so that they're well equipped to expand it to more use cases. That level of understanding of the disability and accessibility market is, I would say, not very common. It's also this understanding which allows us to see opportunities where even the entrepreneurs themselves might not. To give you an example, one of the more common things that happen, this wouldn't surprise you, Chris, for sure, but it might surprise some of your listeners, is a lot of our companies, or at least more than a few of our companies, come to us with a B2C model, and by the time they leave, they're pivoted to a B2B model. Yes, they realize that B2C is hard, but they knew that even when they were coming in. The thing they realize is that they can do the same work, deliver the same solution, have the same impact while having a B2B revenue channel and keeping the product pretty much free, if not entirely free, for the end users. And to use an example, of course, there's Be My Eyes, our dear friends over there, but even among ATS companies, a prime example of that is, in fact, a non-tech company called Wimble out of Ottawa. Wimble, as it seems you know, Chris, can be thought of as the Uber for personal support workers. PSWs are very hard to find, book, schedule, and pay. And so if you have a team of PSWs on tap, it's life-changing. So they started with the B2C model, but now after having gone through ATS, they have a B2B model where they sell this as a service to large corporations, to events, to conferences, and so on. That's a kind of unique experience and expertise that we bring that startups appreciate. The second piece that I was talking about was the network. By virtue of never saying no to a call and always being on lookout for interesting people doing good work. We are very fortunate to work with and know of a very, very, very large number of brilliant change makers and organizations all over the world. That's not even including our formal partners and collaborators like the Toyata Mobility Foundation or the Zero Project in Vienna, Austria. It also includes just organizations that we know all over the world that are active in their specific areas of visibility who you should speak with. And you know what's better? We'll introduce you. That really speeds up their path to scale.

Inclusive Design And Use-Case Scaling

Chris Maher 27:49

Yeah, agreed. Yeah, I think I think a couple couple of comments there around your differentiation. I think really, really important around design, the co-design and the inclusive design. I think Wimble and that's Emma Brown, right? Her company is a great example of that. And and and the network, and and I've seen that firsthand, how you how how how you leverage your network for the companies that are in your cohort. Varun's organization is based in Toronto. They're serving the global market. So as you said, you had applications from 29 different countries. You actually have have had a lot of US-based companies go through your through your program, as well as companies from all over the world. I think that's also maybe a little bit different about you as well. The international flavor of the work you do. But that's uh thank you. That's I think those are real really, really good points and and really important topic.

Kelvin Crosby 28:38

What I find very fascinating is how you're building out every sector of a startup business. And you're providing that support for every stage of the business. And I think for me, like I've been through several accelerators myself with the See Me Cane and all that, it's like, man, I wish I would have known about you when I first first started. And but at the same time, it's one of those things where I'm like, alright, as an entrepreneur, you you kinda hear this, you're like, alright, so I gotta I gotta put some more work into grant, look at some of these other options, it's not just alright, go after that VC money or that next investment. And and I think that's the thing I'm taking away from today in today's conversation. It's like, alright, you need to look at the whole spectrum of opportunities, and I think that's really, really important, because if we're gonna be successful as entrepreneurs, I mean that we can't get so laser focus on one source of funding. There's multiple ways of fund stuff and get things done. And so that's that's really what I'm taking away from today.

B2C To B2B Pivots With Examples

Varun Chandak 29:51

I think one thing that I would add is a little bit more qual qualitative that to be honest, I don't usually talk about, but both of you being entrepreneurs yourselves, in a way, would understand that fact, and that I myself am a social entrepreneur, having started Access Ao Success and being responsible for the organization, being responsible for fundraising, delivering our work. And at the same time, I myself am also somebody with a disability who has faced stigma, who has faced really active discrimination, who's gone through a lot of those experiences people with disabilities go through. It puts Access To Success as an organization in a very unique position to genuinely understand a lot of the things our entrepreneurs go through. So when somebody emails us, and these are all true stories, at 11 p.m. my time saying an acquisition opportunity is falling through, and they are about to force us to do things that we don't want to do. What should I do? I know that I can pick up the call and not just actually help solve for that problem, but also just talk to the entrepreneur at a person-to-person level and get them in a state of mind where they can, they're, if not well equipped, at least better equipped to go through what they're about to go through. It's how I know that when somebody tells me, which again is a true story, that a $200,000 grant that was basically a done deal fell through. And now, because of that, a lot of matching commitments have been pulled and the company is six months away from going under. I know that at the end of my conversation about here's all the things that are your options. I also remember to just ask the entrepreneur if the company goes under, will you be okay? What do you need to do to take care of yourself? It's the reason why one of our most popular sessions that we do at Access to Success is called Pardon my French, fuck up nights. It's where our entrepreneurs come in and talk about all the times things when well yeah, all the times things they don't want to think about, but when they talk about in that group, elicit knowing nods, and sometimes laughter. Because it's a room of people who know what it's like to be in those shoes. And that ultimately all of this stuff lends to a very strong sense of community. We like each other, we want to work with each other, we want to spend time with each other, and that I think sets us a part of it.

Chris Maher 32:30

Yeah, I think that's huge. I mean, I I actually talk about that with entrepreneurs quite regularly is finding those handful of you know, three to five people that can be real trusted advisors, kind of that like the consigliere that you can go to when you're having that tough day, right? It's it's you got plenty of people you can talk to when things are going well. But when you're when you're having a tough time, that's when being an entrepreneur can get really lonely very quickly. And it gets very, very difficult, especially if you're a solo founder, you don't have a co-founder to lean on. And so I know those stories to be true that you just talked about because I've heard from a number of entrepreneurs that have said that about you, that you they've called you at 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock at night because they're having a crisis. And every time you pick up that phone and you you you play that consigliere role and and talk them through it and support them in any way you can. And so I think that is also a big differentiator for your organization. And that as you said, it's it's maybe something that's a little bit more intangible, but it is so critically important for early stage entrepreneurs to have people like that that they can rely on. And so I'm I'm very glad that you brought that up. So as we wrap up here, you know, when you when you think about, we didn't really get into kind of equity and you don't have to give details on that, but like I it do you have advice on or for entrepreneurs that are looking at applying to accelerator programs? And what are some of the things they should think about? Like, I one of the things that I've learned being being on the investor side is that there are some accelerators, more traditional accelerators, like a Techstars. When you agree to join their program, you're agreeing for them to give you some money, but taking a very large bite of your equity. Like I it's very aggressive. And and so, you know, what what do you think are some of the important things that an entrepreneur should think about when they're applying to programs? And oh, by the way, that have applied to and been accepted to and execute, you know, gone through multiple accelerator programs. There's nothing wrong with that. But what would what advice would you give to an early stage entrepreneur on how to navigate the process of evaluating and applying to and what and and whether to accept an invitation to join an accelerator or not?

Community, Mentorship, And Founder Care

Varun Chandak 34:48

Well, let me begin answering that by just quickly saying that Access To Success is free. We don't charge anything, we don't take any cash payment, we don't take any equity is quite literally free. Those that ask for a range of equity in some cases and return for an actual cash investment, in other cases purely for the delivery of the program, and in yet other cases, accommodation of cash and the in-kind value of the services that they provide. I think unfortunately the answer is it depends. I think if there are groups out there charging 10% equity and not even providing any cash, no, run away. Don't ever do that. If there are groups charging 5% equity and providing you with $150,000 in cash investments, and this is literally your first program, it's probably worth at least considering. Everything in between, it depends. Sometimes the truth is sometimes entrepreneurs are out of options. And so maybe in those cases, if it's a last resort, okay, go for it. It's just that when people make that decision, they should be aware of the implications. And one of the main implications being what it does to your cap table, what it does to the possibility of finding future investors. If you have a busted cap table, because you gave 8% equity to an accelerator with a whole lot of liquidation preferences and preferential treatment and feature rounds and so on, you're gonna scare away future investors, and then it's a lose-lose scenario. So it's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem, as is most things in running a startup, and that you should ideally have good advice before you ever sign away any equity, acknowledging that sometimes to get that advice, you need to be in one of those programs in the first place. So I'll close with Access To Success is a free nonprofit program.

Chris Maher 36:56

Yeah, no, I think it's I think it's really, really good advice. And because the the the accelerators come in, as you said, in many different flavors, and reading the fine print is super important and getting some advice on that, I think, is is a is very good, very good advice. So, Varun, as we wrap up here, how can people connect with you and learn more about Access To Success and all the great work you folks are doing?

Varun Chandak 37:18

Yeah, so I'll just drop a quick plug. First, we can learn more about us at accesstoccess.ca, you can reach out to us at contact at access to success.ca. But also on November 24th is our annual flagship event, the demo day, the ATS demo day 2025. It's taking place as a hybrid event in person in Toronto, but also virtually. If you're interested in what we do and you're interested in connecting with others that do similar work that we do, or investors or leaders in the sector to see you, Chris and Kelvin, at this event, hopefully, maybe in person, but at the very least, virtually, you can go to our website to sign up.

Chris Maher 38:00

You got it. All right, my friend. We appreciate you spending the time with us. You are the best, and you're doing amazing work with uh ATS and looking forward to seeing you in person sometime soon.

Varun Chandak 38:11

Thank so much as well Chris. Thank you. Thank you, brother. Appreciate it.

Kelvin Crosby 38:20

That wraps up Investing in Accessibility. As I always say, go live beyond your challenges and we'll see you in two weeks. Thank you for listening to Investing in Accessibility, a Samaritan Partners podcast, where we invest in change for accessibility, not wait for change. If you want to follow us, you can find us on YouTube or LinkedIn at @Samaritan Partners. If you would like to invest in Samaritan Partners, email Chris at chris@samaritanpartners.com. If you'd like to learn more about us, go to www.samaritanpartners.com. You can take the first step in investing in change by giving us five stars and sharing this podcast with everybody that you know so we can spread the word so that we can give access to all by Investing in Accessibility.