 Hi, good morning, thanks for coming out. It's great to see so many people interested in this topic. So my name's Jenny Everett, I'm the deputy director of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs, and today I'm gonna be talking about the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative. But to get us started, stand up if you are an entrepreneur who has been to or is thinking about participating in an accelerator program, if you work for an accelerator program, or if you are a funder who has been asked to invest in an accelerator program. Stay standing if you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the program in question has been 100% effective in training these entrepreneurs and you have the data to back it up. That's what I just thought. So here we are just up the road from Silicon Valley which is often credited with creating the modern day accelerator. It's where places like Y Combinator are supporting some of the best known tech businesses, even businesses that non-techies like me know like Dropbox and Airbnb. And in the past 10 years, we've seen this accelerator model explode around the world. Universities, foundations, corporations, social enterprise communities are starting accelerators to help support small and growing businesses and entrepreneurs. But yet we as a sector don't really have very good information as to whether or not these programs are effective. But they take a lot of time. So accelerators are putting in tons of work selecting and training entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs themselves are taking valuable time away from their businesses, sometimes three to four months at a time to go through these programs. And funders and DFI's are being asked to invest in these programs. And that leaves us with an important question, do they actually work? And so that's what we're gonna talk about today. The Global Accelerator Learning Initiative is a partnership between AND and Emory University and is supported by USAID, the Omidyar Network, the Wimbledon Foundation, and our Gideas and builds on some earlier work that was funded by the Kauffman Foundation. And what we're trying to do with this program is build a longitudinal data set of enterprises who have applied to accelerator programs and track them over a three year period regardless of whether or not they're accepted in the program. So what we're hoping this will do is give us a data set that we can open to researchers and academics to go in and look at questions like, does it matter if they had a mentor? Does it matter if it was a three month program or a six month program? If it was an in person program or an online program? Does it matter if it was a woman led business? Does it matter if it was an impact accelerator? All of these questions that people in the sector have right now and we don't have good information on. So right now we have 56 partners that are part of the program, 38 of which have contributed data to date from their application process. So we have data on about 3,000 enterprises that we can start to study and learn and educate the sector. So what all of these organizations have in common because accelerator is a broad word, people have very different definitions for accelerator. But what these programs have in common is that they're cohort based, they accept some entrepreneurs but reject others, they attract legally established businesses or at least businesses that are up and running, not just idea stage businesses. They have an open application process where they're receiving over 30 applications per cohort. They work with businesses that have access to the internet because that's how the follow up questionnaires are done and they make it mandatory for businesses that are applying to participate in the follow up survey. So at this point in time we have data on the 3,000 businesses that are already in the program mainly on the application data but we're already starting to see some interesting trends that help us think about how we think about accelerators and over time will help us think about what works best and the best in the right situations. So one of the early findings is that ventures with women on their founding teams are significantly less likely to attract equity investors but they're significantly more likely to report positive revenues and to have higher philanthropic investment. So for those of you in the room who are working with women led businesses this probably isn't much of a surprise, it's confirming what a lot of us have always suspected but the data on the philanthropy is really interesting and on one side it may show that philanthropists are filling the gap that investors aren't filling but it also begs the question as to whether or not these businesses are hamstringing themselves in some way by taking on philanthropic capital early on and not being subjected to the rigor of investors that they will need later on. So we're looking at topics like gender and youth, there are already some data briefs that are out on our website, you can also talk to Peter Roberts who's here from Emory University to talk more about some of these findings but these are the kinds of things we're looking at. The next thing that we're finding is that a small minority of the sample adventures measuring impacts are using things like BLab and Iris and the dominant reason for not using it is because they're actually not aware of them. So for me who's been a proponent of Iris and Gears and BLab since the beginning this is a little bit concerning but then you start to think about the stage that these businesses are in when they first go to an accelerator program. It's often the first time that they've engaged with an entrepreneurial ecosystem where they're working. They're early stage, they may not yet be thinking about measuring their impact but even when they are, they're not aware of these tools. So that makes us think that we need to do even more work than is already being done to make these tools more accessible to early stage entrepreneurs and that's what Sasha's gonna talk about in a little bit. But it also begs another question, what if all of these accelerator programs had the resources to really train these businesses on impact measurement at this stage? Not only would the businesses benefit from actually being able to understand and track their impact but it would also prepare them to work with impact investors down the line. So then the next thing we're finding is that founders with entrepreneurial experience are significantly better at attracting equity. Again, not that surprising in a US context when we're all used to the mantra of fail often and fail fast. But what does that mean in the communities where we're working where it often isn't culturally acceptable to fail? So do we as an entrepreneurial community need to be doing more not only to cultivate an entrepreneurial spirit in some of these communities but also to cultivate the acceptance of failure? Then we're also finding that ventures whose founders hold patents, copyrights and trademarks are also more likely to have equity investment and report positive revenue and employment. So for an organization like the Lemelson Foundation that is looking specifically to support investors, sorry, inventors, this is a really interesting finding. And also for us as ecosystem actors it makes us wonder should we be spending more time in countries helping to streamline the patenting processes or working with universities to help them commercialize things that are being invented in their labs? And finally, there is an understandable bias among program selectors towards ventures with more established track records. Ventures that end up participating in accelerator programs are significantly more likely to report equity and are significantly more likely to report prior revenue and employees. Again, not that surprising. Accelerators spend a lot of time on this selection process looking for the best businesses to go through their programs. But it makes us wonder could success be predicted on application data alone? And while many accelerators talk about selection as being the secret sauce, could they be diverting some of the resources away from the selection process to the training process? So these are the kinds of things we're hoping to find out as this project goes on. So this brings us back to the original question. Do accelerators work? And as my business school professor used to tell me, finance professor used to tell me, it depends because it depends on what success is. This isn't a black and white question. So let's look at a few accelerator examples. So I mentioned why Comber and Nader. Their goal is to create an environment where you can focus exclusively on getting an initial version of your business built. Startup Chile, which is often credited with spreading the entrepreneurial spirit throughout Chile, is looking to convert Chile into the innovation and entrepreneurship hub of Latin America by attracting the world's best and brightest entrepreneurs to bootstrap their startups in Chile. Agora partnerships provides entrepreneurs who are intentionally building businesses to solve social and environmental challenges in Latin America with the resources they need to grow. And Village Capital finds, trains, and funds entrepreneurs solving global problems. So while they're probably all putting entrepreneurs through very similar trainings and programs, they have very different goals in terms of what they're trying to help the businesses do. And it gets even more diverse when you talk to the funders. So when we look at some of the funders who are most interested in supporting accelerators, our Gideas Foundation aims to help entrepreneurs to build profitable businesses and contribute to the sustainable development of their communities. Omidy are a network, invest in entrepreneurs and their visionary ideas that create opportunities for people to improve their lives, their communities, and the world around them. The Lemelson Foundation uses the power of invention to improve lives by inspiring and enabling the next generation of inventors and invention-based enterprises to promote economic growth in the US and social and economic progress for the poor in developing countries. And USAID partners to end extreme poverty and promote resilient democratic societies while advancing our security and prosperity. So they're all supporting the accelerator community, but they all have very different goals in terms of the work that they're trying to do. So again, back to our original question, do accelerators work? For for-profit accelerators, this question may not matter. As long as they can generate revenue through their accelerator programs, they're gonna continue to function. But for those of us in this room who are interested in more than just financial impact, it's a really important question. As we work to build entrepreneurial ecosystems and their limited resources to be investing in training programs, we need to be better understand what are the right programs that work in the right situations for the right types of entrepreneurs. And so it's our hope through the participation of all of the accelerator sorority in the program and many of you, we can continue to generate the data to help us better understand this. Thank you.