start me up

All new businesses face challenges, but startups with big ideas walk a particularly precarious path. Accelerators aim to offer a trail map and a new pair of boots.

These outfits provide a small amount of seed capital to a handful of budding startups with the goal of incubating them into companies with enough swagger to pull in a larger chunk, potentially millions, from venture capitalists.

A big player helping startups in the Midwest is the highly competitive Gener8tor incubator, which was founded in Milwaukee in 2012 and has expanded to Madison, Beloit, Minneapolis and Detroit. Three times a year, it invests up to $140,000 in five startups and surrounds them with mentors, technical experts and connections to investors. The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. has a “Seed Accelerator” grant program aimed at drumming up more such programs.

While many accelerators are exclusive, Startup Milwaukee aims to gather everyone under a big tent, with events where startups pitch themselves to scores of investors and fellow entrepreneurs. “Milwaukee is a very siloed city,” co-founder Matt Cordio says, “and to have a real culture of innovation, we need to have people break through those barriers and focus on helping each other.”

With an assist from the now-defunct accelerator 94 Labs, Cordio in 2011 founded Servique, a startup intended to be an online marketplace to conect homeowners and contractors. Servique “failed pretty quickly,” he says, but of the 24 businesses in his “class” at 94 Labs, about half still exist. “It really created a network of entrepreneurs.”