You can ask my friends and family, I’m super competitive, I love board games and I would NEVER cheat in a game, like EVER… It kills the fun and challenge, and that’s the whole point (at least in games)
But in business… that’s another story. Cheating is the name of the game.
If you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t want to build another boring bread company and compete with every baker in the world. You’ll NEVER win, and you will certainly never reach venture scale – not unless you have net negative carb bread 🙂
The problem is, you have NO unfair advantage.
There’s no reason for folks to buy your bread vs someone else’s.
It’s a fight to win EVERY single customer EVERY single time – it comes down to taste, price and availability… (hence why food is such a low margin business).
But if you’ve got access to cheaper flour or zero-carb flour or have connections to every supermarket in your state, maybe there’s something there… because you can cheat and use your unfair advantages to build a real business.
But without an unfair advantage, you’re just an SME…
And SMEs don’t raise from VCs – they can’t reach massive, world-altering scale.
Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing bad about that. But if you want to build a category-leading, climate-altering company, you NEED unfair advantages – you NEED to hit scale.
That means finding YOUR unfair advantage.
For us with 4WARD.VC, it’s our network – we “cheat” by investing in incredible companies in 4WARD.VC’s Partner in Clime Climate Accelerator and introducing them to 30-100+ super relevant corporates, partners and clients, all with the goal of landing them 2-5+ MAJOR new customers or pilots within our short 12 week program.
We use our network and that of our 100+ super-connected mentors to open dozens of warm doors so our companies instantly become worth 2-5x.
And if you know anything about VC, you know funds that return 5x are in the upper upper echelon – yet that is our goal for every single companie within 2-3 months of exiting the accelerator.
How cool is that? Helping companies move not 1 or 2, but 10 or 20 steps forward – that is “cheating,” that’s an “unfair” advantage. And it is why incredible climate companies apply for our ultra hands-on, networked growth hacking accelerator
Because climate innovators need a “Partner in Clime” 🙂, they need someone 100% focused on them and their success (not busy with a cohort of 50+ companies…)
That’s our unfair advantage – the 10k+ VCs & CVCs, accelerators & incubators, corporates, angels and ecosystem players we’ve connected with within the past 12 months. Add to that our Slack communities, exploding email newsletter and The Startup Tank show and community and we’ve built a pretty unique unfair advantage for climate companies.
And the only thing better than “cheating” to boost your own business is when someone else “cheats” for you, a “Partner in Clime,” so to speak!
So, if you’re a CRAZY ASS climate founder tackling a MASSIVE real world problem and want to unlock your “unfair” advantage for growth, sales and funding, be sure to apply for 4WARD.VC’s Partner in Clime Climate Accelerator.
And be sure to let us know what your “unfair” advantage is… 🙂
PS. There are no cohort deadlines – we take 1-2 new companies per month, because why leave great companies hanging?