Week 1: Welcome and Planning

Welcome to the 2021 Tufts Venture Accelerator!

In this eleven-week-long journey, you will learn and relearn an  entrepreneurial mindset and skillset. You will make friends. You will get feedback and advice from coaches and mentors. You will keep yourself and your cohort members accountable. And above all, you will have fun!

In each of the next three months, you will be focusing on a different aspect of building your venture.

  • In June, you will be focusing on understanding your market and customer.
  • In July, you will be building a solution and developing a go-to-market strategy.
  • In August, you will figure out how to make money, build a team and everything else that goes into building a standalone venture.

You will put everything together and pitch your venture to the cohort in August, then pitch it again to inspire the entire Tufts community in September during our Innovation Month celebrations.

Many of you will say, I have already done all of this. Why do you make me repeat what I have done for my venture already?

Here’s why. No matter how far along you are in your venture, it is always good to take a step back, take stock, and review your entire venture from the basic premise of the target market and customer onward. You will relearn skills you may have become rusty in and you will discover new insights – teams frequently pivot when they repeat some of this work and uncover new data that did not appear before or new technology and market trends that have changed since they last did this research.

And so, keep calm and follow the process, starting with a 3-day bootcamp to kick off the summer. No preparation is needed – just come. We will be going over the key elements of venture creation. We will be using your own ventures as case studies to apply the principles we will review.

Let’s do this!

Tina, Elaine, Adolfo and the Tufts Entrepreneurship Center team

Protected: Accelerator: Summer 2021 Landing Page