When I started my internship at MACH37, I had not even known what a startup accelerator was. I just finished my first year in college and no content covered anything like accelerators, which is honestly disappointing, because I think accelerators have the capability to initiate tons of new ideas and improve businesses across the world. Being introduced to MACH37 was like being reintroduced to my favorite show as a kid, Shark Tank. These accelerator leaders see something in these cybersecurity startups that they may not even see in themselves. Throughout my summer, I learned so much not only on how accelerators operate, but also the work that goes on behind the scenes to evaluate startups. My goal from the beginning of my internship was to learn a new side of business, one with companies that may not even have a prototype, but interestingly enough, the experiences I had with MACH37 pushed me way farther than that goal.
Learning to Evaluate Startups, Not Just Ideas
My first project with MACH37 was analyzing the different assessment forms that a typical startup would go through when applying to join the program. I looked at different strengths and weaknesses in these assessments and compared them to alternative accelerators to see areas we might be missing or could improve. Going into this process, I assumed evaluating a startup was observing the strength of the company’s idea and how much potential revenue could be earned. What surprised me was how detailed these assessments were and how they also touched base with other crucial details for a company entering MACH37 such as the founding team’s compilation, experience, and coachability The assessments truly tested whether MACH37 is the right fit for them. A founder who is extremely technical may have no sense of how to run a business, and vice versa, but MACH37 emphasizes the importance of balancing technicality with management abilities. That isn’t just something you learn by reading the pitch deck, but it comes from sitting in on interviews and truly analyzing the “so what” of every question. This insight is what caused me to build a reframed rubric based on common evaluation criteria themes I saw between forms. It was a five-dimension chart looking at Team / Founder-Market Fit, Problem and Market Opportunity, Technology / Product, Coachability and Communication, and Cybersecurity Domain Fit so that interviewers can weight importances of certain qualities and have an apples-to-apples comparison in addition to the other data and qualitative notes about these companies.
Building a Guide for the Other Side
Since I didn’t know what it looked like to fully run an accelerator, one document in particular was my guide for the entire internship – The MACH37 Operations Playbook. At some point, my internship coordinator, Sarah, and I decided how useful it would be to have a similar guide geared towards the founders. It wasn’t much different in content, since the founders and the Ops team go through similar procedures throughout the accelerator, but it was really cool to try and understand what the process looked like from a founder point of view. I tried to highlight each step of what actually happens after you apply to then becoming an eventual alumni, what mentor meetings are for, and what founders were evaluated on throughout the process. I then created a step-by-step guide from the founder’s perspective as well as a checklist so that the founders have a clear understanding of what they’re getting into and what should be expected of them before and after each stage. It was a small addition that founders might not even need, but this project was extremely helpful in showing me what founder due diligence looked like and expectations throughout the program.
Viewing MACH37 from an Investor Perspective
Towards the end of my internship, I had the opportunity to learn more about investing in startups as well as perform tech research of my own in my final capstone project. This capstone project asked me to do something different than any of my previous experiences: I had to evaluate an entire market segment the way a tech investor or VC would and then choose startups in that segment and further evaluate their business models. With no prior knowledge of this subject, I chose non-human identity (NHI) security. NHI security seemed to be an increasingly urgent problem where businesses had thousands of API keys that were almost impossible to manage along with finding a way to identify non-human employees with the shift towards implementing AI agents in the workforce.
I went in knowing nothing about this space and came out having built a full investor-style due diligence report looking at market sizing, competitive landscape, funding, startup opportunity, unsolved problems, risk analysis, and even my own investment thesis looking at the companies within the non-human identification space. It was interesting to see the relevance of this field, with hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into these startups and multiple acquisitions happening within the past two years. I got to learn a lot more about Oasis Security, GitGuardian, and Astrix Security in particular, companies I would have never known about beforehand because usually I pitch consumer and retail stocks in school. This ultimately showed me how important it is to be aware of new industry trends in industries you might not be familiar with. I had no idea what an API key, a Non-human identity, or an AI agent was before this, but now I know how relevant they are and how we could see a boom in this market in the future.
What MACH37 taught me
If there’s one thing I learned this summer that changed the way I think about everything I’ve learned in finance thus far it’s that evaluation decisions aren’t about the initial appearance of companies. It is important to have multiple methods of analysis like applications, baseline assessments, interviews, tech research models, market research, competitor analysis, and internal business analysis that highlights which startups show promise in the future, and even then, there’s still no way to certify that thought process. However, performing due diligence and understanding whether a founder is coachable or not can really help the decision making process of companies to join and thrive in an accelerator. I came into MACH37 curious about what an accelerator even was, and I’m leaving with a strong foundation of how to evaluate startups and how to think like the investors who decide whether to fund these companies. That insight is more than I ever could have expected taking away from my short time this summer.
By Riley Warner