#tomorrowish

Planning - 100% - Completed

Handwritten draft - 100% - Completed (2 pages front/back and 1 page front)

Tomorrowish has just been accepted as a MassChallenge Finalist!

That is the excellent news we got last Tuesday and you can read more about that direct announcement in the press release also on this blog.

Why this is a good thing beyond the simple fact we are in the running for prize money totaling over a million dollars is something I’ve had to explain multiple times to family and less entrepreneurial friends. Frankly, this isn’t about the prizes, though they’d be nice to get. The mentorships are better that “a nice to have” and I have high hopes they will give our team much needed insight into the huge number of challenges we are going to encounter.

The big deal, the thing that not only makes incubators valuable and useful, but also what sets MassChallenge apart from the other incubators, and accelerators out there is scale. MassChallenge is the worlds largest startup accelerator program with 125 finalists taking competing in the same space for the $1M in cash prizes and over $4M in services. All those startups will be working out of the same space interacting on a daily basis. When I compare this to the other excellent accelerator we were short listed for with only 5 startups, the potential for synergies and transferring knowledge should be obvious. In this case the old military saw that “Quantity has a quality all its own.” really highlights the quality provided by this huge quantity of passionate, talented, naive, grizzled, clever, hustling, creative entrepreneurs.

I personally have years long relationships with key personnel or founders of at least two other startups that made it to the finals. The interconnectedness of all these companies is a powerful force to Get Things Done in new innovative ways. Nate Aune a founder of one of a very cool finalist company, Appsembler and I have known each other since 2006 when I helped out with a Python based CMS (Plone) Meetup group he ran. That was even before I decided to really make a go of being an entrepreneur, but Nate was already doing it, and seeing the stuff he and others were working on at that meetup and others definitely helped me make the decision to jump into entrepreneurship.

I see MassChallenge as a great opportunity to interact and share all the crazy energy, experience, and innovation that comes from getting all these startups in one place. When I’m at the gym and lots of people are working their asses off it keeps me highly motivated to get off mine, and I plan on spending the next few months working my ass off surrounded by a bunch of talented people working just as hard.