Accelerators as a Format of Collaboration with Academia

3) What is more important for the HSE Inc, while selecting participants: mature and developed solution or matching with the overall vector of the accelerator?

Again, there are many different formats and tools with which you can implement the goals of the incubator. The incubator has many goals, we set them ourselves and then follow them. In acceleration, the most important criteria are the adequacy of the team. If a team is insensible, if it does not hear recommendations, if people do not take feedback, if they do not draw conclusions from their mistakes, then we cannot work with such a team.

In fact, if you start working with a startup in 90% of cases, it changes its business model at an early stage, it may shift in a different direction. This happens when the team starts proving the value of their solution, so they face reality. If the team is not ready to face the reality we are not able to help, we cannot work with such a team. Also, as I said before, there are a number of things that we will not work with due to ethical considerations. Among these, there are tobacco production, stakes, and a number of other industries.

4) Which dos and don'ts for a participant of an accelerator could you mention, based on personal experience and observations?

An adequate team is a must, if there is an adequate team, it manages to cope with any situation and challenges. Any complicated situation is basically a task, and the question is how long you can test your hypotheses and find a solution. Here, both the adequacy of the team and of the founder is important, and accordingly, there is such a quality - good resilience. For example, one of the teams became international with representation in several countries, they came to us at an early stage of ideas. Even the leading experts in their field said that their decision would not work. Nevertheless, such a good entrepreneurial resilience is also important and may drive a start-up.

5) What is the mission of accelerator?

We want as many entrepreneurs as possible to appear in the country, we set ourselves a goal that we want. We have set a goal of ten thousand new entrepreneurs. From our point of view, this could be a tangible contribution to the country's economy and this is a good ambitious goal for us. We are currently revising these goals a bit, adjusting them because we have been planning them for quite a long time. But in general, our mission is to increase the number of technological entrepreneurs in the country.

6) The acceleration provides a number of possibilities, including mentoring, resources, experts, networking. Which of them was the most valuable for participants?

From our point of view, the key thing we can give is networking. That is, we give as many points of contact as possible with opportunities with different experts, investors. That is, their communication package, opportunities, their knowledge, and they can use it. On the other hand, we help teams to solve their certain problems. We have a specific consultant to help with this task. Thirdly, we have a distinctive internal community - teams that are in the program, alumni, who also share their experience and information with each other, always help each other. This is also a part of networking.

7) How do you track the progress of participants?

When a team comes in, we make an incoming diagnosis - we define the goals and objectives of the team, for a year, for six months, for acceleration, and for three months. We use such control format in accelerator as a weekly demo - it works like a kind of sprint and for the weekly demo, the team prepares a presentation. In it they indicate a number of points: what they did last week, what they planned, what came out of it, what they will do next week, and every week with one of the employees - who understands unit economics, they discuss it, and based on this we see if there is progress or not. Of course, the progress is in increasing the number of deals, clients, contacts, in attracting investments, for someone else in something else. But the internal progress we measure by means of weekly demos because all these indicators are clear and measurable.

8) What is the general difference between the corporate acceleration program and one at the university? What is the distinctive feature of the HSE Inc?

They usually have different goals. Much depends on the corporate accelerator, but the corporate accelerator sets the following goal - either to grow internal innovations, internal entrepreneurs or to implement their solutions. Or these are different other tasks related to HR, development of the corporate culture. But as a rule, the task of internal accelerators is to grow companies in order to diversify them later. External accelerators, they set their own goals and try to achieve them. Accelerators with funds - to ensure the specified inflow of investments together with the fund. At universities - their own tasks. As far as we are concerned - among our goals we are going to increase the number of entrepreneurs, to develop innovations within the university and so on.

Appendix 4. Interview with VladislavZdorenko, Head of development of Phystech Start, co-founder in Startech.vc, CEO & Founder в Startupbootcamp Russia

As for the program, the target audience is closely linked to the mission of Phystech Start. That is, our main focus is on technological entrepreneurs. And it is not directed at all MIPT students or at students in principle. It seems to me that the average age of our participants is 30-35 years.

2) How the selection process is organized? Which are the main criteria to pass?

According to our own criteria, we look at the team, determine whether we can or cannot help, but it turns out that the competition is getting more and more complicated, so it is become harder to pass selection stage to Phystech Start, so these criteria are increasing not because of us, but because of a greater number of strong projects come, so criteria grow and increase evolutionarily. Not because of our motives or goals, but because of the projects that come to us, their level, and their background.

3) What is more important for Phystech Start, while selecting participants: mature and developed solution or matching with the overall vector of the accelerator?

We do not have a selected profile - our projects are as wide as possible. We look at the team as a whole structure - which project is strong.

4) Which dos and don'ts for a participant of an accelerator could you mention, based on personal experience and observations?

I will mention the project's focus as a fundamental criterion for success. If you do not have a focus on something particular, based on your hypothesis, on what you do, you will not be able to do everything and be successful in all directions. In the IT sector most often you should have a focus on a certain level of sales, on your target audience. People usually enter our program, already having the first sales, and some of them are even more developed, thus here the main focus is to gain a foothold, to validate their target audience. And those, who do not have a fixed focus, just keep running around and such an approach does not lead to anything good and efficient result.

It is impossible to set the wrong focus or hypothesis. No one can say and determine it until the team itself checks it out. But sometimes the question of incommensurable mindset arises. For example, the team wants to attract $1 million in investment and they still have nothing. So an entirely unrealistic focus is bad as well and could be extremely misleading.

5) What is the mission of accelerator?

The mission, rather than the goal, can be formulated as follows: when the technology that is beneficial to humanity appears, it must be helped and developed. Accordingly, our mission is to help all those, who want to become technology entrepreneurs to realize themselves and their projects. We mainly target technological entrepreneurs. From time to time, there are also projects with a different profile background. As an example - the current flow includes a project on healthy food production. There is some technology used there, but definitely it is not rocket science.

6) The acceleration provides a number of possibilities, including mentoring, resources, experts, networking. Which of them was the most valuable for participants?

Observing feedback from the majority of our alumni, everybody highlights the contacts that Phystech Start can give you. There are not many university accelerators to choose from and in general, there are few who can give relevant contacts and connections with and foundations as we do, because we have been earning and developing this experience for a long time. The contacts are provided by our mentors. We have very successful mentors, selected for the program - they help, boost, and mentor participating start-ups. Obviously, we invite external experts as well. Secondly, we have always helped companies with launching pilots. This contribution follows from the first one - because there are a lot of contacts, we easily identify companies that need contacts from the industry. We find the appropriate contact: before the pandemic, we organize face-to-face meetings and introduced them to each other immediately. It is clear that there are many more opportunities provided by the accelerator. But these are exactly what sets us apart from other similar programs. The important thing is that these words are confirmed by the start-ups themselves that have passed the program, they all mention these strengths and confirm that they stand out from the list of opportunities. In addition, we help some project to enter international markets, sometimes we give investment to selected projects, we helped someone to attract investment, but you can meet such opportunities in any program. And another important thing is that we really understand technological projects, we can work with them, understand their need and challenges, evaluate them, give them targeted assistance, especially expert assistance.

7) How do you track the progress of participants?

As soon as the program starts, we put up a banner on a huge screen that says we do not owe you anything, then we literally repeat the same idea five times. For participants the program is free, they do not give us any share of their projects, so they only get benefits from us. You do everything by yourself, this is your business and you are fully responsible for it and for its progress as well. They fill in all sorts of tables, we see what progress there is, but overall, it is more on their conscience. As I remember in one set they were even going to expel the participants because they did not fill in anything, they did literally nothing at all. Accordingly, those who did nothing at all were expelled, because of it impossible to track the progress.

8) What is the general difference between the corporate acceleration program and one at the university? What is the distinctive feature of Phystech Start?

Phystech Start is a very adaptive program. It includes some universal courses, which all participants take regardless of their existing background.

In general, we adjust to a particular track, see what they need. Somewhere we just include this into the general stream of the program and somewhere it is more efficient to give it privately to a team. So the course is very adaptive and flexible. How to communicate with journalists - we have a constant series of workshops, running with the support of Rusbase, it is universal and useful for everyone regardless of level and experience.

Appendix 5. Interview with Alexey Lukasov, CEO in Phystech Accelerator

1)What is the target audience of Phystech Accelerator?

Originally we had two big programs: “I Track” and “MIPT Artificial Intelligence Week”. The fact is that both of these programs were not very standard. The idea was that we had a partner organization in the USA, which was highly engaged in sales in the field of artificial intelligence, the idea was the following - there were start-ups, during the course of the program they got a rough idea and prepared materials, built their work to enter the U.S. market with their products. Then some of them, who were the most upgraded, received support by the partner organization to enter the U.S. market. I mean our partner Data Monsters did not want to sell consulting services to participants, they earned by providing services in the field of development of artificial intelligence solutions for companies in the USA, so they expanded their showcases - what they later could offer to their customers.

In fact, we promised, and for a number of projects we had fulfilled this promise - to get the first orders from the USA. This was the key goal for the first program. In the second Artificial Intelligence program we also focused on the U.S. market, but there was also a big connection to MIPT itself and we formed a pool of contractors for the MIPT National Technical Initiative Artificial Intelligence Center. Accordingly, they theoretically had a flow of potential orders for artificial intelligence from Russian corporations, and this center needed contractors to distribute these orders to them. It was a search and initial training of such contractors.

2) How the selection process is organized? Which are the main criteria to pass?

In fact, we looked at the projects to have sales, we looked at the team - do they required expertise in entrepreneurship. The first program included participants from all over the country. It was linked to MIPT directly - a laboratory of business solutions, through the collaboration with you receive an ability to land in MIPT, to promote the non-intrusive development of the MIPT system. The second program also had an optional link to MITI. The link was as follows - contractors could appear from the side of MIPT.

3) What is more important for Phystech Accelerator, while selecting participants: mature and developed solution or matching with the overall vector of the accelerator?

Depends very much on the setting of the task of the accelerator itself. That is now a lot of accelerators with absolutely different goals, based on it and selected start-ups. If the accelerator is about start-ups, about a scalable business model, then there is a need for entrepreneurs, you need a project that gives hope for a scalable business model. If there is a specific accelerator, for example, one on the artificial intelligence, then the project needs to be the same as the profile. And if a wider business incubator is like IIDF, it is important for them to create a certain number of working places. If you look at graduates of IIDF, you can understand that with their projects, they could not claim to be a start-up in any format, to scale up even theoretically to the whole world.

4) Which dos and don'ts for a participant of an accelerator could you mention, based on personal experience and observations?

The most important thing is that the team need to have a budget. We had a problem, facing with the fact, that we had a budget only for operational activities, but we did not have a budget to give it to start-ups, including entering into equity. This is a basic resource that allows us to deal with the project. And then, based on the goals of the accelerator. For example, IIDF had previously looked to the team to have some strong expertise in either marketing or product, or these people have proven themselves in several other businesses.

5) What is the mission of accelerator?

Our structure were originally created to develop the MIPT's entrepreneur ecosystem. It is accelerators that contribute to this goal as well. And we realized that we have an entrepreneurial system in the high-tech field and with a real market focus. And there were some difficulties with that. We realized that in MIPT these activities do not bring enough value, as they could, that is why we changed our direction. Now we want to attract R&D orders in order to get additional funding in the specialized laboratory (business informatics). So that there will be students, postgraduate students and employees, who have experience working with foreign clients, so that we can form a kind of "field", on which in the future there could be teams that are able to lead quality international projects.

The fact is that a lot of projects are now called start-up accelerators. But in general, start-ups are about a project that is looking for a scalable business model. And the scalable business model is not about the Russian market, it is about the international market, not just business accelerators or business incubators. That is why we need projects that can enter the international market and for this we need people who have experience working in international markets. The issue of increasing the number of such highly qualified employees in MIPT we are trying to solve now.

6) The acceleration provides a number of possibilities, including mentoring, resources, experts, networking. Which of them was the most valuable for participants?

The first program is an opportunity to make first sales in the USA, and an opportunity to learn how such contracts are made. The opportunity to appear and receive the appropriate training with the direct participation of people who already receive these contracts.

7) How do you track the progress of participants?

There were trackers, so the process is quite standard. There were two-week iterations: at the beginning of the week, a call with the tracker, at the end iteration there was a preparation for the reporting event. The trackers themselves were guest experts. And Data Monsters employees and other involved experts - they were the ones who gave expert analysis, made workshops, and gave methodological materials.

8) What is the general difference between the corporate acceleration program and one at the university? What is the distinctive feature of HSE Inc?

The standard format of the university accelerator is Phystech Start. We have a different goal. The founders had different ideas on how to establish a relationship between the start-up and corporation, so we are working in this direction. We did not have clearly defined and formalized goals based on the mission.

Appendix 6. Interview with ArtemPortnov, Owner and Founder в Seetapmobyle app, Participant of the HSE Inc

When I started working on my startup, I didn't even know what it actually was. I just had an idea of what I wanted to do. I saw at various exhibitions, at meetings, that people exchange their business cards, I knew that they have a need to make the right contact. At that time I did not know yet what product research looked like, what a case study was, why the company had to test all of the hypotheses, etc. At that moment I just hired the guys, they were highly motivated by my idea. I supposed that I had such power of persuasion that the guys caught fire with the idea. They were students and we started to develop it, we did not really know what a product was or how to work with it. We even participated in the competition, organized in Skolkovo, and took 7th place, without having a product, we had only a presentation and an idea, after that I thought that we should develop and get information about how it should be done in a more holistic way. That was the reason why I applied to several accelerators that I found by searching on the Internet. So I just realized that I needed to find a way to promote my startup, I found out that there was an accelerator format for covering this need and I applied for several accelerators. Soon I got a phone call and an interview, the interviewer asked me on future plans, ambitions and I went they invited me to the “sandbox” stage. It was not my decision to apply to this particular program. I was just looking at all the options that could help me. But the fact that I got there after graduation - I am absolutely glad about the result, my team managed to reach. During the HSE Inc I meet a lot of guys, who also make their own start-ups, we keep in touch and it is very cool, we exchange our experience, expertise and just have a good time together.

2) Which was your aim for the acceleration? Did you manage to reach it through acceleration?

Of course, like everyone I want the startup to make huge money, to attract investment, and after accelerator, I may become another “Zuckerberg”. But the main goal that I immediately set myself after passing the selection - if you do not know what a startup is - you need to learn. And I get all the necessary basis from the HSE Inc.

3) The acceleration provides a number of possibilities, including mentoring, resources, experts, networking. Which of them was the most valuable for your team?

Among the top priorities for me, there are useful contacts and a vector for further development. Indeed, I cannot tell there is much knowledge provided. There are certain lectures, seminars, but mostly I remember one top-level tracker Daniel Khanin. He is direct and every time I communicate with him he asks the right and necessary questions: what have you done, what will you do and why do you need to do it at all. These are absolutely right questions that make you sit and think more and more and then come to your conclusion - why am I doing this, whether it will lead me to the goal, and what I will do next week, and how these actions will affect the result. Every Friday we got the pitches and me as a participant pass through several stages: firstly you worry, and when after 4-5 pitches, you change your attitude and think that it is really cool, you want to perform to show you best to the audience, especially when there are a lot of people, for example, pizza pitch. And it is pure networking, you perform, you communicate, it does not even matter if you get an investment or not.

4) How was the process of progress tracking organized during the acceleration?

The first time I came there, I did not understand anything, to be honest. What were the things, everyone were talking about: tracking, pitching, for what did they stand for. Pitch, ok I also roughly understood that it was some kind of presentation. But tracking, how to track progress, why there were different iterations, how to do them - that I did not absolutely understand. I understood it only on the third day when the tracker was already arguing about what I was doing here and how I was tracking my progress. But without such words and direct instructions on what to do, I probably would never have understood what it is, I would not be interested in it at all. Now I am the one who has already learned how to prioritize tasks. I know what sprints are, learn Scrum, Agile, and Kanban. I even know now how just in one iteration develop a part of the product that you can quite use after. Nobody explained to me that before, so it was interesting to understand. Tracking was something brand new to me that I had to understand and learn. In general, the tracking in the accelerator is necessary to understand, track your progress, and follow steps in the accelerator. Because even negative tracking is a measure of dynamics. You fail, but you get out of it after and you draw certain useful conclusions. If you do everything steadily, it is just an indicator of a lack of activity. And this tracking pattern is shown to investors afterward on pitches, on demo days, they say that in three months the start-up has gone this way, here it has failed (and this is absolutely applicable for all participants), then here they have learned how to sell, then they have sold something and here you can scale them. And this means that you can invest money into them, making the investment at an early stage, buy cheap stocks and options. You need tracking inside an accelerator for that purpose. And for the founder, you need constant tracking to control your project, to understand the next steps.

5) Which dos and don'ts for a participant of an accelerator could you mention, based on personal experience and observations?

The first thing I strongly recommend is to fail your project. You need to learn to make mistakes and make as many of them as possible. The more mistakes you make, the more you understand what it is. You do not have to be afraid of making mistakes, you do not have to be afraid of failing your project, you do not have to learn that your ideas are worthless. I think it is the most important thing for a start-up to understand in time that your idea is not worth anything. Then you will be emotionally stable to any disappointments, you will learn to look at different products and your ideas soberly - you will be critical of them and first check them and then implement them.

And another recommendation is a constant self-study. I started my first project without graduating from university. And now there is an urgent need for basic knowledge - mathematics, economics, psychology, all sciences. I discovered behavioral economics - a new topic in economics, based on irrationality of human behavior, I want to know more about it, I have already started to apply several methods of this model in products, created some stages, manifestoes.

6) Could you name the distinctive feature of the HSE Inc - what makes it special among other acceleration programs?

I have nothing to compare it to, as you can see. The HSE Incis distinguished by its innovative and start-up friendly atmosphere, semi-family, semi-startup, everyone is interested in how to make projects. The people who work there, they are very cool experts, I like talking to him, the way they are charged with the idea. It is very cool and it inspires you to do something, move and develop your project too.

Appendix 7. Interview with Georgy Parygin, CEO of Skladobot, Participant of the HSE Inc

It was recommended to me. When I received government funding in the form of a grant, I was advised to pass an acceleration program. Earlier I participated in various events from HSE Inc. Mikhail Ermanhimself, head of the incubator invited me to join, so I could not refuse.

2) Which was your aim for the acceleration? Did you manage to reach it through acceleration?

From our team, I was most involved in the process. The rest of the team was made up of students and was periodically absent. The goal was to try to run our project wisely by taking all advantages of the experience of the experts from the incubator.

3) The acceleration provides a number of possibilities, including mentoring, resources, experts, networking. Which of them was the most valuable for your team?

The best part for me is the incubator experts. Round tables, they are also called "expert tube". Here you practice pitching, you present the ideas. And the connections of these experts - who could introduce your project to the right person. That is how I was introduced on Facebook to the right representatives of the corporations.

On the other hand, I work in a very narrow sphere - robotics, there are few experts in it. I only met one person within the accelerator and I cannot say that his feedback was valid and useful because there was a biased attitude to the project. There are experts, but no willingness to share knowledge. That is, very often an expert gives general knowledge instead of real and valuable sharing experience, leaves more questions than gives answers.

4) How was the process of progress tracking organized during the acceleration?

Sometimes real tasks of start-ups differ from those to be finished within the acceleration framework. And participants had to perform them, it was a terrible obstacle to development. So I had plenty of operational jobs: to find a team because it broke up, to pick up suppliers. You see, a lot of tactics, no time for strategy. Trackers just do not take it into account when setting goals. In the accelerator, they do not even make a division into the fact that there are already teams with a legal entity, a well-established team, and there are those who have only an idea yet. The approach should be different, they cannot be treated equally, they cannot be given the same tasks. But I understand the organizers: they set the task, understand the efficiency, give feedback. If something is not clear in it, they explain it. In theory, everything works perfectly - but in practice, not everything is so calm. There is an example - they give a goal: collect the first applications for your product. But to do this, you need to prepare a website, branding, sometimes participants at this stage and get stuck - can not find a resource for technical solutions. And the organizers have a burning plan, they are waiting for your actions, your development, otherwise they are not interested in working with you like this. I gained a powerful experience, but I spent a lot of nerves. For a while, I even tried to finish it all but decided to get to the end. It also affected the relationship within the team.

5) Which dos and don'ts for a participant of an accelerator could you mention, based on personal experience and observations?

I would advise you to try to implement your idea at least on paper, at the prototype level from the very beginning. Whether it is a device or software, prepare layouts. And try to pack it all, to present it through a landing, for example, on Tilda free platform. And even try to make the first sales. When the first lids come, potential customers - call them up, ask them why they chose it, check customers, find out what motivation they had to add your product to the cart, conduct research. And try already with this feedback to move in the incubator. You do not want to spend too much time looking for a team. If it is not there, it is quite normal to start like this. The team is highly dependent on the idea, and if it changes, you need to be flexible and ready to change the team, because you may need other specialists already. Try to make prototypes, many and different. And another advice - do not look for the idea of funding, the idea itself is worth zero rubles. This is misleading perception, it is easier for an investor to put money in the bank for an insured deposit. This is a naive and erroneous approach - a venture capitalist will never give money, so that then just forget about them, especially in Russia.

6) Could you name the distinctive feature of Phystech Start - what makes it special among other acceleration programs?

I can compare it to IIDF because I know it well. Both of them are state organizations. The good thing about IIDF is that important ideas can be pushed at the legislative level. For example, the delivery of medicines has been allowed. Honestly, I highly doubt the ethics of such pressure levers. An entrepreneur thinks in the wrong categories then. Usually, you have very limited resources and you use your wit to distribute them, squeeze out the maximum, get the result. And not the other way around - create all the conditions and then work on your own. HSE Inc is better, it does not have such pressure methods. There is a very competitive approach in IIDF, if you missed the pitches, you will be immediately kicked out. And in HSE Inc, the attitude is more personal and warm: everyone discusses with you, tries to understand, motivate you.

Appendix 8. Interview with Daria Kroshkina, CEO &Founder inStudyFree, Participant of Phystech Start

This is the only time in the history of our startup that I just decided to follow the advice and will of other member. At that time we had a small team and there was a guy, who was a graduate of MIPT, he might have wanted to go back to his alma mater with some start-up. So he convinced the whole team to participate, he started to talk, it was the only time I agreed and said let'sgo.

2) Which was your aim for the acceleration? Did you manage to reach it through acceleration?

I mean, at that time we got out of IIDF accelerator, we have already knew how to sell, we have developed well, but our argument to go was that there was a cool community of mentors, experts, alumni of MIPT and we would receive ability to support contacts with all of them. So we decided to go.

3) The acceleration provides a number of possibilities, including mentoring, resources, experts, networking. Which of them was the most valuable for your team?

At that point, I would say the expertise is not about this program. Maybe now the situation has changed in some direction. We have something to compare it with - IIDF. IIDF has a lot of trackers inside the accelerator. So the situation is absolutely different from Phystech Start, of course. In other words, there are people, coaches in the Phystech Start, who have seen something somewhere, brought something to some market. But such expertise for mature start-up projects is not enough, maybe for beginners, it would be helpful. We received some help with useful contacts. The coolest experience during the program was the invited experts from IIDF.

In terms of accelerator mentors, a meeting with Phystech Start graduates are very formal - just one meeting. In our case there were two of them, literally for 20 minutes and at the very end of the accelerator. So there was no way you were getting the effect of working with them.

What did they really help us with - if we needed lower-level expertise - like finding a proper traffic managers or solve some other tasks, they taught us to do exactly the right things here. The expertise inside was not enough, as I have already mentioned, but they helped to find it externally - to connect you with start-ups that are a few steps ahead or with experts that is at a higher level.

4) How was the process of progress tracking organized during the acceleration

There was not much tracking, as I explained above.

5) Which dos and don'ts for a participant of an accelerator could you mention, based on personal experience and observations?

For participation, it was useful that what we have already known how to sell. We wanted to start customer development of platforms, so we came with consulting, we did not have a product, and we thought that would start somehow at the technical university, would develop a prototype of the future platform that we had already had. Organizers told that solving this problem was not a priority and for them it was more interesting to show that we had already known how to make money. And if we could sell something for a hundred thousand, then prove it. And at some point, we sank into sales, and I made a volitional decision and said that we would choose our own price. I mean, I would not say that our case of participation was successful.

6) Could you name the distinctive feature of Phystech Start - what makes it special among other acceleration programs?

A special feature of a start-up team is its leader and co-founder. And the distinctive feature of Phystech Start is Vlad Zdorenko, who is its current head. And he is able to build strong PR of the accelerator in terms of public positioning, in terms of useful contacts. I cannot say that it somehow increases the quality of the acceleration program, but it contributes to the overall recognition on the market because of active positioning. Due to this, those startups who do not have access to such contacts and networking resources - it is just important for them to be friends, communicating during acceleration. There is certain brand awareness and you can get a lot of useful contacts here. Moreover, we were participating in the beginning, their growth began later. Now we take part in the SKYDECK accelerator in California. And in the summer, we waiting for participating in Techstars in New York. We were often told by the trackers during Phystech Start that we were far away, that we had a small billing, that is, we were told to get to China, the American accelerators are not for us. They strongly pushed us to take money from Russian angels. I mean, it is a question of motivation.

Appendix 9. Interview with MatveyKukuy, CEO of Amixr, Participant of Phystech Start

The crucial point for our team Phystech Start does not take any shares of the participant's project. Usually in Moscow accelerators take share and it is quite significant, and if we had given 7-10% of the share and registered a legal entity in Russia, we wouldn't have been able to raise any investment later. Secondly, we have got this program among the recommended ones. Thirdly, it seems to us that the organizers of the acceleration treat the teams very respectfully and diligently. When we were looking for an acceleration program and were considering other options, we came across the fact that there were accelerators who carelessly treated the participants. The position was the following - we, as the organizers, had a lot of start-ups and we had no need to pay our time, efforts to all of them. Phystech Start is very tactful and respectful of every participant, and we like and much appreciate such approach, we immediately find out it was a professional approach.

2) Which was your aim for the acceleration? Did you manage to reach it through acceleration?

Yeah, we had a goal. The first one was based on what we really went for and the second one was what we had to specify when we had an introductory meeting. They brought us together and said: “You need to formulate a goal now”.

With regard to the goal that we really came for, Phystech Start helped us to reach it. While we did not manage to reach the second goal. Our first goal was rather simple - to develop our project, being among non-programmers. Because we were constantly writing the software, and it dragged you out. When you spend a week on the computer without talking to anyone you simply lose your social skills, you stop navigating your project, you forget why you need it at all. We were looking for an accelerator to shake us up. Once a week there was a lecture at Phystech Start - so we had a need to go out and to visit it, to listen, and to get ourselves out of the routine. That was our initial goal - to get ourselves out of the existing context. With regard to the second goal that we formulated at the beginning - sincerely, it was an answer to the question, how many clients we were going to have.At the time we started we had just one. So we randomly decided to set the number 100 as a goal. Indeed we didn't reach this number during the acceleration.

3) The acceleration provides a number of possibilities, including mentoring, resources, experts, networking. Which of them was the most valuable for your team?

Originally we develop our project with the scope for the American market. To be honest, we are almost the only player in the market, thus there are no experts at all. Phystech Start gives us access to experts, to quality networking, but it was not quite applicable to our particular situation. To illustrate this I will provide an example. We could easily find almost 50 contacts of highly professional marketing specialists, but none has relevant experience in sales in the American market. In this sense, we manage to get ourselves out of the existing context, but it is impossible to obtain all the practical benefits of the acceleration that we need. But one of the guest experts was really cool, the sales expert. The expert gave us several lessons on sales, it was cool and versatile. We used this experience in the future.

Surprisingly, we found the investment during the demo day. We gave a speech during the demo day as usual and when the demo day ended our investor came directly to us. Now it sounds like a fairytale story - almost everyone tells such things about accelerators, but actually it does not happen with anyone. But it happened to us in reality. Of course, it is also the merit of the accelerator.

The other thing, I would like to mention is that the accelerator itself became our investor. Their model was that they search for projects to invest in the best ones. It turned out that they chose us.

Really such an untypical story. But actually every story from an accelerator sound untypical. I mean for four accelerators I've already passed, no standard story leads to success. An accelerator is a place, where you have a chance to generate your own unique story, some kind of path to your success.

4) How was the process of progress tracking organized during the acceleration?

It was really the standard one. The process included the following: the table to fill in, the tracking protocol itself. One of the trackers was top-level - DmitriySokolov. And again we faced a mishap. It turned out that we did not clearly understand the stage of our company. Our company was at the stage so-called “just sit and work on your product” and we do not have a need to show up loudly. So as a part of the acceleration process, we arranged the meetings with the tracker on a weekly basis and tried to discuss the business metrics with him - in fact, they remain stable and flat. So we made three sales by the end of the accelerator, as you remember we had come with one sale. As you can see this is a statistically insignificant number. If we raised our sales, for example, from 750 to 810, it would really make sense. But the growth from one to three, would not make any sense.

The tracking process is still applicable when there is a certain process, a team works on it and you can test the hypothesis with weekly sprints. Moreover, to be able to work on tracking the team should get finances. And they should be really significant because you need to attract true professionals. Moreover, tracking could be relevant for projects, which got a flexible product, which can be transformed through several stages and iterations. We really tried hard to pull our product, we developed numerous tables, but came to the point that at the end of all of our action meetings we discussed almost the same things. After all, we had the only hypothesis - to launch our product. It seemed clear and understandable. But in fact, its boundaries were blurred. In our case, we did not know when exactly we would be launched. We were working on the product, which already existed offline. But for some uncertain reason, it did not seem attractive to people. So we constantly remained in a cycle of researching their behavior, so we needed to determine small improvements to the product to bring to the 99% perfection stage so that our potential clients began to use it.

5) Which dos and don'ts for a participant of an accelerator could you mention, based on personal experience and observations?

We used Phystech Start to know its team better, they became our investors and we started working closely with them. We came to them with a number of tasks: provide us access to certain niche expertise, provide us with the relevant contact, to write an article about us and our participation. All these things were among their expertise, so they all know how to do it very well. So important advice, which may be applicable not only for Phystech Start but for any other acceleration - as soon as you pass a formal selection stage start to build your relationship with the accelerator team. Because the team consists of people - it is important to keep in mind. Some startups treat them as a service. This is an absolutely wrong approach, they are not service providers for participants, after all. Still, the main thing is to communicate more and more. Building strong relationships with this team of cool experts is probably the most relevant and useful thing I can advise.

Another important advice - do not ever do something when you do not understand why it is necessary. When we tried and attended the meetings with the tracker, of course, we had to raise the question - how exactly we may stop this irrelevant format or make it more suitable for our stage. Because they could to adapt. Moreover, I am sure that they would understand our point and find a possible solution to make these meetings more efficient and valuable. I mean, if you do not understand why it is necessary, do not hesitate to ask the team to remove it or to redo it until it becomes useful for you. Otherwise, it turns into the format, when the participants are just silent listeners, the accelerator does something on their own - but no one understands whether it is useful at all or not.

6) Could you name the distinctive feature of Phystech Start - what makes it special among other acceleration programs?

I cannot state that it is a suitable program for those, who want to start their sales, no. Also, I advise not to search here for investments either, except that they can invest in the selected project themselves. I think Phystech Start works as a good starting point, so it is better to apply when you have already learned a lot, when you have already known, how to do everything. I mean, you have spent significant time, listening to all online lectures and other educational formats. So imagine the situation - you are a programmer, previously you left your job to make a startup, now you have to learn some new skills, develop your code, and somehow develop your networking. Phystech Start is a cool entry point to start working in all directions. To find investors, to look for sales, to get useful contacts, to get to know the alumni. That is, something concrete through them to close it is not a hundred percent probability. But to start introducing yourself to this world is about this program. But it is useful only if you are 100% immersed in the project if you have already done your “homework” on developing a knowledge basis. You do not have to go to them for specific information like how to sign an investment agreement. There is no need to ask them how to write a cold email. You should go to them when you have already written a cold email, it worked or it did not work, and you could discuss the others how it worked, they could advise you how to fix it.

Appendix 10. Interview with AleksandrKozhevnikov, Co-Founder & CBDO in Voxi AI, Participant of Phystech Start

At the time, we were looking for an acceleration program that could help us. We were considering the key indicators: with whom the program got partnership, whether there were any positive comments and feedback left by previous participants about it. Because to be honest not all acceleration programs in Russia are equally useful. And it creates a twofold situation. On the one hand, participation in Phystech Start is free. On the other hand, they do not invest anything. But there is an option to cooperate with the declared partners. That is the key factor that influences our choice of this program.

2) Which was your aim for the acceleration? Did you manage to reach it through acceleration?

It is clear that it makes sense to rely on some program if you are in an acceleration program, for example somewhere in the U.S., when you have no experience in this market and it is very important for you to listen and implement all the tasks, goals without asking questions. In Russia because we had previous experience in IIDF, but we decided not to participate, because we were not satisfied with the conditions they provided and before that, we had a lot of communication on different programs, so there were no expectations of learning. We already had the experience, we already had other accelerators as a background, thus we did not expect to hear anything groundbreaking. Hence we were interested in corporate partners, in networking. For example, there were meetings with interesting professionals like Sergey Belousov, other representatives of Runa Capital, so networking during the program was crucial for our development through acceleration.

When in 2014-2015 IIDF began to actively promote themselves as an accelerator, when they were supported by the state, they played the key institutional role in this market. Within five years, they have said that it has been important to conduct customer-development, conduct problem interviews, build your sales process, and so on. That is, what they did from the very beginning. In 80% of cases, all of those participating start-ups were founded by engineers, who had no relevant experience in building any systematic business processes with millions of rubles in turnover. And they have taken this niche and mastered that competence. But when in 2018-2019 the phase of saturation began: the accelerators were born massively and those, who were betting just on some training module as a basis for a program, in my opinion, just missed their time and resources. In 2018 Y Combinator launched its online school for start-ups for free, where you could listen to the same lectures, and in addition, there were organized called by different groups - I participated there as well. Listening for several times that you need to talk to a client is very obvious. Someone may need it, but that is not what most companies are looking for at early stage - it is either a networking or direct investment. But as long as the market is growing with investments at an early stage, things will get worse. The only option remains the networking. But if you manage to show your progress later, you potentially can attract some investment.