How could your startup benefit from an accelerator? Precious Payload shares tips from experience with Creative Destruction Lab

This video is about Precious Payload’s experience participating in the space stream of a famous goals-drive accelerator called Creative Destruction Lab. The lessons learned by our team with this accelerator program could be applied to basically any mentor-driven accelerator out there, be it TechStars or Starburst, or even Y Combinator. Of course, this acceleration program takes place completely virtually, so this adds an additional layer of lessons learned here.

What is CDL, the Creative Destruction Lab? It’s a mentor-driven, long-process organization that has 10 different streams. The space stream is led by famous Chris Hadfield, who is the former commander of the International Space Station and, of course, the guitar-playing, picture-taking Canadian astronaut. The program spans six months, with a session every two months. The space stream has over 60 mentors, not only space professionals but also scientists, engineers, venture capitalists, and specialists from the tech community in general. 

The focus of the CDL is to help a startup that has the potential to grow big solve their business problems: how to work out a market strategy and how to build a business out of the amazing technology that they have. 

Observation 1: CDL has a great set of internal processes. They use volunteers and perfectly organize Zoom calls with 100+ participants.

Observation 2: CDL takes a lot of your time — prepare to invest dozens of hours of your time if you want to do it right.

Advice: CDL’s a goal-driven accelerator program. For every session, you need to set objectives and key results. The best way to maximize your outcomes from that is to synchronize it with your team’s internal goals for every quarter.

Observation 3: To get the perfect mentor you have to sell yourself, but not oversell. They have to understand whether they can help you, to understand whether their experience is relevant to the problems you’re having right now. And they don’t have a lot of time to make a decision.

Advice: Create a 60-second video with a good narrative that really explains what you’re building, your product, your issues, your stage. Talking to mentors, be very concrete and specific about what you ask.