Announcing our newest programs in Bengaluru and Tokyo, and how the program works

Zeroth started by Tak Lo with a single office in Hong Kong almost two years ago, and even though the initial focus was Asia, we have invested in AI/ML startups across the world. Our vision is to be a global force of entrepreneurship.

We are happy to announce the opening of two new programs, one in Bengaluru, India and in Tokyo, Japan — run by Sachin Unni and Hajime Hotta respectively. Sachin and Hajime have been part of Zeroth for the last few programs and are well known among our founders already. We are also running our Hong Kong program, which is aimed at investing worldwide, as well.

All three programs, which are part of the 4th Zeroth cohort, are due to start on November 26th, 2018.

Having three programs running at the same time gives us the ability to fund more teams, which means fewer rejections of startups. Having to say ‘no’ to amazing startups just because we hit our quota for a program was a particularly unpleasant experience and we want to reduce our rejection rates.

As per previous programs we invest in startups from anywhere in the world, not just Asia.

If you are interested in applying please reach out to any of us on social media or email. Or you can apply directly at https://zeroth.acceleratorapp.co/application/new

What happens during the program

This is the question that every entrepreneur asks and we haven’t done a great job of explaining so far what exactly happens during a program so would like to correct that. Partly it was because over the first three cohorts we changed content, structure, and approach. Like a startup we did our own A/B testing and iterative design. We are at a point where we know where the border of the canvas is, we are happy with the results, and we can replicate the program outside Hong Kong and start scaling.

The program runs for 90 days, but only the first two weeks and the last two weeks are on site. Moving for 90 days can be prohibitive for entrepreneurs with families, parents, kids, pets etc, and also ends up eating into the money invested. We expect the CEO to attend, because that’s the person investors wants to engage with, as well as the person responsible for the feature roadmap of the product, which could be the CTO or a Product Manager- and might as well be the same as the CEO. Some startups attended the program with all the founders, and if that’s the case we will find a way to accommodate you and provide office space.

During the 4 weeks on site we are going to have strategy sessions to work on use cases, validating them, recruiting, and building traction. Almost every day we have angels or VCs coming over to listen to pitches and give feedback. We try to expose companies to valuable feedback without overwhelming them. We also have a network of mentors that can give hand-on help on things like improving data collection, building models, classifiers, as well as having generous cloud credits from all the cloud providers (and if you are a ML vendor that want to give free trial credits to our portfolio, please do get in touch).

The end of the program is marked by Demo Day, even though fundraising starts when the program starts. DD is just an arbitrary date by which a startup should have everything in order to tap into external sources of capital. We have had pre-product companies getting investor commitments 48 hours after the start of the program.

We take weekends off by hiking, sightseeing, and relaxing.

The remote part of the program consists in weekly group calls with some assignments (not just for the startup, we work with you to cross out items from your to-do lists).

Right now a third of our portfolio companies have raised about $750k+ each, with the top two having raise significantly more. In venture relying on averages it’s always a bit misleading but we want to be upfront about the value that we can add and our own track record.

After the program we support portfolio companies for their own fundraising and that usually gets sorted in about 60 days. Beyond that we continue our relationship with Zeroth alumni and business development opportunities and M&A. We don’t take board seats.

As it’s always the case with Zeroth startups, if we decide to invest and work together we will support you through the program, and try to be as flexible as possible.

If there is anything that is not addressed here, please comment and I will update the post, thanks.