Monday, May 21, 2018
Patriot Boot Camp: Jumpstarting Veterans' Startups, With Josh Carter
What are some of the challenges behind transitioning from the military, to creating your own startup? There are a significant number of barriers, however, Patriot Boot Camp (www.patriotbootcamp.org)--a nonprofit affiliated with Boulder's Techstars—has been working to help bridge the gap between military veterans and their spouses and the world of startups. We caught up with interim CEO Josh Carter about the next program, which his being held in Denver in September. Patriot Boot Camp's applications are open now, and due June 1st.
What is Patriot Boot Camp?
Josh Carter: Patriot Boot Camp is a Techstars affiliated nonprofit. We've taken the Techstars three month model, and compressed it into three days. We do everything a typical Techstars accelerator does, in much less time. It's a fire hose of information, funneled to veterans and military spouse entrepreneurs. We're focused strictly on technology startups. Some are in the products and services areas, and every company is a tech company. We're looking for fintech, biotech, pure SaaS solutions, all kinds of things that fall into the realm of tech startup companies. We started in 2012, when our founder, Taylor McLemore, noticed there was a large gap, with no veteran focused accelerator programs like YCombinator or 500 Startups, so he approached Techstars, and specifically, David Cohen, and asked why they were not doing this. What came out of that conversation, is although Techstars would love to support something like that, they just didn't have the ability to do it—but told him, if you do it, we'll support it. From that one conversation, sprang a nonprofit, which since 2012 has done twelve of these programs, in nine different cities. We've now helped 750 companies through the program. Collectively, they have now raised around $70M in funding, and we've now had about six exits. We've had a moderate amount of success, moving the needle for companies who want to take ideas from conception to startup, and to grow and scale those ideas.
What's the biggest challenge that veterans have in becoming successful entrepreneurs?
Josh Carter: Most of the vets transitioning out of the military fall into a couple of categories. They either want to get a job and continue their career in the private sector, or they want to create something. The issue for both tracks, is they lack a professional or personal network. Whether it's knowing someone who can help them get a job in a field, or create a company they want, they don't have a network that can help them find a job or investors. For people looking to create something, Patriot Boot Camp fills in that gap. We enable them to discover what entrepreneurship is all about, understand that the journey doesn't have to be a lonely one, and help connect them to different resources, funding, and connecting them with Fortun 500 companies, or getting them into an accelerator. When I started Patriot Boot Camp, I started as an attendee in 2014, and went through the program in Madison, Wisconsin, later went through it again in Phoenix, Arizona, and finally met some folks at Techstars. That really helped me understand the ecosystem, and I finally went through Techstars in Chicago. Having gone through this journey, It's been exciting to help folks go through the challenge. It's challenging in every single aspect, but here at Patriot Boot Camp, we're here to support them in any shape and fashion that we can.
Are there any particular advantages that veterans bring to them in the entrepreneurship process?
Josh Carter: There are a lot. Veterans, overall, already have this innate thing that makes entrepreneurs great. It's that thing that almost makes them un-hireable. I watch a great interview on this, basically, the crux of this was that there is an element of being an entrepreneur which makes you unhireable, which makes entrepreneurship so appealing. It's the same thing with veterans. One thing, is they understand how to do more with hardly anything. Bootstrapping is not a problem for a veteran. It's understanding how to be tenacious and agile and confident. That's something that veterans bring to the table, which a non-veteran typically doesn't have. There's an interesting statistic, which say sthat military veteran founders are twice as likely as their non-veteran counterparts to succeed. I think it's because they are so resourceful, tenacious, and able to recognize quickly if something in not going to work and they need to pivot. It's not that they have tunnel vision, or look at something to the detriment to the business, but they are able to figure how how to move that business and which way to make a go of it. Another thing we see, which I think relates to tech startup founders from the military, it you don't see a huge amount of founders coming out of the military, transitioning out of the military and creating tech companies. Of the 250,000 people who transition out of the military every year, of those, only 4 or 5 percent create a business and maybe out of those only 2 percent of those are tech founders. So there are a very small number who are coming out of the military and are trying to create a tech company. There are some, like myself, who get a job in industry, and work for a few startups—I was early in at Twilio, and got the bug to start something. Either way, there are lots of paths a veteran might take to reach us, and whatever that path is, we are definitely the go-to-source to help them grow their business.
How do you effectively compress that Techstars timeline into just a short time?
Josh Carter: We try to make it mentor focused. We've really focused on top-tier mentors, who can come in with some real-world experiences, and lend their advice to these founders. It's similar to Techstars Mentor Madness, in that there are about ten meetings between the two days with these folks. Those are folks like Arlan Hamilton of Backstage Capital, or Harper Reed, who was Chief Technology Officer for President Obama, or Mat Ellis of Cloudability, and Nate Boyer, who convinced Colin Kaepernick he should kneel rather than sit on the bench to show respect. These mentors have all done amazing things in their lives, and for them to come in and sit down with veteran entrepreneurs, figure out what they are doing, and have that benefit those entrepreneurs makes it a phenomenal event. It's an event filled with programing over those three days, with fireside chats, filled with workshops, everything from financial modeling to growth hacking, to understanding how to tell your story better. We try not to waste a minute, because we have a very small window with these founders. We do everything we can for this session to be valuable. We want participants to walk around with an innate sense of accomplishment, and be able to take that next step.
What advice would you give to those who are considering transitioning from the military to the world of startups?
Josh Carter: That's a good question. For those transitioning out, and looking to figure out what they like to do, I suggest they go to meetups. Go to events like Patriot Boot Cap, and figure out what makes sense within your own journey, and talk to others who have gone through their own journey. The mentors are what makes Patriot Boot Camp successful. For a long time, we had run an event that catered to the very start of the startup, the idea, but we ended up seeing companies that might already be revenue positive. So, we started to break that out and create more programs that were thoughtful about where entrepreneurs were in each stage. At the early stage, we created something called Vet Hacks, which helps those with early stage ideas, and help them figure out if those ideas have any merit. That's similar to Startup Weekend or other hackathon events, and by bringing in mentors we can guide them on their journey to build out their minimal viable product. In the first one, we had five teams that were created, and a startup created by a military spouse won that event, and they've not been invited to the Denver Patriot Boot Camp. We've been thoughtful and deliberate with our programming, and segmenting out founders in our ecosystem, so we understand what kind of help they need at whatever stage they are in. I think that's going to better drive success for the founders.
Thanks, and good luck!