Starting a company is easy. Scaling a successful company and making an impact in an industry is hard.
At Galvanize, we measure our success on our ability to materially impact the latter. The more we can help move the needle for the entrepreneurs and startups on our campuses, the better we’re doing at our job. We have made a conscious effort to build our mentor network to be heavily engaged with our community, add more entrepreneur workshops and why the entrepreneurs on our campuses have direct access to technical talent from our Web Development and Data Science Immersives. We continue to do everything we can to connect our entrepreneurs to the people, resources, and knowledge they need to scale their businesses. If our entrepreneurs win, we win.
Each quarter we will publish a quarterly Entrepreneur Impact Report outlining the impact we’ve had, and provide the direction we’re headed. Here is our first Impact Reports from the first quarter of 2017.
Breaking it Down
Galvanize now has 8 campuses across 7 markets including Austin, Boulder, Denver, New York, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Seattle. Two of those campuses, New York and Phoenix, opened during the first quarter of 2017.
Those 8 campuses represent 753 tech-focused companies and 2,279 members. Out of those 753 companies, 194 of them were added to the Galvanize ecosystem in the first quarter of 2017. The top 5 industries represented by our member companies are:
- Analytics (14.2%)
- Ecommerce (9%)
- Finance (8.7%)
- Advertising (7.8%)
- Human resources (6.1%)
Startup Impact
Galvanize entrepreneurs and startups have raised over $3B, totaling $3,195,243,686, with over $58,000,000 of that being raised in the first quarter of 2017. Galvanize campuses are home to tech companies of all sizes, from early-stage ventures all the way to publicly traded enterprises. The breakdown of company stages represented on Galvanize campuses is:
- Ideation: 64.38%
- Pre-series A: 12.33%
- Venture: 13.31%
- Exited: 9.98%
We define those stages as:
- Ideation: bootstrapped or self-funded
- Pre-Series A: have raised angel or seed funding
- Venture: have raised a Series A or beyond
- Exited: have exited through acquisition or IPO
Entrepreneurship does not always fit neatly into boxes as there are plenty of bootstrapped companies who have scaled significantly through customer acquisition instead of funding, but this is still a fairly accurate representation of the company size breakdown in the Galvanize ecosystem.
Out of those companies, 16 percent grew their teams in the first quarter of 2017, and 17 of them graduated from Galvanize, which means they grew to the point where they simply couldn’t fit their team on our campus anymore.
Entrepreneur Education
Education is a critical component to our entrepreneurs’ success. Founders of companies at all stages need access to knowledge through workshops and mentors. We place those resources at our community’s fingertips, focusing on practical and applicable knowledge in the areas of product, fundraising, growth (sales and marketing), and team. In the first quarter of 2017 Galvanize campuses hosted:
- 349 mentor sessions
- 48 entrepreneur workshops
- 843 entrepreneur workshop attendees
We bring together top level mentors and workshop leaders from tech companies in every market, allowing our entrepreneur community to solve real world problems with the guidance of experts and other entrepreneurs in the community. These mentors and workshop leaders hail from companies like Airbnb, Google, Techstars, IBM, and Infusionsoft to name a few.
What’s Next…
Like any growing company, we will continue to put resources into what’s working and scrap what isn’t. Over the second quarter and beyond of 2017 we will focus on improving the cross-campus collaboration of our mentors and entrepreneur education. We will begin to capitalize on great workshop sessions by using livestreaming and recording to ensure all entrepreneurs in our ecosystem can benefit from these resources, regardless of physical location. We will also continue to drive entrepreneur and student engagement, by providing more opportunities for our member companies to do project work with students, leading to positive outcomes for both members and students alike.
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