Dave Barcos leads The Bridge Accelerator, a program designed to take business ideas from concept to market in seven weeks. (Amanda Cowan/The Columbian)Photo Gallery
In the first-floor meeting space of the Hudson Building on a particularly rainy October night, upstart entrepreneurs catch themselves in a verbal tennis match with Dave Barcos. The 52-year-old freelance creative director asked them to distill their products into single sentences to help them focus on their products’ strengths. As he listens, he nods along to good ones and spikes the others.
“It’s about …,” Janus Sanders said, before pausing and looking toward the ceiling for ideas. He created a camera that fixes onto firearms and records stable footage. They talk of marketing it to paintball players, to the military or to hunters. “It’s about bringing your audience outdoors with you.”
“No. It’s not,” Barcos said. Others in the room laugh.
“It’s not?” Sanders said, laughing, then scrambled to his next idea. “It’s about … reliving the moment. That moment.”
Sanders scanned the other would-be captains of industry in the room. They include a man who makes jerky from mushrooms, a man who wants to better integrate drone technology for search-and-rescue missions, a man who manufactures high-end beer growlers, and a man who sells fashionable toddler clothes to be shipped directly to parents’ doorsteps. They nodded approval. Importantly, so did Barcos and his business partner, Colton Telford.
The back-and-forth was just a sliver of the hourslong meeting at the Bridge Accelerator, but it encapsulates a lot of what the business owners found appealing about the seven-week program. For them, joining an accelerator program was a chance to brainstorm together with relatively little pressure. For organizers Barcos and Telford, it’s a chance to find upcoming businesses that need a little push and a way to push the throttle on startup culture in Vancouver.
“The more startups that come out and start engaging, the more we can find out exactly what we need,” Barcos said. “That’s the whole process that we’re going for.”
The accelerator is part boot camp and part support group. The companies, hand-picked by Barcos and Telford, each face unique challenges. Some companies need marketing help. Others need to rework business models. One business idea, a competitor to Groupon, was shot down, forcing its originator, Curtis Townsend, to settle on his second idea: clothing company My Lil Bambino.
“We decided through a lot of discussion that it wasn’t really in line with my passion — and that’s design,” Townsend said. “I’m an idea guy, so I’d been testing different ideas and what’s when I shared my idea of My Lil Bambino. I ran some test posts on Facebook that went viral. The moms out there loved it.”
The program is helping him build his distribution plan, which any serious investor would want to know. It is modeled similarly to Zappos, a shoe and clothing store that sells online, directly to the consumer. At the end of the program, Barcos and Telford hoped to have taken the companies from their plans to being ready for investors.
A member of the Bridge Accelerator doesn’t necessarily have to be a tech company. While the tech world is hawkish for the next big thing — “Every company pitches itself as the Uber of something,” Barcos said — the Bridge Accelerator does want the company to be unique and, as Uber would say, “disruptive.”
Michael Pan’s business idea is a snack. The 37-year-old recently visited family in Malaysia and was greeted with a customary heap of food. But a plate of dry, sinewy jerky seemed out of place among his Buddhist vegetarian relatives.
It was mushroom jerky his family originated.
“So I tried it, and after I tried it I was blown away,” said Pan. “It was amazing and delicious and all that … But there isn’t a lot of variety out there for vegetarians that taste good or have the texture like meat. There’s a lot of soy, tofu-based stuff out there but it doesn’t have that texture.”
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For others, mushroom jerky might have amounted to a portable snack for the flight home and a story about the quirks of far-flung relatives. To Pan, who previously co-founded a sports app and worked at Motorola, it was a product that might wedge into a new market of health-conscious eaters who dislike vegetarian food.
“We always joke around about changing Bubba’s mind, right?” Barcos said. “How do we change Bubba’s mind? The meat-a-tarian who takes this thing and says, ‘Damn, I would even eat that.’ ”
Make something Vancouver wants
The Bridge Accelerator is one of the only, if not the only, accelerator program in Vancouver. The programs function like greenhouses for tech ventures, offering select companies a place to grow together and grow quickly. Many programs seed the startups with thousands in cash in exchange for a stake in the company. Then, at the end of a weeks- or monthslong program, companies pitch themselves to investors.
Famous examples include Colorado-based Techstars, which operates in Austin, Texas, San Francisco, Boston and elsewhere; and Y Combinator, a California accelerator that famously spawned Airbnb, Reddit and Dropbox. Y Combinator’s motto underscores many of the conversations at the Bridge Accelerator and at other accelerators: “Make something people want.”
Specifically, Barcos and Telford want to make something Vancouver wants. As much as the accelerator is meant to help the five fledgling companies, it really wants to hard-code tech interest into Southwest Washington. Its success, they hope, could lead to more meet-ups and hackathons and the sorts of community events that turn a city of hobbyists into a hotbed of entrepreneurs.
“We’re talking a lot about the ecosystem. Vancouver is growing right now, like crazy, and there’s an opportunity to bring in high-skill labor,” Barcos said. “When you think about these founders, they’re going to get a job somewhere. Who better can you imagine working for you than the people with the expertise and the drive to start companies like this?”
Max Ault, director of business growth and development at the Columbia River Economic Development Council, agreed.
“Certainly if you can take a group of businesses and have one of them be successful or have all five of them be successful that’s a net gain for that industry and it grows the workforce,” he said. “I think that type of activity is what we need in the county.”
According to the Washington Employment Security Department, technology jobs in the information technology and retail trade sectors — including computer software and hardware programming and work in telecommunications — grew from 89,472 jobs to 144,444 jobs in Clark County between 2002 and 2015, an increase of 61.4 percent. The number of employers has doubled in that time frame.
It’s estimated there are thousands of these accelerator programs all around the world. According to research from Seed DB, a database that tracks accelerator programs, startups that have graduated from business accelerators have raised more than $20 billion worldwide. Not all of them are considered prestigious, and there is concern in the tech industry that accelerators exploit more than mentor.
The Bridge Accelerator doesn’t charge anything at this point, Barcos and Telford said, though that will change in the future. A second cohort is planned for spring 2017. But the focus for now is on growing businesses.
“There’s a great synergy when you connect the founders, connect the guys who are starting in their garage trying to dream up the next big thing,” Barcos said. “That’s a lonely place. But dreamers attract dreamers. I think that will lead to more events and will lead to more programs.”
