A Day in the Life of a MergeLane Cohort Company

It’s Week 8 in MergeLane’s 2017 accelerator, the third in a series that began in 2015. We

do a mid-program in-person week, and so this week our cohort companies from around the US and Canada returned to Boulder to connect with mentors, investors, our team and each other. This is the homestretch for this year’s program. MergeLane 2017 Demo Day is May 4th (Join us!).

I held a casual dinner at my home for the team members who were in town, and at 8pm, I gave the co-founders of TinyHood a ride to their last mentor meeting of the day. Becky Miller and Susan Blinn — who are creating a system where parents can get expert real-time, personalized answers to their parenting questions — jumped in the car and rattled off the details of their day. As I listened, I realized how intense the accelerator experience can be and how amazing the community of advisors, mentors, and speakers really is.

There are never too many occasions to be reminded of this.So I asked them to drop me a note with their agenda for that day, and here it is:

4:30am: Becky woke up (still adjusting to the time change!)

7:00am: First newly created “expert advice package” on Tinyhood purchased

7:30am: Team meeting 

10:00am: Pitch Practice with Seth Levine of Foundry Group

11:30am: Mentor meeting with Derek Kraus, most recently of Solidfire

12:00pm: Mentor Lunch with Kirk Holland of Access Venture Partners

2:00pm: Mentor meeting in Denver with Craftsy co-founder Josh Scott

4:00pm: MergeLane session featuring Jenny Lawton, COO of Techstars

5:30pm: Mentor meeting at Gaia office in Louisville with CMO Jaymi Bauer

6:30pm: MergeLane dinner at Sue’s house in Boulder

8:30pm: Mentor drinks with Yoav Lurie, founder and CEO of Simple Energy 

10:30pm: Back to our hotel 

11:00pm: Becky is responding to emails from the day and writing our investor update while Susan is fixing bugs…. 

Not half bad. #changetheratio