TheRodinhoods

10 Reasons to join Startup Leadership Program

Prashant Pansare

Startup Leadership Program [SLP] is a highly selective, global, world-class training program and lifelong global network for outstanding founders, leaders, and innovators.

I underwent the program in year 2014-15, while I was running my first startup Playerify. Later, I undertook the responsibility of executing the next batch of 2015-16 Bangalore Program while I was running OnlinePrasad. This year I am taking a larger role, as India Director, to ensure smooth execution and giant strides for SLP India.

In the last two years, I have seen the SLP program from a participant’s perspective, SLP Bangalore Program Leader perspective and now, a lot more closely, as India Director.

Here are the top 10 things about the SLP Program and its global alumni network and why you should join SLP 🙂 

SLP ensures that for each chapter, which usually constitutes of about 25 founders, it admits a diverse set of participants including diversity in age, gender and Startup sector. SLP does not record age information, but the youngest Fellow was 19 and oldest was 60 when they joined. 

SLP has over 400 women and a dedicated Women’s Initiatives Department.

The stages of the startups SLP admits into the program, includes those in the idea stage, early private beta, beta, early traction to angel funded to VC backed startups. So far SLP has 42 sub-sectors including, but not limited to, Technology, Life-sciences, Fin-Tech, Manufacturing, Consumer, Food & Beverages, Clean-Tech and Social Enterprises.

The best part of such diversity of stage is the peer to peer learning, collaboration and support for each other. Often, we have joint sessions beyond the curriculum where we help each other in various aspects.  

The Program is usually divided into about 10-12 sessions where all critical aspects of building startup are covered. 

The sessions follow a predefined curriculum, derived through over 6 years of learning, but each chapter has freedom to fine tune as well as to make suitable changes to program sessions. The decision is made, first, in an informal session over lunch, where the participants along with the Program Team, discuss in detail about order of sessions, contents, mentors and execution through the year.

The main focus of sessions is to bring the best mentors on board who can deep dive into the topic and share learning from their own execution.

The mentors are entrepreneurs, VCs, Angels or people who have walked the path themselves and thus, the sessions are very fruitful. Vikas Malpani of commonfloor, Ankur Singla of Helpchat, Shivku of Exotel, Sampad of Instamojo are few of names of founders who have mentored our fellows.

Once enrolled, you can participate in sessions across any chapter throughout 27 centers in 12 countries. This helps a lot if you end up travelling during the duration of program. 

The peer group shares learning with each other, helps each other in formal as well as informal mixers and sessions. Collaborative sessions are held where founders team up to work together on various aspects.

SLP usually involves renowned angels and VCs to share their learning with cohort through multiple relevant sessions such as Term sheet understanding, Pitch sessions, Finance session and more.

Each year, SLP also hosts a demo day for batch where key VCs and Angels are invited to the session to feedback about startups.

This year’s Bangalore Demo day had over 80 participants including about 40 investors covering most of VC funds and investment institutions as well as key Angel investors.

A lot of our fellows refine what they want to work on during the program, at times, working on new ideas. At SLP , the main focus is on founder than the startup that he/she is working on. This has much larger significance as at SLP one of main purpose is to build a global network of founders for lifetime.

The fellows, during the program, can attend any session anywhere in the world if they are travelling. The network of SLP spans across 12 countries and over 26 chapters covering all key cities for startups. The community is vibrant and active in sharing, learning and collaborating. Most of founders gain lot through the network when they travel to other cities.

Most of founders also gain from global visibility of startup and specially if they are looking at exploring new markets.

The SLP has envisioned to build life time network of founders globally and thus all those who are part of it are in it for lifetime. The community supports founders through various points in startup and beyond. 

And the last but the most crucial one is 

SLP takes 0% EQUITY and participants pays only for covering operational expenses for this participation which is usually in range of 17K in India and in similar proportion in  other places..

In case, you are interested in exploring what I have explored, you can find out more on

https://startupleadership.com/

P.S. The application for the year 2016-17 are open until July 31st.

Feel free to share your perspective, questions or any doubts on the program in comments below and I will do my best to answer 🙂 

-Prashant Pansare

Twitter : @PrashantPansare

This has been earlier published on  Linkedin

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Related reading: SLP: 3 Reasons, 3 Excuses

SLP: A 6 month journey

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