Abdi Sherif of gBETA: 100x in 18 Months, a $5M Fund at HBS — Now He Backs Founders VCs Never Visit
18VC Podcast · Episode 16 · July 27, 2026
Guests: Abdi Sherif
Source: https://www.18-vc.com/podcast/abdi-sherif-gbeta

And we are so thrilled to have Abdi Sherif here, the program manager of the gBETA Inland Empire accelerator or incubator program at gener8tor. And I think gBETA Inland Empire is a seven-week accelerator program in Moreno Valley, California, and they're helping these early-stage founders to build their companies and meet their mentors and prepare them for investors in the next stage. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we're thrilled to learn more about your journey and also what you're doing. And yeah, I think to start with, can you share a little bit with us about yourself, who you are, what you're doing?

Yeah. Thanks so much, Philip and David, for giving me this platform to share more about myself and what I'm currently doing at gener8tor. Me, I actually started off as a software engineer, graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with a bachelor's in information systems. I had a stint as a software engineer at Procter & Gamble before entering into technology and operations consulting at Deloitte, where I was exposed to a wide variety of industries and some of the top Fortune 500 customers in the world, really helping them with their digital experience to really stay close with the customer and increase revenue.

After that, I actually got my MBA at HBS, and that was a defining experience for me. I went in thinking I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I had a stint actually founding a nonprofit, and I thought, "Now I want to take that one step further into more of a for-profit model." But I just fell in love with venture capital. I received some great mentorship from professors who've raised multiple $100 million firms at the university, and I decided to utilize my network to start up my own venture fund.

And so the venture fund was named Sherif Capital, and we really focused on automating really monotonous processes within legacy businesses and legacy sectors. So I had the privilege of supporting a company called Eudia at the time, acting as an investor and a chief of staff, really sitting down with the founders, helping them raise their $105 million Series A, and naturally was just trying to find more startup founders building the best technologies that would make a positive difference in the world. And so from that, I was thinking about raising a fund too, which I'm in the process of doing so now, but also did some really great things for founders. So I actually started a software development agency based in Africa to support product development for startup founders who are not so technical, or even if they are technical, to really augment their technical department, to really make sure that they're building on top and refining their products for customers to use in a very cost-efficient way.

And then also, I took on the role of program director at gener8tor, launching our first program in the Inland Empire. I'm proud to be from this community. I'm proud to support founders in this community, and we are just wrapping up our second cohort, but we have some great outcomes in the three months that our first five founders graduated in our winter cohort. And after they graduated on April 2nd, to date, we've been managing some outcomes.

They've actually gone on to raise over $78,000 cumulatively in the last three months, all non-dilutive capital. Some of them are now engaging other big-time investors like Plug and Play and Andreessen Horowitz in terms of getting their first VC checks written. So it's been great to see the quality of the Inland Empire entrepreneurial talent pool, and I continue to collaborate with major universities and organizations in the region to really make sure that the Inland Empire turns into the innovation empire. Yeah, sure.

I think we'll dig deeper into the cohorts and your accelerator later. But now we want to just go back a little bit more into your journey, like how did you end up in venture capital, right? I do remember you just mentioned after you're doing Deloitte and also consulting, is that right after that you go to HBS for the MBA? Yeah. After two years at Deloitte, I went to Harvard Business School.

Oh, and during that process, do you meet some people that's interesting? Or what makes you decide to jump into the startup space, like right after? Or is there a specific event or a specific person that Yes Yeah. So I think, my undergrad gave me a really great platform. So I learned how to develop tech for specific use cases for specific clients. I was always hacking, joined hackathons, had a lot of great software development courses where I was developing software for different clients and organizations in the Pittsburgh community.

And naturally, I just became curious about maybe starting my own thing. And hand-in-hand with my experience at Deloitte, where I was really understanding enterprise use cases for automation, I want to start up some sort of social venture just to help the public. And so it ended up being an edtech platform to help students break into top colleges and universities, really funneling the resources and information that they needed based on what they're looking for, and automating it in a way that was very unique for each type of user that came onto my platform. Naturally, I wanted to help more people and make this something that people didn't have to pay for, so I pivoted that into a nonprofit.

But I also knew that I wanted to make a for-profit venture, start one, and particularly use HBS's resources, since they have such a great entrepreneurial ecosystem, to really leverage the resources there to start maybe something in fintech. I've always been gravitating towards the fintech industry because I always thought it was just really cool just to have innovation in financial services. When I first got my internship money at Procter & Gamble, the first app that I downloaded was Robinhood, and I started learning how to invest. And I just thought about how different technologies can actually increase access to financial tools, and just a way to build a wealth, right?

And so that was really cool. And also, I was traveling a lot during that time, and I was just so sick of ATM fees. And I was like, "You know what? I want to solve this problem." So actually, I was developing something to solve ATM fees, which I didn't take further because as I was learning more about entrepreneurship, I knew I had to learn more about venture capital because that's where the money is, that's where the checks are.

And without venture capital, it's really hard to succeed. If you just keep bootstrapping, how do you scale and grow into a major enterprise that one day can dominate the market share in your sector? So learned more about venture capital. And as I was investing, I started teaching my friends how to invest, started teaching my network how to invest. One of my good friends out in the Inland Empire actually had some athlete friends he connected me with.

Now some of them are in the NBA. I taught them how to invest. And I was just thinking, I'm a really good investor. I'm learning more about startups, and I know how to assess them. Why don't I pull together my network of high net worth individuals, and since they are now becoming eligible to invest in startups, why don't I try to open up a new asset class for them?

So that's how my transition to venture capital went. And I was able to raise a $5 million fund to invest in startups, which was a really great experience. But yeah, there was not just one event, I would say. It's just a process of going through undergrad, just hacking, developing different projects, trying to start my own venture, and just getting exposed to a lot of different courses and case studies at HBS that really led me to this idea of starting my own venture capital firm.

That's super interesting. And I do think setting out your own venture at the beginning without any previous track record in investing may be a difficult challenge. How do you manage to go through that process? Yeah, for sure, man. It was an interesting journey. So as I was investing in public equities, I started doing really well for myself. I actually started trying to break down different sophisticated concepts to my friends who maybe didn't have a business degree or were very new to investing for the first time.

So actually trying to teach people my methodology and how to even go about trading stocks was super helpful in terms of me learning the industry and then also enabling trust in those individuals. And so as I was teaching them, as I was sharing my thesis, they ended up trusting me more. And a lot of times, investing is, timing matters, too, in addition to your thesis. And so they would start giving me small amounts of cash to invest for them.

And so I started doing really well there. And then they would tell their friends about it, and eventually I got to talking to athletes and helping them, actually sharing what I was doing, they were doing themselves, and then they were so busy they couldn't do it, so they needed somebody to manage their funds. So I did that, and we had a great return, about 100x in 18 months. 100x?

Yeah, 100x in 18 months. And then from there, as I was learning more about venture capital, my last semester at HBS, I took an independent project under this legendary professor, Jeffrey Bussgang. Every time we bring in a guest at gener8tor, they always mention him. And he helped me really formulate my thesis and get my fund up and running. And I was able to leverage those existing contacts to actually pitch why we should invest in startups and how we could potentially find the next OpenAI or even a Microsoft, right, early, and where our returns could potentially exceed 100x, right?

And so that's the process in terms of how I was able to raise the fund, and it was a lot of mentorship and a lot of help and support at HBS, and I'm so lucky to have gone through that program. Let's bring our conversation back to your latest chapter of life, which is gBETA. What do you think specifically drew you to this place from all of your previous initiatives? Yeah.

So I actually had the privilege of, and it's so funny, through the HBS network, I always peruse our newsletters and what's going on within the ecosystem. And I saw this message from a startup founder. One of the co-founders is based out of Orange County, very close to where I live, and they were developing a automation platform for legal teams at Fortune 500 companies, and that fit my thesis to a T. So I was interested in learning more about what they were doing.

I asked them some really great questions, really tried to build a relationship with them, and I understood that the actual CEO had actually built a product, a similar product, for one of the biggest legal technology companies in the world, and ended up spinning that out for $500 million. And so I knew he had some sort of signal insight into this market that was very special and unique. And so I actually asked them about their go-to-market strategy. They were still figuring it out at the time, and I felt like from there I could add a lot of value.

So I actually sat down with them for four months, helped them break into companies like DHL, Duracell, and Cargill, and helped them with their $105 million Series A, expanding the team to 300 people, and they ended up moving to SF. But I saw that company actually come from Southern California within my local ecosystem, and so That enabled me to have a desire to support more local companies in my area, and gBETA was actually opening up a program, or gener8tor was actually opening up a gBETA program in the Inland Empire. So that really appealed to me, and supporting more founders closer to home and hopefully having a platform for our startups to grow within our region really was a really special thing for me. So I ended up talking to gener8tor, taking on that role, and my hope is that more companies stay in this region and end up creating more jobs in this region as well.

That's a good starting point, I think. Serving the people around where we live and our local community is definitely a good starting point, and I think you are doing that. You're doing your own fund and this gener8tor project at the same time, right? Is there any kind of synergies, or how do you basically distribute your time? Yeah, there are a lot of synergies.

I'm doing a lot of the similar work I'm doing for my portfolio companies at gener8tor. So it's not anything new I have to learn. I'm basically giving the same education and context and experiences to the founders that I'm coaching. And it's really great because with gener8tor, we're really supporting them through mentorship, connecting them with serial entrepreneurs, operators with domain expertise in product development, go to market.

So I've been able to leverage my contacts across my time working at the fund to these now founders who are going through the gener8tor program. But what's really cool is we have investor swarms at the end of the program where our founders get to pitch in front of angel investors and representation at VC firms. And so that network that I've aggregated over time has been especially influential for my founders that I coach within my gener8tor program and across our 51 accelerator programs in the United States. So there's been a lot of synergies in.

I also include that when I was building the firm, I also started up a software development agency out in Africa so that non-technical founders can build their products in a cost-efficient way. And there's a lot of talent out there, and it's great because I'm creating jobs back home on the continent that I'm originally from. But with that, I'm also able to bring a lot of support to the gener8tor network, to founders that I talk to every day, because they are looking for someone, a developer, to help build their initial product, or if they've grown, they're looking to staff engineers in a cost-efficient way where they can spend more of their capital that they've raised on marketing and acquiring customers. So it's been very synergistic, the work that I've been doing with my fund and also with gener8tor.

And I think you do mention your own fund's LPs, maybe your friends and some of these athletes, and I do remember from our last conversation that you mentioned they have their own vision of what kind of how they want to basically help making some change happen in the world by their investments, right? So how do you align your investment thesis of your fund with this LPs vision in a certain way, and does that change your investment thesis in any kind of way? Yeah. So once I have a thesis on the fund, I'm actually looking at LPs who have the similar vision, right?

Because they're going to be my customers, I'm managing their money. They're the reason why I have a fund in the first place. So I want to be very cognizant of that. And so I'm looking for high-quality companies that fit our thesis, and our thesis has to be aligned from the beginning. So I'm telling them, "Hey, this is my background, this is what I'm good at.

We're going to find companies in this space. Are you on board? And okay, tell me what else you want to look at." And if it fits with my thesis, if it's in a particular sector, I'm all for that. I'll do more analyzing of the sector, see if it could be a dominant player in the market. Actually talk to people who have industry experience in that market, leverage my advisory network at HBS as well to see how I can really understand that market to a T.

But that's the way I frame it. It's a very strong partnership at the beginning. You don't want to take somebody's money and then promise one thing and then invest in something else, because that just strains the relationship. You want your LPs to be on your side while you're investing. And as you think about fund two, fund three, fund four, those LPs are going to churn, right?

So you have to think about it from that perspective. So being very aligned with your LPs and having a strategy and a vision that you both are in unison with is very, very important. You could have some minor differences where you work together on that, but my LPs were always aligned and they gave me a lot of trust to go out and find companies that were going to be very profitable, scale very fast, attain high valuations, while also making a positive difference in the world. Before we move into next chapter of our conversation, could you help our audience who might be unfamiliar with gener8tor, which is very popular parent organization behind gBETA and many a free accelerator across the United States, of what they are about, in plain English?

Yeah, for sure, man. So gener8tor, at a high level, is a startup accelerator and venture capital firm. So you could think of it as either a seven-week or 12-week program to really coach entrepreneurs, give them the structure and guidelines to really accelerate revenue throughout the program and connect them with Advisors and mentors at a high level. Some of our accelerators, some of our programs that we coach entrepreneurs in, actually have a fund attached to them.

And so we sometimes work with program partners that have raised funding, and we are helping support them in terms of investing in particular businesses. So we do a lot of the recruiting, we do a lot of the assessing, and we select together with our program partners. But once we align on the startups that go through the program, and oftentimes it's five startups at a time, to keep the cohort very small and have concierge programming, we will actually invest sometimes $100,000 into these businesses, at the start of the program and help them allocate the capital in an efficient way. So those are kind of like our investment accelerators.

Our gBETA programs are seven-week programs that are free. No equity is taken, but no investment is made. And so those are the majority of our programs, and we're supporting founders here at their earliest stages. So we're connecting them with mentors, we're connecting them with customers, and then we're also connecting them with angels just to curate relationships for when they're ready to raise a seed round, they have them in their back pocket.

And some of the outcomes we track in gBETA are, we want at least one-third of our graduates within 12 months to either raise their first $50,000, get into an investment-based accelerator that takes equity in return for cash, like one of our own, or like a Techstars or Y Combinator, or in some cases, we actually have them get acquired. So those are the three things we look at over the 12-month period after they graduate from our program. Okay. So it does a lot of supporting at the earlier stages of startups.

But what would you say is the grand or key problem that gener8tor is trying to solve, as a whole, as an organization with all of these accelerator supports and other free programs? Yeah. So our mission is to be the best partner in the community to invest in their best and brightest. So most of these startup accelerators are in major cities like San Francisco, LA, New York, Boston.

gener8tor really tries to play in kind of a blue ocean territory where we believe talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. And so most of our programs are in the Midwest or in the South. So we have a majority of our, a lot of programs, I'll say, in Wisconsin or some areas in the Midwest, or we're headquartered in Wisconsin. We have a lot of programs in the South, like Alabama and Texas.

Inland Empire, nobody has invested in there before gener8tor has. And so we really look at these locations that have been historically underserved, and we try to really build a platform where entrepreneurs are supported, where we can get them to the next stage. Would you say the gener8tor's national network helps... So, okay, a better question would be, are you trying to activate these local regions where traditional venture capital funds has not touched, such that there's more active attention to them, or is it that you guys are trying to connect these great founders in less-visited areas to national funds or a more popular network?

Yeah, I would say a little bit of both, but probably the latter is kind of our thinking. We believe that talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. And so we believe great founders exist everywhere, and we have the resources and a really broad investor network that can actually connect these founders with access to capital. And so we believe that if we coach them in the right way in a very short amount of time, we can make them investment ready and have those conversations with our investor network, and any other connections that other program managers or managing directors have individually.

So that's our thinking there, and usually cities or universities in these underserved regions bring us on to really support their entrepreneurs because they lack the infrastructure to do so. Do you think... So is there a, how do I say it? What would you say is a way that you find a balance between bring attention, find great founders in local areas versus they have to be the best of the best of the entire region?

Yeah. So I think there's a lot of great founders. So, doing this job, I've come to a realization there's a lot of great founders in the Inland Empire area. And my thinking was that, I don't know, I know there are hardworking people here, but are they going to be the cream of the crop? But just even based on our first program and our outcomes in the first program, we've already had our founders raise over $78,000 in non-dilutive capital in less than three months, which is really exciting to see, and it probably sets a record, in gener8tor's history.

So there are great founders here. It's all about finding diamonds in the rough and coaching them. A lot of them haven't really been exposed to startup courses or venture capital or just how to really have a good structure in terms of building a startup. And so they have great domain experiences, they have great technical experience. They know the problem space really well.

They know how to build a solution, but just having that structure around them is something that they need. And I've seen this in other locations that I've supported too, because I come in and support other markets as well, and there's a lot of great talent and There's a lot of great people that go on from gener8tor to join a Techstars or even a Y Combinator, for example, and those are very selective accelerator programs too. So, I think in each of the markets that we play in, and I think across a lot of other markets that are underserved, there's a lot of really great founders, and it really takes a boots-on-the-ground approach to really find them. Really being in the trenches, going to a lot of these events, going to university campuses, using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, trying to find people who might not even call themselves founders, but are founders at heart.

And if you just frame the accelerator in a certain way that would support them, they're willing to apply, take a chance and, I'm not going to say every founder is perfect at the beginning. There's a lot of times where there's a lot of ironing out that needs to be done. But I think at the core, they have the embodiment of a very strong founder. I think gBETA is a free program, and you do not take equity from the founders.

Then a natural question would be, well, what's basically the business model of gBETA? If you're not taking any equity, which means you may not expect any returns at the end, then how do you fund basically the operations of that program? Yeah. So there's a couple of things there, right? So we're usually funded by cities or universities, so we co-develop and co-create with them the program, and we co-apply to grants, right?

So grants really cover our operating expenses for the program. A lot of the times, our partners will also give us a space they want to utilize for their founders so they can have the space be exposed to a lot of the mentors and the investors who actually come in person to meet our founders. So grants usually cover our operating expenses. I think for us, we usually see gBETA as a pipeline for our investment accelerators.

And so the founders that come out of there, if they are within a particular sector, like a digital health or a fintech in which we actually have an investment accelerator and a fund attached to that program, then we will look at them very diligently to see if they would qualify for those type of programs. Those programs are only located in certain areas of the country, so sometimes we'll subsidize travel depending on that program, and sometimes most of it can be done virtually, but we'll have some in-person components as well for those select investment accelerator programs. Yeah. So basically, you are building up a pipeline or a funnel for this later stage accelerator program that do take an equity.

Exactly. Yeah. Great. I think the reason why you operate this gBETA program in this Moreno Valley or Inland Empire area is because you come from there, right? Yeah. I come from there, and gener8tor actually had an existing relationship with the city of Moreno Valley because gener8tor has this investment accelerator and gBETA accelerator that they're very well-known for.

But they have other programs as well. So they have a skills accelerator to help people get higher paying jobs. And you can just think of this as kind of your university's employment resource center where they help you with your resume and connect you with hiring managers. We have a program at gener8tor just for that. So we have them across the country, I think.

In Wyoming, Microsoft sponsors that program, and we actually had one in Moreno Valley that had very successful outcomes for veterans in the Inland Empire. So when a grant opportunity came about for a startup accelerator program, it's gener8tor's bread and butter. We have that existing relationship with the city of Moreno Valley. We went ahead and applied for that grant.

We received that grant for the programming for this year, and so that's where I came in and led that program because they reached out to me, and I wanted to lead something in my community. gener8tor also has two other accelerators, you can call them, quote unquote. One is around corporate programming. So we have two things. We usually have a flagship conference in the fall where we bring in corporates and startups, and we do workshops on innovation.

And so it's also a great medium for startups to engage with potential B2B buyers. And then as part of that program too, we have this thing called Innovators In a Plane where we have corporate leaders travel from all these different companies. We have 30 that go on a plane, go travel somewhere, and we teach a seminar on innovation there. It's a great networking event as well, and all expenses paid.

I think the next one we're going to do is in San Francisco in November. And then the last accelerator we have is our creative accelerator, so these are for artists and musicians to fulfill their creative endeavors. So here we give a $15,000 grant to be used for anything like materials, equipment, or even travel expenses. I think that's pretty diverse programs there.

Yeah, I didn't expect you're even supporting creative works besides just startups, right? Yeah. That's super interesting. And also, I think, how would you describe the Inland Empire startup or founder ecosystem maybe compared to this larger LA or Silicon Valley ecosystem? The Inland Empire innovation ecosystem is growing, right? Inland Empire is probably, from a land area, one of the biggest regions in Southern California.

It encompasses Riverside County, San Bernardino County, and now Imperial County. And Riverside County extends very east, and then San Bernardino goes up very north to Nevada. So there's a lot of land area, and the population continues to grow as residents from LA and San Diego continue to move to that region. Different partners now are collaborating to make sure that the ecosystem has a lot of resources for our founders.

So, in Murrieta, excuse me. In Murrieta, for example, we have the Murrieta Innovation Center that supports biotech startups. And what I see is a lot of biotech founders are moving from San Diego to Murrieta as a way to ease cost of living. And so we have this center to support biotech entrepreneurs in that area. Cal State San Bernardino has done a lot of events and programming to increase entrepreneurship on that campus.

They have an entrepreneurship major as well, and they host a lot of different events across the region to support entrepreneurs. I recently spoke at one of their conferences called Redefining the Future, which is a great platform to bring in a lot of startup founders and angel investors to that program. There's also another FedTech accelerator program out in Corona that focuses on startups that would utilize a lot of the resources from the Navy, so really focusing on military and defense tech. And, we have a lot of great pitch competitions in the month of April.

So April is Riverside Innovation Month, and we have a lot of pitch competitions that each city in Riverside or five cities in Riverside contestants can compete in, pitch their startup. Winners go on to the Riverside County finale, and we actually had three winners in each of the five cities within our first cohort. And the 10 finalists get to compete for the first place prize to win $12,000 and the chance to represent Riverside County at Startup World Cup, which actually ended up being a gener8tor company in my first cohort. So we have a lot of things going on, and it continues to grow, and we're really excited about all the cities really collaborating within the entire region to build the infrastructure for the innovation empire.

Yeah. And is there a specific type of industry or focus in that region? Because, for example, if we talk about just LA, maybe people think about entertainment or consumer tech kind of startups. If you talk about Silicon Valley, people may think of, I don't know, just B2B SaaS, maybe AI startups, right? Is there a specific industry focus, or what is local founders, what kind of problem are they solving, and in what kind of industry?

Yeah. I would say with Murrieta now being a biotech hub, there's a lot of biotech founders in that region, as well as UC Riverside as well. But I would say the three industries that really dominate is advanced manufacturing. Inland Empire historically has been a blue-collar area, so advanced manufacturing. I would also say ag tech, so agricultural innovations as well.

Again, UCR leads the way in that. And then also climate tech. We have one of the hottest arid regions in the country, so we're really focused on climate innovation as well. And one of our companies in our recent accelerator program was called Blue Core Minerals, a spin-out from the Cal State San Bernardino, and they developed this technology to extract lithium from brine and wastewater.

Do you think those three dominating industry focus of the Inland Empire contributed to historical under-attention from traditional venture capital, or do you think there's any other factors that played into it before gener8tor went in to the region? Yeah. I don't think so, to be honest, but I just think that there's such a high density of founders in Silicon Valley and New York and all these major areas, and investors tend to live in those areas, too. We don't have a big angel investor network.

It is growing, and there's an organization called Tech Coast Ventures or Tech Coast Angels group, where they have different chapters across Southern California. I would say probably the bigger ones are going to be in the LA and Orange County areas. We do have one in the Inland Empire, but it's a very small group, again, and Riverside County is just so spread out where a lot of the angels can't really meet in person unless it's for an event that happens every so often, right? And so I think there's a lack of exchange and deal flow.

Now they have Zoom meetings, but how active are they really? It's a major question in terms of just exchanging information, exchanging flow. I love now that I'm on calls where we're exchanging information and deal flow, and just events happening in the Inland Empire, but it's just a widespread area with a lack of density in angel investors and traditional VC, right? So I think people are not really looking at this area.

And people go out and travel to LA, people go out and travel to San Diego, right? People don't really know about this area, and you only pass through it if you're going to go from San Diego to Vegas. If you're going to San Diego to LA, you're really going to drive on the coast, right? So it's an area that doesn't really get visited, not much attention besides Coachella, which happens in our area.

Right. So I think just the lack of understanding of this area exists and the lack of density in terms of the angel network and just the widespread land area of this region where a lot of people are not super well connected is just a major driver in terms of lack of investment in this area. So the first cohort of gBETA graduated this year in April, right? And I think they would be a good early study case that could answer these kind of questions.

So an extending question to you would be, so the graduates from this cohort, some of them are already getting great tractions, right? One, I think, entered with traction, but still after graduating. What do you think is the factor that separated the ones that were doing great compared to ones that were still refining, developing their way? Yeah. I think not being afraid to talk to customers, even if your product is not 100% what you envision it to be, right?

I think a lot of times people want to have the perfect product and there might be a customer that's interested in having a pilot done with you, right? But you feel like you're not there yet, and you don't want to mess up the relationship. I think you need to understand what good enough could be to provide value for that customer, and products will continue refining, right? You can always make products better.

But I think the ones that are differentiated from excellent versus good are the ones that understand what's good enough and how I can get into the market faster and take advantage of the opportunities that myself or other resources that have supported the program have delivered, right? So those who are able to jump at the opportunity have done really well, and have extracted a lot of revenue from the resources that I've delivered from them. If you plan on waiting and just trying to deliver the best possible experience, you're always going to be in that mental loop. And once you decide to even take that chance, that opportunity might have passed you, where that customer might have found somebody else, right?

So I think a bias to action is very key. That speaks somewhat into the founding team's personality traits, right? Would you say that's something that you look for in a company that hasn't built up its record yet and/or is very early? Oh, I think he's out of the Zoom. Damn. Okay. Let's wait for him to join again. Okay. Okay. It's good because I can just...

Okay. It's fine. You can just repeat the question, and we'll just cut off the middle part. Man, am I doing okay? Yeah. Pretty good. Okay. You should teach me how to do the editing via cloud. I'm very interested. Oh, yeah. I think it's pretty straightforward, actually. Physically, it's the same. I provide the transcript with the same kind of message of when it's host speaking, when it's guest speaking, and just ask it to map it with the video angle Yeah and cut it together.

Just make the magic happen. I don't know how it do it, but it was capable of doing that. Does it eat up a lot of tokens? I think it's within my plan, so I didn't check. It's not a super large volume of tokens, so it was fine. Yeah. Okay. Let me see what's happening with... See. Oh, wait. I didn't realize it's still being recorded. It's fine. We can just edit the...

Yeah. Is he joining? I don't know. Let me see. Oh, yeah, it's back, I think. Right. Welcome back. Hello. Welcome. I apologize. It's not my normal setup, so my battery ended up dying, so I apologize. Oh. Oh, no, it's fine. Yeah, it's fine. Yeah. Yeah, we can just continue to Okay. Yeah. So, okay, so coming back to... Okay, no, because we're going to edit it out and then put it back to here.

So what should I start it out? Okay. I think just start with the natural beginning of a sentence. We can just cut the previous out. Yeah. And what you just said speaks somewhat into personality traits of the founding team, right? Would you say that's at least one of the factors that you look in startup teams that hasn't built up track record yet or is pre-revenue, still very early, et cetera?

Yeah. The founding team is probably the most important... No. Actually, it is the most important thing I look at. I look at four primary buckets. I developed a framework during my time at HBS called Perspective Of The Company, so POTC. P stands for people. So I'm looking at the founders, their previous experiences, how it lends to the startup. I'm actually looking at their previous track record of working together, too, if they have that.

What are their skill sets? What part of the business are they both working on? And do their collaboration styles amplify each other where they can actually execute faster than each of them separately? So I'm looking at do they work together in a very synergistic way where one plus one equals three? So I'm looking at that primarily as the number one factor that I use to assess startups, because at the end of the day, business is a human enterprise driven and determined by people, and it's basically going to be the make or break.

You can have the best product in the world, but if you don't have people to execute on that vision, if your founders are not charismatic enough to recruit the best talent to the organization, I don't see how you can be successful as a category leading company. And you do mention there POTC, so there are three more. Can you also Yeah share with that? Yeah.

So O is the opportunity. Here, I'm looking at the market, so the market potential and the growth rates. So how big is the market? Is the market going to be growing over time and in a very attractive way as an investor? T is the technology. I'm looking at how novel the technology is. And then sometimes I group in operations here, if it's more of a CPG company.

So I'm looking at if they can achieve economies of scale pretty quickly. C and also T, I'm also going to look for patents, right? If it's a hardware company, how protected can they be? C stands for the cash flow and customer traction. So here I'm looking at evidence of, if it's a hardware product, early evidence of pilots. If it's software, I want to see some sort of revenue coming into the door.

I also want to understand your business model and your profit margins as well. Sure. And I do think it's very important that, as a investor or as a accelerator manager, you want to make sure maybe the founders can work at least in a good way, you can collaborate with them at least. Because if it's going to invest, it's going to be maybe a long-term relationship, right?

It would be maybe several years or even 10 years before there's an exit. So do you think, for example, the coachability is a very good trait you are looking for? And 100%. Yeah. 100%. Actually, everybody, when they communicate to the partners, one of the questions we have to answer is, is this person coachable, right? Because if they're not coachable, there's no reason to bring them into a seven-week program.

It's very hard to work with them. They're not going to be attaining or applying the information that you're giving them anyways. And if they're not coachable, they might be better off doing it on their own where Because if they're not going to take advantage of the resources, what's the point? If they're not going to be receptive to the feedback, what's the point?

We're connecting them with 30 mentors and 25 investors throughout the program. If they're not going to be taking that feedback, we're just wasting everybody's time, right? So coachability is one of the major things we're looking for, and if somebody's not coachable but has the other dimensions I talked about, has an amazing product, even has OpenAI as a customer, we won't take them. Yeah.

And I think another interesting, let's say, debate or arguments there is, now you can see the job market is not as good as the previous years and maybe some of the students, they are having a hard time finding their jobs, and one way out of that is some of them maybe start considering doing their own startups. Yeah. And also with the development of these technologies like AI and AI coding stuff, students can start to building in an earlier age, right? They don't need to actually finish all their education, to start building.

They can have all these tools to help them finish that execution part. And on the other side is that, maybe some people may argue that, for the best founders, they need to have some deep industry expertise to build something that's truly impactful so that it can really realize where's the pain point, and they can solve that problem. So what your take on balancing start building early and, versus you need to have a deep industry expertise in this founder's background? Yeah.

Yeah, that's a really, really good question. Like you mentioned, there's a lot of low to no coding tools out there to help you build out your platforms, which I say to every founder, there should be no reason why you can't get at least a prototype out the door, right? And so I think what's really important is doing your research. You should at least know the customer you're trying to solve the problem for.

So doing those interviews, aggregating a lot of data, to help scope the solution is going to be very, very important and having a really good sense of the problem. But what you can do, right, is put stuff in front of customers, right, and just see how they're interacting with particular products after you get some data. And then use that to refine what you're doing. So I think the beginning, try to get as much data as you can, but at a certain point, you need to actually take what you've learned and build something where people can start interacting with it at a high level.

It doesn't have to be perfect. Just get that data to see where you need to refine your solution, and where you need to kind of adapt your solutions because everything's going to be built in an iterative way, right? Software, even some components of hardware. So, that's kind of the approach I would take. And, yeah, try to get enough data to have a signal and then start building out pretty quickly where you can test and take that back in to refine and test, refine, and it's going to be iterative process.

Yeah. And do you think, for example, for these younger founders, maybe student founders, and these who already have several years of working experience, have deep understanding in the industry, should they basically focus on different type of startups or different types of problems they should be solving for this kind of different backgrounds? I think the biggest thing is you have to do something that you're passionate about. I always tell founders, "You have to want to do this like you can't breathe." And maybe I'm a little extreme, but basically you've got to be living and breathing this, right?

So you have to want to actually solve the problem as bad as you need oxygen, right? And if you fall out of love with the problem, then maybe it's not a problem worth solving, and then you give up when things get tough. So you want to solve a problem that you're passionate about, that you have a signal that there's a problem, and you have a unique insight into a solution, and you want to be able to see if you can get data fast enough to test that out with customers, right? And you want to love the process.

You want to be so ingrained in the problem that you're thinking about it, and it's consuming you. But what you also want to do is you want to make sure you're healthy, right? So you want to have some sort of healthy outlets, too, that when things get tough, you're able to recover quickly, take care of yourself. I think health is wealth, too, so you want to make sure you do things that energize you, but you always want to have that deep appreciation of the problem and that pain that customers feel, and you want to also have that feeling yourself where you're like, "Ah, this is so bad.

I wish this could be solved for my customers." Right? So that's the advice I would give. Sure. And also, for example, some of our audiences may be student founders, and they may be interested in your gBETA program you're running. Should they apply early, or should they wait until maybe they already have some traction, then they apply for that program?

That's a good question. I think our program is very selective, so I think founders have applied multiple times before getting in across our markets, right? So the best thing to do is to set up a office hour with the staff that is leading your market, and there's a list of all the gener8tor employees on our website, and there should be contact information where you can reach out to us, and even sometimes our Calendly link to schedule a time with us to learn more about the program. So even if you feel like you're not ready, I would encourage you guys to do that, to just reach out to us.

You can always reach out to me on LinkedIn, too, Abdi Sherif, and my email is abdi.sherif@gener8tor.com, so you can always reach out to me there. I'm always happy to talk. I will say the more traction you have, the more competitive your profile will be, but we consider a lot of different factors in terms of creating a diverse and very strong cohort pool of five. So, don't let your perceived thinking of your traction to eliminate you from applying or putting your hat into the ring, because some founders think that sometimes, and they miss out on a great opportunity to receive some mentorship and access to investors as well.

The last thing I will say, too, about gener8tor is even if you're not within the program, we have these things called Lightning Rounds where anybody who knows about it on our website can apply, and usually we have this broken out into sectors. So we have a biotech Lightning Round, we have corporate innovation Lightning Round, we have a fintech Lightning Round. And so if your company is in a specific sector, I highly recommend you to apply to those, because if you do get in, what we do is we match you with our investor network. And so usually when you apply, investors will be like, "Hey, yes, I want to meet this person." Set up the Zoom meeting, and we'll set up 15-minute Zoom meetings where you'll pitch for five minutes, and then there's 10 minutes of Q&A, and if that conversation goes well, there's a opportunity to extend that relationship further down the line.

Say the founder has a conviction, a passion in solving a certain problem, but they are limited in terms of the resources, both capital and network. Beyond these office hours, Lightning Rounds, and other programs or meetings that gener8tor provides before its accelerator program admission, what else could such student founders do to validate that they're doing something correct? Yeah, I think most universities have a entrepreneurship club that's probably led by more senior students who are developing ventures or even have advisors that are part of the entrepreneurship school on campus, or business professors who have successfully scaled businesses. So I would look into getting resources from there, and then also tap into your alumni pool.

You can look at LinkedIn and understand alumni that came from your school that are really successful in businesses and startups, and you can always leverage them as a resource. Alumni are very much willing to talk to current students and actually serve as advisors. And so I would definitely tap into that network, because there's a commonality there. Another thing I'll say is if there's some sort of commonality that you have with a certain mentor, or somebody that you find on LinkedIn, don't hesitate to actually emphasize that.

Let's say you come from a certain demographic and you feel like you could connect with that person on LinkedIn, you can frame your messaging like that, but I think people will respond if there's some sort of commonality or a link... right with what you're trying to do in terms of what they're doing too. So that's the core piece. People want to connect with people that look like them or come from a certain community as them.

So for me, if I was advising somebody in the Inland Empire to find additional resources, I would say look at your university, but also look at entrepreneurs within our ecosystem as well, because we're growing as well. So everybody in our community wants to support each other. Can you motivate these emerging founders by telling us a bit more about the experience once they get admitted to gBETA? So we know that it's a seven-week program, right?

Could you walk us through what's happening through these seven weeks until from the launch to final showcase at the end of the program? Yeah. So we start off with a very nice dinner and a celebration, kickoff event. The last one we did was at Topgolf in Ontario. So I had to display my awful golfing skills to everybody. I promise I'm good at a lot of sports.

I played semi-pro in basketball and soccer, but golf is not my thing. And we had a founder who just finished university who's going to Stanford in the fall, and he was hitting the golf balls out of the arena. So we went out for Topgolf, and then the next day, it's a full day orientation at our program partner's site. So there we really covered what gener8tor's really about.

We did some venture capital math exercises. We covered the itinerary for the seven weeks, and we started working on our executive summaries as well. So, the first page, which really encompasses the company overview, the founder overview, what the product looks like, what the go-to market is, and just started to get ready with our executive summary. From weeks two to six, there are a couple other elements that we incorporate.

Every founding team has a one-on-one session with me where I prepare some very concierge advice and connections to the founding team. And so really what I'm trying to do here is really help them accelerate their business and really solve their unique challenges. Here, I'm also trying to connect them with additional customers as well, and additional mentors in their field. We also have a lunch and learn session that's open to the whole Inland Empire community every week where I cover a concept that's really important for these founders, whether that be market sizing, revenue models, comparables, or even how to break into an investment bank accelerator.

We do that every week. And the other thing we do, which is probably my favorite and I think the founders' favorite, is we bring in serial entrepreneurs, domain experts, people who've worked at highly influential product or sales roles at Google and Microsoft that actually live in the Inland Empire, that moved to the Inland Empire. Even also VCs and investors come in. They get to hear our founders' pitches, and they ask them some questions.

They grill them a little bit. They give them advice on their pitch and their business model, and we're all in the same room together. And I think it's really great for the mentors to also understand who else is doing this type of work in the Inland Empire, too, to explore synergies. So we do that week on week. We do that until week six with the mentor swarms in person.

And in week six and seven, we have our investor swarms where we invite angel investors, venture capital firms, also investment advisors to hear the pitches of our startups, give them feedback on their pitches as well. And sometimes we do have angels who are interested in follow-up conversations to see if these founders could be a good investment for either themselves or for their firms. And then at the end of that, we have our final showcase, which is basically a demo day where last time we had 100 people in the community actually come out to hear our founders' pitches. I usually lead the session where I have an opening.

I bring in our program partners to talk. I bring in the president of the community college to talk. I set the scene for our startup founders to pitch. They pitch for five minutes, and after that, I do a closing ceremony, and the founders set up their booths where the audience can interact with them and learn more about what they're doing. We actually had some great engagement at the booth last time out, and one of our founders had intro conversations with UC Riverside to do a pilot.

And we also had an angel investor come out and is interested in investing in one of our startups as well. What would you say is the biggest change you see in founders from week one to week seven after the demo day? Yeah. I think the confidence that they have. Coming in, they have all these questions and I think it's good to have questions, but I think they are inhibiting themselves to take action.

I spoke about bias to action earlier, and we're really trying to have them move in a fast-paced way where we make them a little uncomfortable, right? And I always take a temperature check on each founder because you don't want to push someone so hard where they don't enjoy the experience as well. You have to learn everybody's mannerisms, but I will understand what your limit is, and I'll push you to the brink. And, I see them executing faster and a lot of them, or some of them who thought maybe they would do this part-time with a job...

couple of them quit their jobs after this and been like, "I have to do this. I have to go out full force." I know one person has kids they have to support, and they were like, "You know what? Maybe I'll apply to one job, but if I don't get it, I'm doing this." And they're about to get a $400,000 investment from an investment accelerator out in the Bay Area. So it's really cool to see that they've had the confidence and the conviction to take and move things forward.

Yeah. I think this question will be moving towards a little bit more of your personal side. So how would you describe yourself besides being an investor? Yeah. That's a good question. I think it's important to have this type of characteristic as an investor, but just as a really great human being. I'm very relationship driven, right? And so, I look to build relationships with people, understand where they're coming from, explore where we have synergies, and I try to give before I take a lot of times.

And a lot of times I just try to give, give, give. And I think with this gener8tor experience, a lot of the social capital that I've given has come back to me because I haven't really taken anything and I'm like, "Oh, hey, I think you would be a great fit to support one of my founders. Do you mind having a conversation with them?" And so that's been super helpful in terms of finding great matches for these founders and great advisors for these founders. I'm also a very big sports guy, especially I played a lot of sports growing up, so that taught me resiliency and teamwork, and so I'm really big on that.

You want to push yourself as much as possible, but you have to realize that you can't do it all yourself, even if you are the star player on the team. You need other people to support you as well. And so those are some of the lessons I've learned in sports. I love soccer. I love basketball. I'm watching the World Cup right now. Unfortunately, my team got knocked out in the previous round, France.

But yeah, big Laker fan too. Big Kobe Bryant fan. Mamba mentality always. And so I think, just trying to be 1% better every single day. If you could be 1% better every single day, if you look at it across 365 days, it's exponential. So, yeah. Those are some of the characteristics I try to stick with and that embody who I am. You are serving as a core network in a lot of these ecosystems now, right?

And just extending what you've just spoken about growing 1% every day, what would you hope yourself to be and gBETA Inland Empire to be in the next three to five years? Okay. Well, in the next three to five years, I hope we have more than one program in Moreno Valley, for a start. I've started having conversations with different cities and universities.

I won't name names because we're still early in partnership efforts, but I envision us maybe in the next couple of years to have at least five programs, and that's being conservative, across the region. There's a lot of interest, and my hope that in three years we actually have a fund attached to these programs where they're not just gBETA programs, but they're investment accelerated programs. And I definitely see that appetite there, and I'm pretty sure we could pull it off. So that's my hope for the region.

And like I said, we're the Inland Empire right now, but I hope for us to become the innovation empire, maybe the Silicon Valley of Southern California. Moving on to the closing. For the founders that are listening to this episode, what would you say you're looking for in your next gBETA cohort? Yeah. Well, I look at the founder. That's the first thing I assess, right?

The personality, the founding team, right? So, I'm looking, are you coachable? Do you want to learn? Do you want to go through this program? A lot of times people try to apply to the program because they just want investor connections. They feel like they have everything already mapped out, and they don't want to do anything else in the program. And so I try to filter that out as well.

But if you're eager to grow, you're hungry, you want to learn, and you're committed to what you're building, those are the things I'm looking for. Our program is industry agnostic, even though we have, based in our region, a slight bent, so where it's clean tech and also ag tech and advanced manufacturing. I'm totally open to any industry. I will also say gener8tor has made a push lately to actually support more university-affiliated technologies.

So if you're a professor inventing a technology and trying to commercialize that with your students or any other partners, I think gBETA programs are going to be very successful for you because we're actually catering our curriculum for those type of startups that come and spin out from universities. So, if you're hearing this, if you're from a university trying to commercialize your technology, gBETA program would be a perfect fit for you. Yeah. And I think there's one demo date coming up, right, after this current cohort in the summer.

And for some of the potential investors maybe who's also listening to this show, can you just quickly introduce some of these companies that will be pitching at the day, and also share the information of how they can actually participate? Yeah, 100%. So we actually just launched our RSVP page for the event. It will be happening on Tuesday, August 11th.

From 5:00 to 7:00 PM at Moreno Valley College in Moreno Valley, California, which is just east of Riverside. So we'll have five startup founders presenting on that day. We have a sports tech company that's building the digital infrastructure for jet ski sports, trying to expand into all underserved sports categories, and has an official partnership with the IJSBA, and a pilot in the works for at least $30,000 per month. So that's a very exciting startup that's coming out of the Inland Empire, out of Moreno Valley, actually.

Then we have another company called Pampered Social, and they are building the digital infrastructure for local chambers of commerces, really helping the event experiences at these organizations and automating a lot of the event curation through AI. They also have a close to six-figure contract right now with the Southern California Black Chamber of Commerce. The next company we have is Verodex. So it's a smart air quality monitoring system for veterinary clinics, and they're now doing pilots in a few veterinary clinics out in the Inland Empire.

A really robust prototype that's been built and will be featured at the showcase. Next company we have is called Plumb, and so they're basically utilizing AI for hardware companies so that they can prevent costly rework, and reduce monetary expenses for very expensive hardware designs. And so, the founder is actually going to Stanford. We're going to miss him, but hopefully he comes back to the Inland Empire to build his startup.

And then lastly, we have Certopus, which is a company that's building digital credentialing software for organizations and universities, so they can actually accurately identify that this person actually completed a certificate or a degree at this university or organization. So basically authenticating digital certificates. And the company, before coming to our accelerator program, was doing over $200,000 in revenue. And so they've been able to connect with the universities in the Inland Empire ecosystem to increase their growth and ARR.

So we have five really amazing companies that are presenting, and we would love anybody in the Inland Empire community or even external in LA, Orange County, or San Diego to attend. Let me know if you want to attend, I would say. But also, we're so glad this program exists in the Inland Empire because we really see this region as a force for entrepreneurship, and we're really excited about our showcase on August 11th. Yeah.

So I think this basically wraps up our episode today. So for founders, if you're interested in applying for the gBETA program running by Abdi, definitely reach out to him. Also, for potential investors or angels who may be interested in participating in this demo day, and definitely also reach out to Abdi. And thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks, Philip. Thanks, David. I had a great time. Thank you for having me.