2020 GW Summer Startup Accelerator (GWSSA)

What It Is

The GW Summer Startup Accelerator (GWSSA) is a capstone entrepreneurship experience for GW's most ambitious student startups. This intensive, 9-week, residential summer program supports a select group of student entrepreneurs who are ready to go “All In” to launch their companies. The program provides these students with the knowledge, funding, mentorship, peer support, and resources necessary to become “fundable” business ventures.

The accelerator’s greatest benefit is to provide student entrepreneurs with the opportunity to spend nine weeks working full-time with a cohort of other young entrepreneurs. Participating students receive free housing on campus and a living allowance for the duration of the program.  

The GWSSA’s curriculum is an intensive set of workshops and activities that help startup ventures fill in any holes in their business model, financial projections, product development plan, and go-to-market strategy. The end product is a rock-solid pitch document backed up by vetted details that enable startups to make credible pitches to prospective investors. 

In the accelerator, the student entrepreneurs get connected to the right advisors, partners, coaches, and funders through networking events and a database of hundreds of supporters in the GW entrepreneurial ecosystem.  At the end of the GWSSA, the teams pitch their ventures to scores of angel investors and early-stage venture capitalists (VCs) in the Showcase and Demo Day. 

The GWSSA accelerates highly promising ventures, transforming them from GW student teams to startup ventures that are fundable and can make credible pitches to angel investors or VCs. Other goals for the program are to launch companies, launch products, get companies to revenue and prepare companies to get to scale.

Check out footage from the Summer Startup Accelerator here.

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