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either it's Jiang Diskin from the start of NGO calm I have with you with me today st. Ella the managing director of lunch pan la I say so I only been at lunch pest for the last few minutes and I already heard amazing stuff about Sam he's the legendary around here so um what is lunch Spinelli so we are a startup accelerator in Los Angeles we were started about two and a half years ago my Marx sister Marc is a big venture capitalist in LA and he created launchpad as a mentorship program to encourage people to start companies in LA and keep those companies in height so for the past two and half years it's been kind of monthly meetings and connections with investors and mentors he did two classes 23 companies went through that program 19 were funded five were acquired and so it was a great record to build on not that we take credit for the success of those companies but we were honored to assist and support them and the logical next step was to build out a full-blown accelerator somewhat inspired by tech stars or Y Combinator and so what we have today is Launchpad is an office here in Santa Monica which we didn't have before we raised a fund of 1.3 million dollars to invest $50,000 in 20 companies this year we give them free office space for three months for three or four months and more valuable than anything we have a huge network of mentors investors advisers supporters alumni you know who are here supporting you know investing in mentoring advising our 10 companies we opened our doors in January and we have eight companies working full-time out of our office and we've got two more that are have their own offices nearby and the executives come in part time and we are excited and honored to be working with these incredible oh that's very cool I mean Mark Suster has been such a celebrity in the startup commuity he's great but he's actually the major port of building the ecosystem around here you know so with the program I mean how does it work the company come in here they had some office space in the middle of Santa Monica what else do they get yeah so like I said there's there's the money and we you know we fund them at the beginning to help them you know bring on an additional team member or you know scale up whatever it is that they need to do for marketing or anything along those lines and then the mentorship kind of takes two forms on the one hand we will meet with every company when they come in and we will say what do you need you know what do you need them we'll tell them what we think they need and they'll tell us what they think they need and we will try and develop kind of a short list of you know the best mentors that we think in our network would be you know would be ideal for helping them big part of my job now when the companies are in is to engage those mentors and bring them in and hook them up with the companies so that's one part of it which is kind of the spoke mentoring and bespoke connections for each company the other part of it is what we call it curriculum but I you but I think it's less like a school program like or startup school and more just kind of like a couple you know an ongoing program of just really useful speakers and panels about various topics and those can range from something like here's a very specific panel with three lawyers about term sheets and here's the in announce of term sheets here all the the you know the things to watch out for that investors will throw in there here are the ways to you know structure a term sheet to your advantage as an entrepreneur you know and and we had three lawyers Dave Dave young from DLA Piper and it's got all their tenant who are two of our investors sponsors mentors and Donley they up they all came through and and did you know two hours just going into the nitty-gritty of term sheets on the flip side you know programming might look like earlier this week we had Jodi Sherman the founder and CEO of eco mom and he really just came in and spent an hour in this room chatting with our founders about his entrepreneurial journey and the winding road that he took starting this company starting the next company taking time off making money spending money all the funny stories that kind of you know go along with that it was really inspiring to because it just you know reminds them it reminds all of us that there's no one path to success in startups and it's great to just I think for our CEOs they've said has been extremely valuable to hear from people who are a year or two years or three years ahead in their entrepreneurial journey and so yeah we're you know the programming of the mentorship is really just you know I think that's the core of the program and and you know what all that I know that later on is is the community of the other founders and the alums last week we had alumni companies come in for you know party at night we see it all the time that ku from Android knows about design and Jason from Chow now is you know our marketing expert and matt from chromatic is you know our design star and you know everyone has different areas of expertise and what's really exciting is to see the companies tapping each other and using each other kind of as a their way mentoring and advising each other so the ecosystem that you create here and then you have the capsule right solid had the lesson sort of you know legal lessons and maybe fundraising lesson and there's a soft side way they share the experience exactly so who are the let some other mentor in the program um we've got I mean we've got tons of mentors I mean everyone's you know they're they're they're big names and then there are you know just incredible people who've been VPS and you know heads of business development at different corporations yeah you know in different startups like everyone like I said from Joey Sherman who you know came and spoke earlier last week we had Willie Belk runs product at Beech meant come in earlier that week we had the founders and the entire engineering and product team from grub with us coming nice and they came and talked about like how do we do product development how do we enjoy and that was two very different stories from our founders to learn from we yeah we Mark Suster Jim Andelman Peter Lee Allen Patrick Alex from Idealab all these guys are our investors but really they all work out of the office one day we for the most part we have just you know yeah we have like a terrific group of people that are supporting us and both in LA and you know stuff like well I visitors like Steve schlattman from layer Avengers who's going you know what an awesome guy based in New York a ton of experience in media and investing he came in spent a day with us or Jeff Tannenbaum from luan ventures I'm going to come down and spend a day and they can where an investor hat but more than that they're here to let's work with you know the startups and help them with their pitches and say okay you can talk to us as an investor maybe we'll invest but more importantly how can we help you refine your pitches and your vision for in two three months when you're really out there speaking to tons of investors and actually trying to fund this very cool so I was talking to a trip charting which is one of the company right here and I said I mean they've been here for five weeks and it's already they already raised a lot of money through just meeting people here so how involved are you with their fundraising process um we'll be as involved as we need to be I trip Charlie I you know I'd like to take credit for their incredible an incredible team and they've got an incredible product and so when they went up north to speak to investors investors responded and they were excited about it I see my job and our job is launch pad on the investing front it's more to be a facilitator and we've got an incredible network we've got a ton of relationships and what we want to do is once everyone's ready or we don't want the one script on teams ready which they were they came out of Idealab they came here refining their product they have a new design about to launch a lot of stuff coming together an engineering team that's growing and they went out and so it was very easy for me all we had to do was send me some you know hey guys you know you're probably gonna be up north next week let's sit down you know them and make it happen so every journey is a little different for you know for these companies and some came on the launch pad having zero dollars some raise you know kind of between around 500,000 the company here that's raised a million dollars so you know like I said there's no really one-size-fits-all approach but what however is whether it's raising the first seed round or the Series A or whatever it is we we can and will be tremendously helpful that's very nice I mean that's very it brought a very good point very interesting point about how each company just went and you've started out we have for more than 400 companies are applying for to the program so how exactly did you do that screening process to come up with these ten companies yeah it was it was really challenging and we I think one thing we learned from this process is that we should give ourselves more time to review companies because you know frankly you know I ran into an amazing founder last night he's got a great company that was referred to us and that we that we looked at and he was like he was like you know I never you know I I didn't you know you I didn't hear back from you and and I was like oh my god and I felt horrible you have and so I'm sure there that's not the only story like that and so we did our best to screen you know give everyone a first look and we and we did do that it was it was a real challenge because the quality applications was so high and but you just just as far as insight into our process how it how it works is basically we have a few of us who do the initial screening and we will kind of try and basically cut the initial group down to maybe about half or a little less than half we have a group that kind of reviews those again and people would maybe with a little bit more domain experts use in a given area if it's in small business or if it's in travel or whatever it is you know they'll kind of give us their thoughts on that and then once we get it down to about 30 or four years so our investment committee which includes our investors and me and a few other kind of a rotating cast of characters we will do our best to you know take a meeting with every entrepreneur and then I on top of that just on my own try and you know grab coffee with you know as many as I can there were there were days in November I'd have half an hour coffees from 8 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. a lot of coffee yes coffee bean so when is the next class gonna be um we will gently nudge these guys out in in early to mid May and we will take about a month and a half I think to select the next class and my hope is that Launchpad support costs would begin images I've seen okay and then if anything that startup can do to you know help improve the chances of getting getting into the next class absolutely the number one thing that I would recommend is to try and find someone in our network one of our mentors one of our investors me anyone who can serve as a reference because with the volume of applications we received it if anything to help you kind of like bubble up to the top is incredibly helpful and because we unfortunately don't have a huge amount of time to spend on zooming due diligence due diligence on every company we're not like a venture capital fund that can afford to spend you know weeks or months really getting in deep with every company those extra data points from trusted people in our network are very valuable so that's a great thing for us also we want companies that are developed product we're not trying to turn powerpoints and to businesses or turn ideas into companies for us it is we want to we want to be able to click or touch or break something we you know and that gives us insight into how you think is as a founding team and how you think about product and how in your ability to you know code and you know all these things that will be like essential and you know to building your business later on and we just want to try and get as much early information as possible there the last thing is that we have a strong bias towards teams with technical co-founders yeah or at least with tech already on their team it's it's not a disqualifier if you don't but it definitely is like a big positive if you have technical talent early on we don't discriminate against you know industries you know definitively I will say however we're a lot better prepared to help a digital media or ad tech or consumer facing software company in some way than a clean tech company or a hospital technology company again though we'll look at it all and we're really committed to supporting great companies with great technology in LA whatever they're doing and you know we're not a media accelerator you know and that's it we've got 10 companies in 10 different industries but at the same time if you look at our mentor list and you kind of come to me and say hey I love to connect with this person I know that talking to I'm a watt would be game-changing for my business and we can say okay great that little tips that's very cool so are you gonna do an open day or something with the future yeah future applicants can I should come in and just have a sense of wonder that's actually a good idea we hadn't really thought about having an open house here yet but yeah we're gonna do an open house and and the demo day the demo day we are talking a lot about now I think one challenge that we face in LA is obviously not a huge amount of investment funds that are able to write those series a checks and so there's definitely thinking around maybe does it make more sense to bring our teams up to Silicon Valley does it make more sense to kind of band together with all the other terrific accelerators that are ni and maybe do a demo day all together and I think we're all talking about that and figuring it out and regardless you know we're really committed to doing something that gets our startups the exposure and connects investors everywhere with the amazing companies in LA that are being built at launch pad in it amplifying it love your labs and science and start engine and you know and all the other great stuff that's going on here very cool thank you so much for your time thank you really appreciate that thanks that was spent hello farm lunch Pinelli