Dec 11, 2014
By Alex Kopelyan
What next?

We received an incredible number of great applications from across the world (more information to come in the next couple of weeks) but we have also just started sending out our rejection emails as well for the first application cycle and for some of you reading this, we’ll have attached a link to this post to discuss some of the reasons why your team submission might not have been successful in this application cycle.

What if you didn’t get into the first Indie.Bio class?

Rejection is part of the process of building any company, from the day your idea is born, you have to nurture it through the objections of friends, family, co-founders, potential customers and investors. For many of you this isn’t the end, it’s just the beginning of your journey and for some of you not successful in this cycle, we encourage you to apply with new ideas and projects as well as refined projects that you’d previously applied with, we’ll be opening up applications for fall 2015 in SF and Cork applications are open now for the Summer.

So what are we typically looking for in our applications?

1. Team: Strong, dedicated team with at least two full time co-founders (or at least willing to go full time upon funding).
2. Strong science: based on your own experiments, alpha/beta products or current literature, is your science likely to work?
3. Coming to San Francisco: Is your team willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay area for the 100 day program (at least)?
4. 100 Days: Will you be able to develop a product or service within the 100 days of the program? How will you show investors during and after demo day that you’re ready for the next round of investment to scale your company?
5. Vision & Market potential: What’s the grand vision for your company? How will your technology meaningfully help humanity? Is this more than a small service or product and does your company have the potential to build a $100m-$1BLN+ biotech business in 5-10 years if you’re successful?

Some of the applications we received were VERY interesting scientifically but needed just a little more work to show that the science might actually work, in those cases we’d highly recommend joining your local biohacker space or local lab and continuing your work and applying for the next cycle.

Just remember as Carl Sagan once wrote “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”