Sparklehood is a new-age startup school for working professionals. The company does not ask the founders to quit their job until they have market traction/funding commitment. They are sector and stage agnostic and they empower employees to become employers. Anchal Taatya 4x Entrepreneur, IIM Ahmedabad, and Giulia Piona are the Co-founders of the company.
Support provided:
- Coach (startup guy) available 24 * 7. There are 4 coaches with strong early-stage startup experience and mild exits:
- Anchal Taatya
- Mitesh Damania
- Ujwal Sutaria
- Ravikumar Yadavilli
The founders were fortunate enough to attend reputed educational institutions such as IIM Ahmedabad for our MBA and because of that; they were surrounded by really smart people in the circle. This made them wonder why the people who have the gift of brains and grit are not taking the entrepreneurship path as often. Sparklehood was born to make it easier for working professionals to jump into entrepreneurship.
According to Anchal Taatya, “We have heard so many brilliant ideas from extremely smart and passionate people with full-time jobs and people who have unique insights about their industry. If we can make a tiny fraction of these ideas successful, the world would be a much better place.
Sparklehood has tied up with Republic, an angel investing platform based in the US to give special consideration to the cohort startups. The company is also in touch with most A league VCs in India and in parallel building their own angel network.
At Sparklehood, they treat each startup uniquely and shy away from the batch processing approach followed by most incubators and accelerators. For e.g. Zasket, a Sparklehood cohort startup, lifetime free delivery hyperlocal grocery startup focused on Tier 2 and below towns couldn’t close funding in India and now they are doing a round of USD 375K at USD 3 Million post-money valuations in the US through Republic.
Sparklehood does not believe in fitting people/ideas into frameworks. Their assistance primarily looks like 1:1 bespoke consulting by mentors and coaches.
Mentors are entrepreneurs with an avg. valuation or exit of their startups at USD 200 Million and founders do structure 1:1 hourly calls per week with them. Coaches are entrepreneurs with strong early-stage startup experience with exits between USD 2 to 10 Million and act as non-operational co-founders to help with brainstorming, making warm introductions and advising on all aspects of the business.
The 1st cohort which was launched on 22nd November ‘20 is halfway through and the company focus is to do successful fundraise for as many of startups as possible. The 2nd big focus is to attract high-quality founders for the next cohort.
At the moment, the biggest competitors for Sparklehood are Antler and Entrepreneur First programs both of which are Europe centric with an Indian chapter.
Sparklehood adds value solely via sweat equity and they get equity only when they do successful fundraising but for other incubators, it’s more about weeding out startups constantly who would not give good ROI.
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