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Matter. THE DESIGN-DRIVEN ACCELERATOR
Corey Ford, Managing Partner at Matter: “Matter is a design-driven accelerator program that supports entrepreneurs who want to change media for good. It is about venture acceleration, about getting where you want to go faster. It’s intense, but it pays off.”
VENTURE ACCELERATION
Matter is about venture acceleration. It’s about getting where you’re headed faster. It’s not about getting a workspace. It’s about helping portfolio companies reach product/market fit better and faster than they would through their existing operations, funding, and their advisor networks.
Matter’s five-month accelerator program starts with a one-week boot camp, followed by four one-month design sprints. It’s really intense, but it pays off.
DESIGN THINKING DRIVES EVERYTHING
Design thinking applies throughout the lifecycle of a company. Our program lies at the intersection of design thinking, entrepreneurship, and the future of media. The first piece is absolutely critical. Because design thinking is fundamentally driven from a human-centered point of view, its lessons don’t apply only as you push toward a first beta, they also apply to sales strategy, fundraising, geographic expansion, and hiring practices.
The teams who come through our program leave with a skill set that keeps them moving faster for years after they launch out of our program.
WHAT MAKES MATTER DIFFERENT?
At Matter, we’ve created a very intentional culture of experimentation. We’re focused on creating an experience for these entrepreneurs and our partners trapped in old-school media organizations to help them reach their absolute highest potential. We do so much more than provide space and funding for our entrepreneurs. It’s not just about getting the highest financial return.
MINDSETS DRIVE OUR WORK
There are clear and visible messages about unique mindsets we live by. Behind each mindset, such as “Be Bold and Disruptive” and “Tell Stories,” we articulate clear behaviors and prompts for action. The signs act as reminders of how we want to show up to our investors, our strategic partners, our entrepreneurs, our mentors, and the broader community. They are the “signal generators” of the culture that we want. You have to carry the culture in everything you do.
HOW DO WE CREATE A DESIRABLE, VIABLE, FEASIBLE IDEA IN A 20-WEEK PROCESS?
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IT IS ALL ABOUT FEEDBACK
Regular and disciplined feedback cycles are core to our process. Every month our entrepreneurs have to deliver an elevator pitch and demo a product to a panel of diverse experts and an extended group of trusted mentors in what we call a Design Review. It’s a safe space to get constructive critique from different angles and fresh perspectives. It’s focused on uncovering the unknowns about the business. Each design review runs through a gauntlet of nine questions that are hung up on the wall for everyone to see. For example: “Does your excitement outweigh your hesitation?” We ask the entire audience to respond to them, including the other entrepreneurs in the cohort. This makes them better givers and receivers of feedback, too.
My hypothesis is that the entrepreneurship journey is lonely. Most people wait way too long before getting feedback. By the time they do get feedback, it’s too late and the feedback comes across as too harsh. Feedback is everything here.
ONE-PAGE VISUAL BUSINESS PLAN
The one-page business plan allows us to understand our business through very intuitive and clear questions. It’s the driver of the viability question.
ENTREPRENEURS THAT CAN KILL THEIR PUPPIES ARE THE BEST IN THE WORLD
There’s lots of business stuff tied up in the plan. It unpacks business-speak into “how might we” questions. It helps us cut through the jargon of business.
For example, if you asked my entrepreneurs if they know what “sustainable competitive advantage” is: 90% of them will say they’ve heard it before, but they don’t really know what it means.
THE THINGS WE LOOK FOR
We look for teams that are able to let go of their original ideas and plans. Our team GoPop, which was acquired by BuzzFeed and is now running their mobile prototyping efforts, is a great example of that. The majority of teams cling to something that is not working way too long and they run out of time.
And then there are some teams that recognize the light bulb moment. They can kill things that were once dear to them and do it confidently without knowing what comes next. They have stories of people who have done this before them and that gives them the strength to do it, the confidence of going down into the abyss. 
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EMPATHY AND THE HUMAN FACTOR
The beauty of taking a design approach is that everything starts with the human factor. You base your entire discovery process on a real need about real people. If you try to build a business that’s not grounded on that, you’re building the business on sand.
When you start with understanding the people who will use and purchase your potential offering, it’s a lot easier to build and test the right prototypes that can maximize desirability, feasibility, and viability. Without this essential empathy, lean startups often find themselves optimizing toward the best version of what they decided to create without having ever figured out if it’s what they should create. In essence, the lean startup is a great way to get to a local maxima, but not necessarily to a global one.
IT’S ABOUT SPEED, NOT STAGE
When we evaluate companies for our accelerator, we judge whether they’re right for us based on the skill set and track record of the team and our excitement about their products and services.
More than anything, though, we want to see that they possess the mindsets and the drive to navigate the fog of entrepreneurship: they’re mission-aligned, highly collaborative, user-centered, prototype-driven, and ready to walk through the desert to change media for good.
They take advantage of the rare opportunity to benefit from the contribution of everyone in the ecosystem – mentors, media partners, investors, and each other. They view feedback as a gift. And they want to reach the next stage of their growth much faster than they could at their current pace. 
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Dedicate time to interact with mentors and other organziations that provide feedback.
For all that’s been said about scaling design within organizations, future leaders are graduating today having mastered design tools and skills, while taking on the designer’s mindset. They’re not just coming from art programs either.
Around the world, MBA programs, the stalwarts of business management pedagogy, are embracing design thinking. In some cases, such as the one described on the next few pages, design has been completely and totally merged with business.
As the world changes and requires different skills and a new mindset, MBA programs are evolving with it to ensure leaders graduating from these programs have the skills and mindset to match. Whether you like it or not, the future leaders of your company are designers. Design is coming. Are you ready?
