Kicking Off 2010 With a Bang

For nearly two decades, I and my colleagues at Guidewire Group have been evaluating startup companies.  Combined, we estimate that we’ve looked at more than 20,000 startups over the years, trying to pinpoint what bodes well, and what portends a darker future for entrepreneurs creating companies and bringing new innovations to market.

Those many meetings have lead us to a surprisingly narrow set of criteria – seven actually – that prove to be strong indicators of a startup’s prospects and potential.    Over the last year, we’ve codified those criteria into what we now call the G/Score.   The G/Score is a transparent, quantitative assessment methodology designed not just to rate early-stage companies, but also to provide a diagnostic of a company’s strengths and challenges.  The G/Score is prescriptive, providing clear measurement and obvious benchmarks that a young company can aspire to achieve, and in so doing improve the likelihood of its success.

As we embark on the new year, Guidewire Group is launching what may well prove to be our biggest endeavor to date:  encode 20 years and 20,000 interviews into a rich assessment tool that will enable entrepreneurs to evaluate their business concepts, receive directed feedback about their ideas, and get advice to support their business execution. (We’ll be posting our first G/Score scorecard of a company later this week.)

We tested the G/Score concept and methodology throughout 2009 – on entrepreneurs, on large companies that work with startups, on economic and government development agencies charged with catalyzing entrepreneurship. During this process, we found one champion that we’d not quite expected: The National Science Foundation.  The Foundation is charged, through its SBIR program, with supporting tech transfer through entrepreneurship.   Thousands of researchers and entrepreneurs apply for SBIR grants each year and the NSF does an incredible job of providing real support, along with grant money, to validate and commercialize research innovations.

Their challenge, not surprisingly, is scaling their programs in order to provide real guidance and mentorship to the entrepreneurs who receive SBIR grants.

When our champion at  NSF learned about the G/Score, he encouraged us to apply for a grant ourselves, suggesting that we develop an online self-evaluation tool for entrepreneurs that would provide assessment and prescriptive direction for business improvement and acceleration.

Late in 2009, we learned that we’d received the grant to develop proof-of-concept for this self-assessment tool.   As you can imagine, we are thrilled to have the support of the NSF to further the cause of startups and technology innovation in the U.S.

It’s an exciting project, and we’re putting together a crack team of project managers and developers to turn that rich experience into an even richer prototype of the G/Score online.  As we cast our nets to put together the best team and to build the right product, we hope that we can, as always, engage the wonderful community that is the Guidewire Group network, to come along on this exciting ride.