Lars Hinrichs beendet HackFwd

3 Jahre, 3 Monate und 3 Tage nach Start des Inkubators HackFwd zieht Initiator Lars Hinrichs den Stecker bei seinem Brutkasten und verkündet das Ende per Twitter (siehe unten) und sehr lesenswertem Blogpost. Zitat daraus: “I would like to announce that we have stopped accepting new startups into HackFwd three years, three months and three days after we first began supporting Europe’s most passionate geeks”.

Stattliche acht Millionen investierte Hinrichs in den vergangenen Jahren über HackFwd bzw. in HackFwd und die HackFwd-Start-ups. “Will it pay off? At minimum, we are certain it will pay a good dividend. But is the portfolio worth 2 or 3 times our investment? Maybe. The future will tell. But knowing that we won’t lose money (especially compared to many other investors, accelerators and Incubators or even VCs) is still a solid outcome”, schreibt Hinrichs, der sich zuletzt als Baggerfahrer und Abrissunternehmer einen Namen machte. Zu den HackFwd-Start-ups gehören unter anderem YieldKit?, Cobook und Infogr.am. Was jetzt aus denen wird beantwortet Hinrichs selbst: “And while we are not taking any new companies into our program, we care deeply about our existing ones and continue to support them”.

Und nun zu den Gründen für das Ende von HackFwd: “Three and a half years ago, when we started, there were hardly any accelerators of note in the world. In Europe, Seedcamp was in its second year. In Asia, Innovation Works had yet to launch. And in the US, Y-Combinator was just starting to gain traction. Today, it’s a very different landscape. There are literally thousands of accelerators; so many that I often wonder if there are more accelerators than angels and more angels than there are entrepreneurs”. In der Tat war die Inkubatoren und Accelerator-Welt vor drei Jahren noch eine völlig andere, dennoch wird HackFwd mit seinem Herz für Geeks fehlen.

Interessant zu lesen, ist auch Hinrichs’ Liste darüber, Was bei HackFwd gut und was nicht gut funktioniert hat. Sein positives Fazit: Geeks Can Be CEOs, European Geeks Are As Talented As American Ones, Mentorship Is Worth More Than Money, The Need For In-Person Inspiration und The Importance Of Intellectual Generosity. Sein negatives Fazit: We Didn’t Cut Early Enough, It Was Difficult To Nurture And Scale, We Underestimated The Bureaucracy, We Assumed Faster Exit Times und It Can Be Hard To Go Deep And Wide. Danke für diese offenen Worte.

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