#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Caroline Smith, Co-Founder & Co-Director; and Margaret Lee, Co-Founder & Co-Director, Collab
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Creating an inclusive entrepreneurship ecosystem in New Haven
New Haven, the home of Yale University, is quickly emerging as a hub of entrepreneurial activity in Connecticut. One of the organizations spurring early-stage startup development in The Elm City is Collab, a community-led accelerator that works to build up the confidence, skills, and resources available to emerging founders. We recently spoke with Caroline Smith and Margaret Lee—the co-founders and co-directors of Collab—to learn more about the accelerator’s work, the Connecticut startup ecosystem, and the work they’re doing to empower future entrepreneurs.
Can you tell us a little about yourself? What is your background?
Margaret and I both have a fair amount of similarities. We’re both originally from Kentucky, and we both graduated from Yale in 2014. We’ve been in New Haven now for about 10 years, and we both fell in love with the city.
Margaret used to work at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, which is now called Tsai Center, and saw through a lot of their student venture programming. I started working for a local startup called SeeClickFix after I graduated, and I was involved in a lot of community organizing work around the city. When we met after college, we combined perspectives on community organizing and venture building together.
Tell us more about Collab. What is the work you’re doing, and how do you work to empower Connecticut entrepreneurs?
Collab is a community-centered accelerator for Connecticut entrepreneurs. Our main mission is to make entrepreneurship accessible across the state.
Our model has three parts, the first of which is access. When we were building Collab, we heard from so many entrepreneurs about the various psychological, logistical, and financial barriers they face to entrepreneurship. In particular, those barriers tend to affect women, immigrants, and people of color. So we want to build a program to address those barriers, including providing child care, transportation, and transportation services for all of our programming.
The second part of the model is confidence, and that addresses the psychological barriers to entrepreneurship. When we meet with entrepreneurs, there are a lot of limited beliefs and low expectations that systemic injustice often perpetuates. We want to build programming that addresses these issues, and leaves entrepreneurs leaving the program more confident and connected than they were at the start.
Our last pillar is pathways. We work with entrepreneurs at an early stage in the process, when they have an idea, they have some validation of the idea, and they’re excited to articulate or form that idea and push it out into the world. We try and build a connection between us and other connected organizations around the city and around the state so those entrepreneurs have a pathway to higher levels of resources—whether it’s financial, mentoring, or forming other connections.
I know one of your main goals is to make entrepreneurship more accessible to traditionally overlooked communities. How do you work to support these entrepreneurs?
We think about building out programming that works for everybody and helps everyone to be successful. Our programming kind of forms a funnel, with a very broad top. We think of Collab as kind of the front lawn of entrepreneurship that can then lead down other paths. At the very top of this funnel we do a lot of events around entrepreneurship. Those events range from storytelling events—women and mothers in entrepreneurship, immigrants in entrepreneurship, states in entrepreneurship, confidence in entrepreneurship. We focus on topics that matter the most to the entrepreneurs we work with, and then we try to build a more reflective culture around entrepreneurship in the city and around the region. We want to give new entrepreneurs the stage to tell their stories and inspire others to also walk down the path of entrepreneurship. We also do topic-based events that focus on issues like business planning or how to access funding. Those are designed to make some of the more intimidating parts of building a business a little less intimidating.
Further down the funnel we also hold office hours, which are one-on-one sessions with entrepreneurs. We have a partnership with the library, so these can be done over the phone or at the library. They’re an opportunity for us to sit down with entrepreneurs and talk about their work and ideas. There’s a confidence-building aspect of office hours that lets entrepreneurs leave with a better sense of where they want to go.
At the bottom of the funnel we have our accelerator program. This is a 12-week program for six to seven teams of entrepreneurs. They get $1,000 in funding, get paired with mentor, and go through a 12-week educational curriculum. They get all of the nuts and bolts you’d expect from an accelerator, and all of it culminates in a celebratory pitch day. We provide child care and transportation services as part of all of our programs.
What makes Connecticut’s startup ecosystem so unique?
Something that makes Connecticut unique is that we’re the 48th largest state. Since we’re tiny, that presents a lot of opportunities for the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Hartford is just a 40-minute train ride from New Haven, so it’s not far away if you need to access any resources. That’s also true if individuals want to go to Hartford to advocate for different forms of economic development, or to push for more inclusive economic development.
There’s an opportunity to create connections between cities and towns because we’re so small. I think everyone would agree that there’s a lot of work to be done to build up those bridges, but the opportunity is there and exists.
Are there any policies at the federal, state, or local level that have helped Connecticut startups?
The first one that comes to mind is the policy that lifted Collab off the ground. Several years ago, Connecticut enacted a program called Innovation Places. The main mission of the grants is to invest in key cities in Connecticut to create places for innovation. The grant was a mixture of investing in new or existing programs that support the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
New Haven was one of the recipients of that grant two years ago, and that’s what allowed us to focus on Collab and really build out the initial programming. It’s brought us closer together with the other New Haven projects, whether that’s MakeHaven or the New Haven Free Public Library. We’ve also worked closer with CTNext, an organization that not only administers the Innovation Places program but also works to build up the state’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
It’s been interesting to be more connected with the other cities. We’re part of this larger network of cities in the state that have received resources to do this kind of work. It was a significant investment in ecosystem building across the state.
What is your goal for Collab moving forward?
We think about it in phases. Right now, we’re really excited about continuing to build up the programs we’ve been doing, improve it and make it more robust to ensure that entrepreneurs have an accessible pathway toward building a business that supports themselves and their families and contribute to their communities.
I think we’re also really excited about exploring other different models for how economic development can look. What does it mean to invest in less extractive forms of business like co-op models, where workers have a lot more ownership and a lot more of a stake in determining the future of the business. What does it mean to make the financial relationship between businesses and those that are able to invest in businesses healthier and more transparent. So we get excited about continuing to open access, and we’re also interested in different models to help our economy flourish and thrive.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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