Taking a business from zero to one is exhilarating.

Stories of how napkin sketches become billion-dollar unicorns make the seemingly impossible, possible. When you hear aspirational founders equate the experience to ‘eating glass’ or ‘ jump off a cliff and assemble an aeroplane on the way down’, we know that the journey is not going to be easy.

All startups are locked in a fight for relevance.

It truly is the survival of the fittest, and the smallest of edges could be the difference between crossing the chasm or not.

As someone who has been building businesses for the last 17 years, I have first-hand experience of how difficult this journey is. There is nothing that I could share with a founder that would prepare them for what is in store for them. Every journey is unique. However, just like a sherpa guiding people up the most treacherous of mountain trails, what we can do is guide founders where potential potholes can show up.

We conceptualized our HOV Accelerator program with that insight. Over the years, we have built a team at HOV that has been on the zero-one journey multiple times. Instead of spending times in lectures, we work with our founders’ side by side in the trenches.

The bespoke nature of our program is why we are incredibly selective with the founders we choose to work with.

There were three primary filters for us to select companies to work with:

• Venture Scale Businesses

We are specifically looking to work with companies that have the potential to become category leaders. We met many founders who had great businesses but would find it very difficult to reach the level of scale required for a venture scale business

• Fast Growth Trajectories

The type of business we were looking for is already growing quickly. We are an accelerator and not an incubator. We require complete teams that will be able to take advantage of our program and network.

• Domain Experts

Each of our founders needed to know the category they were operating in intimately. They need to share with us hard-earned insights that would give them an edge in the market. Insights that can only come from experience.

As we filtered our applications through this lens, most companies didn’t meet all the requirements. The HOV Accelerator will continue to have high standards on every cohort that we bring on. We do not have fixed quotas that we need to hit.

At HOV we have a core value which is “Do Epic Work”. This value requires us not to put half baked stuff into the world.

Our hope with our first cohort is to provide them with every edge that we have acquired starting, scaling and selling businesses. We are very excited about the founders we are working with and the companies that they are in the process of building. As we progress on our own zero to one journey with the accelerator, we will continue to share our observations and thoughts with the broader community.

If you are building a business that satisfies the three requirements above, please get in touch with us for our next batch!