To encourage founder-founder relationships, Startup Runway uses peer scoring. In other words, we don’t have “judges judge” in our pitch simulations, which lead up to our showcase event. We have founders score each other on these key indicators:
- hypergrowth business model
- team
- traction/customer validation
- inclusion/diversity capacity
Peer scoring empowers founders to own the language and understand their opportunities to grow.
This approach also cements learning about what validation, traction, business model and other investable elements mean for our startups. Further rehearsing these concepts and language needed to have effective early stage venture investor conversations looks like a winning process. We record these scores and use them to select the top 10% of minority led startups in the Southeast to pitch at our showcase event.
