Santa Fe Innovates launched a new five-week program this week to help more than a dozen New Mexican entrepreneurs validate their startup ideas and business models around responsible entrepreneurship.
Fifteen entrepreneurs will spend five weeks with a host of venture capital and business management mentors during virtual workshops as part of this 'Validating Your Startup Idea' program. The entrepreneurs will also get a startup "syllabus" to work through, said Jon Mertz, the founder and director of Santa Fe Innovates.
The program's culminating event will be a virtual "fast pitch" with a panel of judges on Nov. 12. Two entrepreneurs will get access to more resources if they're selected through the pitch, Mertz said, that could come in the form of marketing and legal assistance.
For the 15 entrepreneurs, there is no cost for the program, which is sponsored by the City of Santa Fe Economic Development Department.
Santa Fe Innovates' partnership with the recently opened University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management's Center for Responsible Entrepreneurship will also provide more resources. Those will help continue to support the entrepreneurs past the initial five weeks.
That's something that didn't exist before the partnership with UNM, Mertz said.
"We've proved that we can attract entrepreneurs to a program and take them successfully through to test, iterate and validate their idea," Mertz said. "We haven't had the resources to be able to continue to work with them beyond that, and now we'll have that."
This is the fifth cohort of entrepreneurs that Santa Fe Innovates has assisted since starting in late 2019. It has worked with more than 60 entrepreneurs from across New Mexico, Mertz said.
The purpose of this and other programs is to promote future economic growth, Mertz said — one reason, he said, why the City of Santa Fe is supporting this startup idea and business model validation program.
"If we can create five businesses that employ 25-plus people and generate $10 million plus in revenue, then that will be good for our city from an economic development standpoint," Mertz said. Mertz said that he wants to achieve this in a 10-year timeframe.
And with economic growth spurred by socially responsible entrepreneurship — a combination of "profit and purpose," Mertz said — he hopes to attract more young people to New Mexico, or keep the ones that are already here.
"We're really bad at growing the younger population, Gen Z and Millennials," Mertz said. "Both of those generations in particular believe that businesses should be more than just about profit, that there should be some kind of societal benefit to that for-profit business. So if we're successful in building out the Center for Responsible Entrepreneurship, then the hope would be that we would grow the younger generations."
Business First wrote about a similar program Santa Fe Innovates held last fall. Mertz said that the benefit corporation is also planning to launch a business acceleration program in a few weeks, with more details to come.
