About yCITIES
Creating Impact Through Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Sustainability
We create impact through innovation, entrepreneurship, and sustainability — cultivating leaders who shape a better world.
For nearly two decades, we’ve worked at the intersection of entrepreneurship ecosystem building and education -- working with first-time founders as young as middle school, sitting through more Demo Days than we can count, helping entrepreneurs learn how to build, and drawing on direct experience in early-stage investing. When we started, one of the biggest challenges was simply access: access to entrepreneurship education, mentors, resources, and opportunities to try. Thankfully, that landscape has changed. Youth entrepreneurship programs have matured. Founder education has expanded. Mentors, accelerators, online resources, and startup frameworks are more abundant than ever. Today’s founders can often produce remarkably comprehensive pitch decks. They know the checklist. But having the pieces the story has successfully reduced risk for the startup.
The Grey Space Between a Pitch Deck and a Funded Opportunity
Because of the wealth of resources available now, the challenge today is less about getting founders prepared for Demo Day. We’ve all heard the advice: get out of the building and talk to people. Founders are doing it. They’re interviewing customers, testing assumptions, collecting feedback, and showing early usage, revenue, partnerships, and enthusiastic responses. And yet, they still hear,“Not yet.” “Keep us in the loop.” “Too early.” “Come back when you have more traction.”
The frustrating part is that “not enough traction” can mean very different things. Sometimes the data exists, but it isn’t is articulated. Sometimes, the kind of evidence a particular investor needs to reduce a particular risk is missing, but the founder thinks they need more of what they already have. Sometimes meaningful evidence exists, but it hasn’t yet been connected into a clear argument about what it proves -- or what it means for the next layer of the decision-making.
On the flip side, investors face their own version of the problem. Early-stage investors look at a tremendous number of companies with limited time and incomplete information (inherent nature of evaluating startups). Think of the first glance as a “swipe”, not an investment decision…but a choice between swiping to learn more, or swiping to pass. Which signals are present? Which are missing? Which unknowns actually matter? And where there is evidence, is there enough of it to suggest that meaningful risk has been reduced? Every early-stage investor has their own combination lock. Their experience, expertise, investment thesis, fund strategy, and risk tolerance all shape what they notice and what they consider meaningful. Two investors can look at the same founder, see much of the same evidence, and reach very different conclusions. When investors are interpreting uncertainty through different filters, what matters now versus later can vary as well.
The Two-Sided Grey Space
Founders are trying to demonstrate that risk is being reduced. Investors are trying to determine whether the evidence they’re seeing actually reduces the risks they care about. But it isn’t one decision around one risk. A startup is a landscape of interconnected uncertainties. Evidence that reduces market risk may tell us little about business model risk. Customer enthusiasm may demonstrate problem resonance without demonstrating repeatable demand. Revenue may be meaningful traction to show that somebody is willing to pay, but it may not prove that it can grow big enough for an investor to return their money. The pieces can be real without yet forming a coherent picture. That leaves both sides navigating the same grey space from opposite directions. Neither side necessarily needs more information. They need a better way to make sense of the information they already have, and identify what information would actually matter next.
We make that invisible skill or interpreting risk and incomplete information more visible, discussable, and teachable.
Through programming and real-world engagements, we build a shared language of judgement across founders, investors, students, and other stakeholders in the innovation ecosystem. Participants develop, refine, and share decision-making skills, apply them through direct experience. Everyone has a perspective to offer, and everyone gains by seeing through another lens.