VFC helps OneEleven rebuild its accelerator programming via smart curriculum design
In the Spring of 2020, OneEleven, one of the premier scaleup innovation hubs in Canada, closed its doors due to COVID-19.
Much has been written about the beloved hub’s rebirth, but less is known about VFC’s contribution to helping OneEleven reboot its bespoke supports for post-seed companies.
This new offering, in the form of curriculum-based learning designed by VFC, is designed to equip member companies with an added stream of tailored resources focused on helping upskill their emerging people managers.
Upon restarting the fabled OneEleven in October 2020, Managing Director Matthew Lombardi undertook a consultation process, speaking to alumni and immediate past members, ecosystem stakeholders, VCs, and supporters of the endeavor. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic had a few more waves in store, and so Lombardi set to work building his team behind the scenes and trying to ascertain what value OneEleven could bring to the scaleup ecosystem beyond its traditional (and largely unusable) collision space offering. In particular, what could OneEleven offer that it was permissioned to do, and would provide unique and attributable value to post-seed companies looking to scale?
What Lombardi and the OneEleven team heard over and over from alumni helped to surface an archetype of the typical OneEleven entrant: a company that had just raised a sizeable seed round, with a headcount between six and twelve employees, that was rapidly growing. The average OneEleven member would stay for 1.5-2 years at the hub and 3x or 4x their headcount during that time period. And where founders expressed the greatest exasperation was when it came to headcount growth – specifically, that pain point of strong individual contributors becoming people managers as their teams rapidly expanded.
Lombardi set to work trying to solve this problem, building up a first-of-its-kind curriculum at OneEleven, and enlisting VFC’s expertise to do so. VFC created something that is both attributable and measurable for emerging team leaders and managers at post-seed companies across three functional areas: Sales/Marketing, Customer Success, and Product for OneEleven.
The curriculum VFC designed for OneEleven is an innovative curriculum that relies on a design/curate/deliver model, leveraging external delivery partners to bring disparate trainings and mentorship opportunities to its member company employees.
You can hear OneEleven’s leadership talk more about VFC’s new curriculum, and how it aims to help member companies get the most out of their talent, and upskill their people as fast as their companies are growing, on the BetaKit podcast. To learn more about the OneEleven collaboration, keep an eye out for our upcoming page outlining the project.
