I spent the last two and next two days at the Nike Foundation / Unreasonable Girl Effect Accelerator — an insanely great two-week long accelerator program focussed on ventures which positively impact the lives of girls living on less than $2.50 a day.
One of the programmatic pieces which the accelerator team has baked into the program are daily deep dives: Three of the ten teams have the chance to pick a topic which they are grappling with in their respective ventures and spend two hours with the rest of the group solving. It’s an incredibly powerful format — allowing an entrepreneur to tap into the collective wisdom of their peers, mentors and accelerator staff. And it brings the entrepreneurs close together; as we are all sitting in the same boat.
Here’s the best part — you can easily replicate this at your startup. Find a bunch of likeminded entrepreneurs and set up your own Deep Dive Series: Get together regularly and have one (or more) of you discuss a challenge you’re facing, then band together and try to solve it.