Application rounds and selecting a cohort

An accelerator picks a cohort from an application round: applications come in through your portal, reviewers score them in batches, and the selection committee decides. Cohorts in the sidebar holds your rounds. Each round has tabs for Applications, My reviews, Calibration, Selection, Decision emails and Settings.

Create a round#

1. Open Cohorts and click New round.
2. Enter the Round name, Applications open and Applications close dates, Places in the cohort and Reviewers per application.
3. Click Create round.

The dates are in your fund's time zone, from the start of the opening day to the end of the closing day. The scoring criteria start as Team (weight 3), Problem and insight (2), Early traction (2), Market (1) and Fit with the programme (1). Change them on the round's Settings tab: rename, reweight with the slider, add or remove. Once reviews are submitted, criteria can be renamed or reweighted but not added or removed, so scores stay comparable.

Bring in applications#

Founders apply on your portal as usual. On the Applications tab, Add portal applications adds every application submitted between the round's dates that isn't in the round yet; the button shows how many are new. Add a company adds a deal by hand, for a company the team sourced or a late application. The trash icon takes an undecided application out of the round, with its reviews, and offers Undo.

Set the round's status from the menu at the top: Planning, Applications open, Reviewing, Cohort selected, Programme running, Done.

Assign reviewers#

Click Assign reviewers, tick the people and click Assign. Each undecided application gets the round's number of reviewers from the people you picked, spread so everyone's load differs by at most one. Existing assignments stay. Reviewers are admins, partners and analysts. An analyst sees only the rounds they review and only their own batch, and can read the applications assigned to them even when they don't own the deal. See Reviewing applications in a round.

Calibration#

The Calibration tab shows how each reviewer scores against everyone:

A reviewer's habit is removed from the Calibrated score once they have three submitted reviews: each review is moved by the gap between that reviewer's mean and everyone's. Where reviewers disagree lists applications whose reviews are 1.5 points or more apart, with Read the reviews.

Select the cohort#

The Selection tab ranks applications by calibrated score and shows Places filled. For each application choose Selected, Waitlist, Declined or Undecided; an Undo appears after each change. Selecting past the number of places asks you to confirm. Recording a decision sends nothing and doesn't change the deal's stage.

Only an admin, or a partner who approves decisions, records the selection.

Approve the decision emails#

The Decision emails tab has a template for each decision, with the placeholders {founder}, {company}, {fund} and {cohort}. Edit and click Save templates. Below, each decided application has a draft filled in for its founder, with the recipient masked and a state: Draft, Sending, Sent, Failed or No founder to write to.

1. Click Read the email to check a draft.
2. Tick the drafts to send, or Select every unsent draft.
3. Click Review and send, check the count, and click Approve and send.

Emails come from your fund's name in your portal colours and carry only what the template says, never scores or reviewers' comments. The same email is never sent twice. If you change a decision after its email went out, the new decision gets a new draft. Only an admin, or a partner who approves outbound messages, sends.

Who can do what#

Frequently asked questions#

Does a high score select an application?#

No. The ranking only advises. A person chooses each decision.

Can a founder see their score?#

No. Founders see only the email you approve.

What if an application has no founder account?#

Its draft shows No founder to write to and it can't be sent from here. This happens for companies added by hand.