Selection Camp 2018 — our way of getting to know our future partners

Participants of our Selection Camp at the end of the third day

At MKB Fintechlab, we invest in early-stage fintech startups. We invest in a stage where product-market fit has not been found, the product itself is still developing and you have to have belief in the founders that they will be able to fight through the challenges that are necessarily coming with the early stage. Thus, we invest in founders even more than ideas at MKB Fintechlab.

78 fintech startup applied from 11 countries — those are our stats from our 2018 recruiting for our next batch. 78 talented teams from all over the region applied to be accelerated and we needed a quick-and-effective method to figure out which 8 founding teams are worthy of investment and participation in our next acceleration programme. We decided to organize a 3-day long Selection Camp to achieve our goal. When you look at accelerator best practices, it’s common practice to invite the best applicants for a couple of days to get to know them. When it comes to selection camps, the hard part isn’t the what but the how.

Fintech startup founders from all over the CEE region.

Our goals going into our selection camp were:

• see how the founders interact and work together during an intense assignment with time pressure
• test the receptiveness and openness of the teams
• gather enough feedback from our mentors
• identify the areas where the teams need improvement and whether it matches our offering
• and of course… dazzle the teams and prove the smartness of our money

So what did we do?

We put a simple assignment in the center of the selection camp:

1. identify the key assumptions about their businesses
2. select the most important 1–3 assumptions that will make or break their plans
3. test and validate those during the 3 days, show measurable results and build the results into their plans

In addition to the assignment, we provided the teams with the tools they need to go ahead and solve their assignments better: workshops about foundations, more than 35 mentors, technical workshops and even suprise challenges that helped them finetune their skills.

Technical workshop on the first day by one of our key partners.

The result? All 18 teams showed measurable progress about their businesses, finetuned their skills and of course, we got to know them during live situation.

Now the challenge is on is to somehow select the top 8 from these excellent teams.