Welcome to Comcast NBCUniversal’s LIFT Labs Accelerator, powered by Techstars

…and to this blog!

This fall I joined Techstars as a Business Development and Growth Associate, working with the exciting early-stage startups admitted to Comcast NBCUniversal’s LIFT Labs Accelerator, powered by Techstars. Our incubator is neither short on brilliant founders nor words in its official title.

As an associate, my role is to partner with the founders and help build components of their businesses across a wide-array of functional categories. From marketing, to business development, to product, to growth, I’ll be engaged with every element of these young companies.

As a result, I’ve decided to blog my experience over the next 12 weeks to share what I’ll learn about how to grow a nascent venture. My goal is to create reference material for future aspiring founders to use as they build their own companies — to show what’s worked well for me and what hasn’t. Additionally, I’ll look to share some of the advice and best practices imparted by the impressive array of speakers that Techstars brings in to the program. Lastly, I hope to demystify exactly what goes on in an incubator behind the scenes.

I’ll keep it brief for now, and leave you with a rundown of all the startups I’ll be working with over the next 12 weeks:

• AfrolandTV: AfroLandTV is an OTT streaming media platform for Pan-African TV shows and movies.
• Beam Health: Beam Health provides healthcare professionals and health systems with premium telehealth services to provide quality, convenient care to patients.
• Cast: Cast’s automated audio-visual reports with embedded call to action helps customers understand complex concepts and drive high-value actions.
• Covatic: Covatic’s mobile SDK empowers media companies to deliver exceptional in-app experiences by identifying when, where, and how each individual can engage with content without needing to expose personal data.
• Glow Up Games: Glow Up Games develops and publishes character-driven mobile games for underrepresented gamers and gathers key data on this overlooked demographic to encourage more diverse characters and storylines in the gaming industry.
• Introvoke: Introvoke provides white label technology that powers virtual connections, hybrid live events and elevated networking in a branded experience.
• Kidas: Kidas is an AI service that protects children from cyberbullying and online predators by alerting parents about potentially dangerous activities in their child’s digital life.
• Seshie: Seshie is a marketplace of expert guides offering live and virtual team building experiences for organizations to increase employee morale and build company culture.
• Showcase: Showcase is a video-first hiring platform that uses asynchronous videos to help companies streamline the recruitment process by eliminating repetitive interviews.
• Workchew: WorkChew is a marketplace connecting a community of mobile and remote workers to workspaces in restaurants and hotels across the US and beyond.