The room at the National Incubation Center is too small in the way that good rooms tend to be — twenty-two chairs for eighteen founders, two whiteboards, one window. The mentors sit at the back. This is intentional.
What I tell every cohort
On the first day of every cohort I ask the same question: what is the smallest version of your business that could earn its keep? Most founders cannot answer it on the first day. By the end of the second week, the ones who can answer are usually the ones who, two years later, are still in business.
The mistake I keep seeing is conviction about the product before any conviction about the customer.
— NICC cohort notes, recurring
Why I keep coming back
I keep returning to NICC because the Cambodian founder community is small, dense, and almost entirely self-trained. There is no Sand Hill Road to walk down the way there is in California. The mentors are the road, and the road has to be maintained by hand.
Six cohorts in, fifty founders mentored, I am still learning more from them than they are from me — though I would prefer they not know I think so.
What the room actually does
The cohort is not, in the end, an accelerator. It is a peer group that happens to share a calendar. The real work is not what we mentors say from the back of the room; it is the conversations the founders have with each other afterward, in the corridors and in the small bars on Sothearos Boulevard, where the actual education happens.