Editor’s Note: This guest post has been created in collaboration and with financial support from Oracle Startup Cloud. It was written by By Reggie Bradford – the head of Oracle’s global startup program
Last week I was in Paris at Station F for Oracle’s Innovation Executive Summit where I spoke on the expansion of our Oracle Global Startup Ecosystem and the additional resources in process for our local Paris program. Globally, we’ve announced the launch of a new virtual-style, non-residential program called Oracle Scaleup, targeted to later-stage companies and VC and PE firms. Locally, we’ve taken lessons learned from our wildly successful inaugural cohort to make cohort 2 even better. We want to expand and increase our resources to work with more startups to foster collaboration, co-development, and inspire cloud-based global innovation.
For our Paris cohort 2, we are improving on our customer connection capabilities, product integrations, and marketing capabilities for our startup partners. We’re building an ecosystem that enables tangible business value, customer growth and revenue—for the startups, our customers and Oracle.
Proof point? At last month’s Oracle CloudWorld event in New York City an audience member asked one of our startups during a keynote session what are some real tangible benefits of the Oracle program? Nexus Edge, part of the Sao Paulo program, replied that during the six-month program they already closed half a million dollars in contract revenue because the Oracle partnership. And that’s just one example. That’s what we mean about creating an ecosystem of tangible business growth and revenue for all.
In only one year, we earned a lot of wins and endured mistakes that provided invaluable learning lessons. We are applying those lessons to continue to improve and better position our startups for growth. We are running lean as a startup inside Oracle and we will continue to learn and adapt to find the right balance of speed and growth for 2018.
Having started three companies without ever associating myself with an incubator or accelerator, I take it as a challenge to build a global program – an ecosystem, really—that I would find valuable if I were leading a startup today.
As we move forward, we won’t lose sight of our global mission: To provide enriching, collaborative partnerships to enable next-generation growth and drive cloud-based innovation for startups throughout all stages of their journey.
If you are a startup in France interested in our residential Paris accelerator program, we want to hear from you. Applications are open for our Paris cohort 2. And our Oracle Scaleup program is taking applications year round here.