It's Time to Elevate Your Idea By Kristiana Dimitrova Elevate is the first startup acceleration program, launched at a university in the Balkans. It started on Nov. 4, 2019, and there are already six prospective businesses. The program is designed to help students and recent alumni develop business ideas and start their own companies. Participants in Elevate build teams, decide what kind of business they want to start and begin their entrepreneurship journey. During the 14-week program, mentors come to the American University in Bulgaria campus to share their experiences. They help students better understand the process of setting up a business, by going through the steps every entrepreneur must follow in order to start a company. “Elevate aims to inspire and motivate students to transform By participating in Elevate students get more practical work experience as they face real business challenges. Along with that, every team receives a starting capital of $5,000. In exchange, team members sign a contract that ensures a 5% stake to AUBG from each company started as a result of the accelerator program. Even if the participants don't succesfully start a company during the program and don't go into business, AUBG will still hold a 5% stake of the company if the idea gets developed in the future. their ideas into working businesses,” said Nikolay Pohlupkov, AUBG graduate and one of the leaders of the program. Participants can benefit from hearing the success stories of the mentors and discussing with them all of the difficulties they might encounter. “At first, our idea was kind of a joke, but then we gathered as a team and decided to give it a try,” first-year student and participant in the program, Nikolay Pachev, said. “So here we are in the next round. From a practical perspective, I think I would learn many facts and tricks about the market and the business.” “If you happen to have missed the [application] deadline, and you are not in the program, that doesn’t mean that you cannot benefit from it,” Pohlupkov said. “It means that you can come here, network with these people, get in touch with them." Access to the events is not restricted to AUBG students. Everyone who finds a particular topic interesting can join, and each event is posted on Elevate’s Facebook page. Lubomir Nokov, talking about his entrepreneurship journey; Nikolay Pohlupkov for AUBG Daily 6 AUBG Daily | Fall 2019
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