When I first heard about HackFWD I thought it was the ideal program to join. They were well positioned as accelerator program specifically looking, optimized & engineered for techies.
I was not part of their program but in the last few years I learned to know a bunch of the HackFWD mentors and met a few teams that went through the program and only heard the best about it. So I was curiously following what they did and also encouraged a bunch of teams I met to apply at HackFWD if they fit their profile.
I still believe that their hypothesis to focus on technical founders is very smart for an accelerator program (it is way easier to teach marketing & business skills to engineers than the other way round). Also the better you can specify your target audience/hypothesis the better you can focus and build an environment around it and it felt like they did a great job there (even when they ultimately hit some (european) barriers that were hard to overcome).
On top of that (besides their focused hypothesis) Europe has an amazing pool of brilliant engineers that at the same time lack a bit of the business savviness if you compare them to founders in the US. So it's not only a great global strategy, I believe it especially works well for the local (european) environment, same with having Germany as the base rather than the UK.
HackFWD also reminded me a lot of philosophically aligned efforts like Fred Wilson's MBA mondays, what Google Ventures do with their lab and 500Startups with their amazing mentoring program/bootcamp on UX and distribution.
We ourselves (Blossom.io) ultimately were lucky to get into Seedcamp (one of the leading european accelerator programs) and we're very grateful for all their support but it is sad to see another bright star of the european scene gone.
Hat tip to Lars for sharing his thoughts and lessons learned. The great thing about building an environment/a community is that even if you 'fail' you leave something that lives on, and it definitely touched/helped/accelerated a lot of people in the european startup scene that certainly will continue to leave a trail and go on to do great things.
Would love to hear from others who were more tightly involved with HackFWD.
bow