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Partners

McCarter & English
McCarter & English, LLP is a firm of approximately 400 lawyers with offices in Boston, Hartford, Stamford, New York, Newark, East Brunswick, Philadelphia, Wilmington and Washington, DC. In continuous business for more than 170 years, we are among the oldest and largest law firms in America.

Vet-Tech
Vet-Tech is America's Veteran Startup Accelerator headquartered in Silicon Valley. With over 100 veteran led startups in its community, Vet-Tech's top 20 portfolio companies have raised over $10 Million in funding and have been accepted into world class programs like Tech Stars and Founder Institute.

CONNECTPreneur

The CONNECTPreneur Fellowship is awarded to the most extraordinary applicant from the CONNECTPreneur Community, giving them the opportunity to enroll in the Washington DC Founder Institute for free. The recipient will be recognized as somebody with the utmost potential to become a successful technology entrepreneur.

The Washington DC Founder Institute is excited to partner with an organization that shares our goal of fostering a strong local startup ecosystem: CONNECTPreneur, a quarterly forum of 350+ top IT entrepreneurs and investors in greater Washington DC region. Through the CONNECTPreneur Fellowship, everyone from the CONNECTPreneur community is invited to apply to the Washington DC Founder Institute for free, and the best overall applicant from the community will receive a Fellowship to participate in the program for free as well ($1,650 value).

Eligibility: In order to be eligible for the CONNECTPreneur Fellowship for the Washington DC Winter 2018 Semester, you must complete your application and admissions test by April 3, 2016, using this link.

Grant: The recipient of the CONNECTPreneur Fellowship will be awarded within 5 days after the deadline.

Click here to apply for the CONNECTPreneur Fellowship.

Source Select
Global Fulfillment
Is it time to think of Global Logistics and Fulfillment capabilities for your product? SourceSelect helps you focus all your attention on Marketing and Product development. We will do the rest. Save money on freight costs and fulfill orders to 180+ countries across the globe. #payasyougrow

SourceSelect is a 3PL in the Silicon Valley that helps startup companies plan for and execute world-wide logistics and order fulfillment capabilities. #AskUsHow

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With a Mechanical Engineering degree from Laval University and a Master in Applied Sciences from the University of Toronto, you would think Khalil Zahar would be settled into a position in a premier engineering firm. However, seven years ago, when he started to take on boxing as a sport, he knew he had a different calling.

“Maybe my company will fail, I’ll go bankrupt, I’ll lose my co-founders respect, and I’ll end up working at McDonald’s, or worse, in a large engineering firm. So why do all of this then ? Why risk it all?”

Some risks are simply worth taking. While learning and training to be a world-class boxer, he noticed many discrepancies. In a shared gym where both beginners and professionals trained, there were a variety of coaches, each teaching a variety of techniques and strategies depending on the boxer. Zahar noticed a lot of mixed or incorrect feedback, which could not only hinder an athlete’s ability to focus on key aspects for improvement, but also sometimes increase their risk of injury. Zahar then begin to think that these issues were not just limited to his gym, or even his sport - they were issues across the whole world of sports.

To capitalize on this insight, Zahar applied and was accepted to the Montreal Founder Institute, but did not know what to expect.

“When I got to the first Founder Institute session and the director’s first sentence is - ‘Alright guys, congratulations for being selected. The reality is 70 % of you will fail this program’…I was like ‘FINALLY!’. Something that feels a bit real.”

The structured and incredibly challenging Founder Institute curriculum forced Zahar and his team to accelerate the production of their product, but Zahar's strong performance in the program resulted in a successful Graduation of his new company, Hykso. He recalls his time in the program by saying:

“I got to see how a successful entrepreneur would run my project and in what order they would do things. The battle’s far from over, but I went from 0.1% knowledge about how to do things to 1.3 %. Considering this is a 1300 % increase, that’s an awesome return on the investment."

While many sports gadgets today are designed for the average fitness techie, Hykso focuses on offering advanced telemetry that helps professional athletes avoid injury and optimize training routines.

Hykso currently is currently refining their product while partnering with Boxing Canada, Canada’s national team, and collaborating with Caroline Veyre, a potential medalist at the next Olympics. In addition, Hykso has recently been accepted to the Winter 2018 batch of Y Combinator - widely respected as the world's premier seed accelerator, with alumni like Dropbox, AirBnb, Zenefits, and more.