“Both Joe and I were lawyers, and we met working on transactions together, both on the startup and the investor side. Joe and I hit it off, and shared the perspective that there was a lot of lacking efficiency for an entrepreneur to go from an idea to incorporating a business, growing that business, raising venture capital, so on and so forth,” Vosseller said. “We’re both admirers of the accelerator model, starting with Paul Graham and YC. Reading his original essays about the program provided a lot of inspiration. And it dawned on us that we could do that here in Wisconsin. Joe and I quit our jobs. We found a group of angel investors out of the Milwaukee area who share that same vision and passion. And we’ve been doing Gener8tor ever since then — that was 10 years ago.”
The team’s first program was in Milwaukee in 2012, and for a while they alternated running annual programs in Milwaukee and Madison. Work with startups, invest in startups, help them grow. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Although YC may have been the inspiration for Gener8tor, the duo tells me things were a little different a decade ago.
“I think there were more local accelerators between 2012 and 2014 than there are today. To some degree, there has been a sifting and winnowing. I think the same is playing out on the national scene. I think there’s been some coalescence around a handful of programs,” Vosseller explained. “We’re bumping into the likes