The New York Times is launching a new startup accelerator, TimeSpace, a 4 month program taking in early stage media startups into the NYT Headquarters. TimeSpace is aimed at Mobile, Social, Video, Ads, Analytics and e-commerce startups, who could be interested in working in corroboration with The New York Times in NYC.
TimeSpace will bring in three to five start-ups to connect with NY Times staff, demo their product, and teach/learn alongside entrepreneurs and employees who make their livings in digital media, technology and journalism.
As for the level of involvement of the New York Times in the selected startups – the expectation is that the chosen companies will be able to partner or pilot with the New York Times but may also receive an investment, as part of NYT’s small investment portfolio.
The Times will not seek equity in your company as part of the program. If and when you raise an institutional round of financing, The New York Times Company will separately consider participating if invited. (View our minority investment portfolio.) And if you are pursuing business development deals, we may become one of your customers during or after your time here. But this is not the purpose of timeSpace.You may call it an accelerator or an incubator; right now we are calling it an experiment and looking forward to working alongside you.
Applications are now open till February 19th. In at presentation at Campus yesterday, Peter Sims, author of “Little Bets” – the biggest breakthroughs come from small discoveries, was preaching how big companies should take the little bets approach to innovation in order to prevent stagnation. Regardless of its success, TimeSpace is surely going to bring some learning to the New York Times, and If I were a betting man, I’d predict that other media companies will follow.
To quote Om Malik’s latest post on lessons he learned as a founder: “If you don’t try, you don’t fail. You don’t fail, you don’t learn. You don’t learn, you will have failed anyway.“
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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