The Tetuan Valley Team were awake late Monday night, why? We had some tough decisions to make in selecting the 20 teams we would be accepting for the Barcelona and Madrid editions of Startup School. Emails went out Tuesday morning to selected teams, as well as those we unfortunately had to tell no. Naturally, we spent our day trying to explain, to a lot of really great teams, why we did not select them this year.

Tetuan Valley is a changing place. I think that when we say we are looking for ideas, we might be understating, and in order to clarify what some of our criteria are here is a list. This was not some secret, unreleased list we internally made, but rather topics that kept coming up in our discussions Monday night- so we want to share it. We hope this helps our candidates and TV community with your future pitches, applications, and general knowledge

Market size We are idealists here, that’s for sure, but starting your own business requires that someone will want to pay money in exchange for what you are offering. You need to tell us who and why, especially if it isn´t extremely obvious.

Doubles For startup school we cannot take two teams doing the same project. It can sometimes prevent teams from being open about their progress and problems, creating a hostile environment.

Copycats Youtube exists, if you are presenting us a videosharing site you want to create, there needs to be a clearly explainable competitive advantage to why or how you can do it better. Much better. You´re better off staying away from copycat ideas altogether.

Motivation We did not require anyone to make demos or powerpoint pitch pages for interviews. But 90% of the selected teams did just that. The 10% of the teams that made it without were able to prove they cared enough to spend time, energy, and sometimes relocate because they wanted to do this program. We cannot ignore this kind of motivation. Same goes for teams that we´re denied last edition and still applied again, your motivation did not go unnoticed.

Investment Potential Tetuan Valley is a safe place to learn how to start your own business. But again, these are businesses, when it comes down to two ideas, if one is profitable and the other is a stretch, we´ll go with the profitable one. Many of our candidates heard us talk about StartupBootCamp in the interviews, if we see synergies we can make between the two programs we´re going to try to make them happen.

Group Composition

1.  Tech person (n.) a friendly geek who is able to make your demo a reality, does not necessarily need to be a computer science guy, just one that can code.

For TVSS this is mandatory, we did not take a single team who was not themselves capable of creating their own demo, we could not make exceptions to that.

2. On our site it says that it is recommended that you do not work alone, we took very few groups that were.

3. We took into very serious consideration the composition of the team teams with three developers received lower marks than teams with a finance person, a marketing person, and a developer. Teams with more experience/education got ranked higher than teams that didn´t.

Clarity if you didn´t know what it was you wanted to do and why it was unique, valuable and important then come decision time chances are we didn´t know either

We hope this can maybe clarify some doubts any of the teams had, and offer some good direction for those who are applying in the fall.