The Creative Destruction Lab’s (CDL) newly globalized Space Stream has now officially started meeting outside North America, having just concluded a two-day session in Paris at the HEC Paris business school. It’s also been confirmed that they’ll be expanding to Oxford next fall, with CDL founder Ajay Agrawal commenting on HEC’s students and the Oxford expansion.
CDL, as mentioned in previous SpaceQ coverage, is unique among accelerators for seed-stage companies. It is a nine-month program where ventures in sector-specific “streams” work with experienced mentors over a series of competitive elimination rounds to refine their businesses, prove their viability to the mentors, and successfully graduate CDL.
CDL doesn’t take equity, and there’s less of a focus on fundraising than in other accelerators, meaning their program is often seen as a complement to other accelerators. After starting at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School, CDL has expanded to business schools across the globe: including locations in Halifax, Oxford, Paris, Atlanta, Calgary and Seattle (among others).
Their Space Stream, headed by famous Canadian astronaut Col. Chris Hadfield, has been a notable success, with graduates such as Wyvern Space, Reaction Dynamics, Obruta Space Solutions, and Mission Control Space Services. It’s also notable as their first “global” stream; while many streams are split between different locations with different mentors for each, the Space Stream makes all their Mentors available for ventures at all three locations; the University Toronto, HEC in Paris, and Georgia Tech in Atlanta. This presumably will also include Oxford after the expansion.
This had raised questions about how this would function, including whether they would have in-person meetings in Toronto and have the other locations be fully-virtual. This meeting at HEC, which included CDL founder Ajay Agrawal, has now proven that the Space Stream is truly “global.”
In an interview with HEC, Agrawal said that the HEC session went well, and credited the business students at HEC assisting the ventures at CDL-Paris.
He said that “the MBA students are making a great contribution to these companies,” noting that “many of the startup founders in this program are scientists with a technical background” who need assistance with the business side of their ventures. The students are leveraging “considerable training and experience in articulating the essential assets of the startup,” as well as”evaluating market opportunities” and “performing market analysis” to assist them in that process. The students, in turn, learn how to “ take this knowledge of market structures and apply it to space.”
He also commented on the news of the upcoming Space Stream expansion to CDL-Oxford at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. He said that the school will “attract a wonderful group of highly accomplished mentors,” and that it “has already been quite active in doing research and coordination work for space technologies.” He said that “CDL Space has another local ecosystem to leverage,” pointing to Georgia Tech and the University Toronto as having close relationships with NASA, and HEC’s status as “one of the world’s top business schools.”
The CDL-Oxford and CDL-Paris schools already had some connections through CDL’s Climate Stream, and it appears that those connections will be deepening going forward.
Agrawal also said that the “economic logic” behind the founding of the Space Stream and its considerable growth—including to Paris and Oxford—is rooted in the falling cost of space launch.
He said that thanks to “technological innovation,” there has been a “significant drop in cost of delivering assets to low Earth orbit in the past ten years.” He said that he expects that “it’s about to drop again by another 30 to 50 times,” pointing to predictions that SpaceX Starship will reduce costs to “$30-50 per kilogram.” The Stream’s growth is due to companies positioning themselves “in anticipation of this new world…there are very few times in human history where accessing something suddenly becomes 30 times cheaper overnight.”
CDL’s proceedings and participants are generally kept confidential, but the winners of the program are announced after the session is over. As in previous years, keep an eye on SpaceQ coverage to learn who made it through.