Choosing the final startups to join Lisbon Challenge is no easy job. For this edition only, we’ve had almost 400 applications, from over 40 countries and we have to select around 22-25 startups that will be joining us in Lisbon this Fall… But, how does it work? How do we review all the applications and interview the candidates? We hate keeping secrets so, we’ll tell you all about it.

Reviewing 400 applications… it’s not a one man’s job.

We go through every single application and that’s a lot of work. Because this can’t be a one man job, we split the applications between our own team. Each application is reviewed by 3 people, so that we don’t base the scores over a single opinion, according to the following criteria:

1. Team

2. Quality of the application (business summary and market potential)

3. Ambition and project scalability

If two out of three people say yes, that startup moves on to the next phase. From here on, we let all those who applied know if they made it through or not. For those who did make it, we schedule the first interviews right away.

The first interviews – tell us more about your startup

For the startups who made it to the second phase they have two interviews: one with a member of the Beta-i team and another one with someone from our network of partners, mentors and entrepreneurs. During these interviews we want to talk about your startup’s potential and ask a few questions about your team and your long-term vision. We love having different opinions and perspectives so that’s why we ask people who are not part of our organisation to come and interview the startups as well. Around 50 people are involved in this selection process…

Once we score the interviews and discuss it, it comes down to up to 40 startups that move on to the final phase of our selection process: the Interview Panel.

The Interview Panel – let’s call the big sharks

As we’ve told you before, we love inviting our network of mentors, partners, entrepreneurs and investors to give us their opinion and for this final phase is no different. We have three full days of interviews with a panel with up to 12 people. In this jury you’ll find some of our Lisbon Challenge Alumni, startup founders from successful companies such as Unbabel, guests from startup organisations and other international accelerators such as Numa Paris, investors and members of the Beta-i team. When all startups are interviewed we go through the results and decide who will be joining us in Lisbon for this next edition.

In the end, it all comes down to big decisions… And big decisions are never easy. But, from what we’ve seen so far, it will be an incredible edition of Lisbon Challenge. We’ll let you know the results soon…

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