- mentoring (10 weeks in incubator, then ongoing)
- speakers e.g. Ryan Carson, Joel Spolsky
- office space
- accomodation
- money (expenses & living allowance while in incubator)
- free breakfast and lunch every day
- sessions on product management and sales
...and take no equity (atleast initially?), tie you down at the end, or even require you have a company.
Seems the motivation is work with "smart, exciting people" and build relationships with those trying to build "companies where the customers are other businesses rather than consumers".
They describe this as an "accidental incubator"...
"Over the course of the last 10 months we’ve managed
to create an accidental incubator.
After meeting start-ups at various events, we found
ourselves playing host to about a dozen people across
five companies here at our offices. They all seem to
like it, and we like them, which inspired us to put
together Springboard."
Also, building on a MS stack will probably increase your chances of acceptance if you are applying (as Red Gate, the host company, builds tools for MS software), but I know first hand some of the companies already involved build using other tools e.g. RoR/Scala/Erlang.
I've recently dealt with Red Gate's support team for a minor issue I was having (I couldn't find my serial number), and I honestly can't remember the last time I've had such a good experience with any support anywhere. They even followed up with an email a few days later.
They seem like a really stand-up bunch of people (and I really like SQL Compare as well).
I'll second that. I purchased one of Red Gate's flagship products (ANTS Profiler) about a year ago to use on one of my last projects for school (a .NET-based numerical library), and I remember thinking that they were the first company that had ever made me think, "Their customer service is so good, I'll definitely buy something from them again."
Seems the motivation is work with "smart, exciting people" and build relationships with those trying to build "companies where the customers are other businesses rather than consumers".
They describe this as an "accidental incubator"...
Also, building on a MS stack will probably increase your chances of acceptance if you are applying (as Red Gate, the host company, builds tools for MS software), but I know first hand some of the companies already involved build using other tools e.g. RoR/Scala/Erlang.