Economic Empowerment: Lunar Startups
For Lunar Startups executive director Danielle Steer, the drive to help diverse founders is as much a moral concern as it is a financial one. “I’m a data-driven person, and the numbers are really clear,” she says. “Startups with more diverse leadership do better. They have higher revenue. They’re more innovative.”
As part of Lunar’s stated goal to create a “more equitable entrepreneurial ecosystem,” the St. Paul-based organization has been running a yearly accelerator program catering to founders from diverse backgrounds. That includes BIPOC entrepreneurs, women, nonbinary people, and people across the LGBTQ+ community.
Launched as a project of American Public Media Group back in 2018, Lunar spun off as an independent 501(c)3 nonprofit at the end of 2020.
Since 2018, Lunar’s accelerator program has served 60 clients. The six-month program provides entrepreneurs with executive coaching, foundational business skills, legal services, and more. Lunar is bringing another 15 entrepreneurs into the program this year, Steer says.
Participating startups can be pre-revenue, but they need to have debuted some product or service in the marketplace. “This is not an idea-stage accelerator,” Steer says.
There are plenty of accelerator opportunities in town, but Steer says Lunar’s differs in its focus on underserved populations. She also maintains that the best startup advocacy work doesn’t happen in a vacuum, which is why she works hard to establish connections among entrepreneurs and economic development agencies, government, corporations, and other startup groups.
“The reason we’ve been successful in the community is because we’re focused on not just our work and how we execute it, but how our work is related to the broader ecosystem,” Steer says.
That makes a difference for folks participating in the accelerator. Belén Rodriguez, CEO and founder of Quebracho Empanadas and a member of Lunar’s fourth cohort in 2021, says the accelerator was an “invaluable” experience. Aside from the practical business skills she picked up, Rodriguez, originally from Argentina, says that Lunar helped build her confidence as an immigrant business owner. It certainly helped to have a space where she could be vulnerable with other entrepreneurs. Being an entrepreneur, she says, is often a “very lonesome journey” otherwise.
Steer is, of course, well aware of that. “Choosing to be an entrepreneur is literally choosing one of the toughest career paths that you could,” Steer says. “Then you compound [that] with the complexity of identity, and it continues to get more and more challenging.”
Lunar’s leaders have big dreams for the organization. By 2025, they hope that accelerator participants will be able to make a $1 billion economic impact. A big part of that goal hinges on providing services that center on diverse entrepreneurs.
“‘Founder-friendly’ is not just a moniker or marketing slogan; it’s truly at the heart of what we’re trying to build,” Steer says.
