By GREGORY ZELLER //
From the Can’t Keep a Good Commercialization Organization Down file comes Accelerate Long Island, which is charging forward with new leadership and a new business-building mission.
Actually, it’s the organization’s old mission, dusted off and polished up after a diversion into hard-core business financing. And the new leader is an old friend – Stacey Sikes, the Long Island Association vice president and former Hofstra University executive dean who’s been with Accelerate from the very beginning, and will now chair its Board of Directors.
Sikes became the LIA’s vice president of government affairs and communications in 2021 after serving three years as Hofstra’s executive dean of entrepreneurship and business development. She was also Accelerate’s assistant executive director under cofounder and original Executive Director Mark Lesko, following stints as then-Brookhaven Town Supervisor Lesko’s deputy chief of staff and former Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi’s director of special projects, among other government gigs.
That résumé makes Sikes the ideal person to chair the Accelerate Long Island board, according to Vice Chairman David Calone, who stepped in as interim chairman after former Chairman Kevin Law stepped down in November. Law surrendered the board’s center seat after being nominated by Gov. Kathy Hochul to head up Empire State Development (he’s still awaiting confirmation).
“[Sikes] has a tremendous background for this job,” Calone told Innovate Long Island. “She has exactly the right experience, working in innovation and entrepreneurship on Long Island for more than 10 years now.”
David Calone: Sikes is the right choice to lead Accelerate Long Island’s new/old mission.
Sikes’ Long Island chops will be critical as Accelerate returns to its vocational roots. Originally, the unique collaboration of Hofstra, Stony Brook University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Northwell Health was designed to promote commercialization collaboration between the partner institutions – to accelerate the creation of new businesses built around Long Island’s cutting-edge scientific research.
From the start, Accelerate did have a financing component – its first funding round, combining state stipends and private investments, funneled individual $100,000 investments to 10 early-stage companies.
By Round 2, Accelerate was a full-on financing mechanism, with Empire State Development funneling the funds and the organization’s scope expanded to include promising companies across Long Island, New York City and the lower Hudson Valley. All told, 24 companies split $2.24 million in Round 2 business-development funding.
For the record, Accelerate did exceptionally well as an investment vehicle: Calone noted that several of those born-on-Long-Island first-round companies – including Envisagenics, Codagenix, Traverse Biosciences, SynchroPET and Green Sulfcrete – are thriving, while the 34 total enterprises backed through Accelerate’s two funding rounds have attracted more than $70 million in follow-on investments from government and private sources.
But Empire State Development’s “funding mechanism” has changed, Calone noted this week, and while the state’s main economic-development engine is still supporting early-stage businesses, it won’t do so through Accelerate Long Island.
Albany will chip in enough to help the Melville-based organization monitor previous investments, but Accelerate is no longer a waypoint for state commercialization stipends – requiring a bit of reinvention, according to Calone.
They mentor well: By refocusing on programs like its innovative LI BioMentoring initiative, Accelerate Long Island will return to its business-development roots.
“I chaired a working group over the past year that focused on what comes next for Accelerate,” he said. “We decided the best idea was to go back to the original mission – supporting and connecting businesses within the Long Island ecosystem.
“Accelerate Long Island is not going to be a funding organization,” Calone added. “Research institutions and academic institutions are the ones who originally funded Accelerate, and we’re going back to leveraging the innovation assets in those entities and creating companies out of them.”
This is the Accelerate Long Island Sikes will lead, chairing a board that features Northwell Health CEO Michael Dowling, SBU President Maurie McInnis, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory President Bruce Stillman, Hofstra University President Susan Poser and Rauch Foundation President Nancy Rauch Douzinas.
The board also features other cornerstones of the Long Island innovation economy – Farrell Fritz Partner Charles Strain and EY Partner Roger Savell among them – and a healthy collection of topflight investment talent, including Calone, CEO of East Setauket-based Jove Equity Partners, and the honchos of Mamaroneck-based Topspin Partners.
Sikes, who will maintain her No. 2 position at the LIA, called her appointment as Accelerate board chairperson “a great opportunity,” and said she was excited to flesh out the organization’s once-and-future business-development mission with the other high-caliber board members.
“They are committed to continuing the organization’s significant role in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship on Long Island,” Sikes said Wednesday. “Accelerate will continue to support its seed-fund portfolio and engage entrepreneurs, researchers and investors through networking.”
That, of course, was the organization’s original function – and if anyone can help Accelerate return to that form it’s Sikes, who’s “been here all along,” Calone noted.
“We’ll be working with tech-transfer officers at these institutions, seeing how they can support each other and go after grants collaboratively, that sort of thing,” the board vice chairman said. “We’ll also be helping early-stage companies access financing and helping to train entrepreneurs on how to run companies.
“We’ve identified all kinds of roles for the next generation of Accelerate Long Island,” he added. “We just needed the right board chairman, and that’s Stacey.
“She’s a great choice to lead us forward.”
