15 Years of Accelerator Insights & Entrepreneurship Lessons

What we do when we bring founders through our programs is we do it in a very sequential way where we have them build a pipeline of investors, and they actually start by pitching their least, like, their lowest priority investors first, right, in order to get feedback and do that refinement before they then share with people that, that they think, you know, have the highest chance or have the highest value to them. As an investor, right? So we always look at these things as sequences where, yes, you do need to learn. The only way to learn is to start getting feedback. That doesn't mean that you should send, send something that's not polished to like your highest, uh, highest quality lead or your highest quality, uh, investor that you're targeting, right? We have them do it sort of in an opposite way. Hey everybody, uh, welcome to this Founder Institute webinar. My name is Jonathan Gritchen, co-founder and CEO of the Founder Institute. Thank you all for joining today. I know we have a really great audience in attendance, a very international audience. For anybody that was registered to the original date for this event, which is about a month ago, I'd like to say thank you for sticking with us. I had some really bad migraines back then, so I just had to push it back. But hopefully I will make that wait worthwhile today. So if you are joining in live, please let us know. These are live events. For those of you who got here early, you probably noticed that we have a networking lounge attached to all of these events. Hopefully you can meet some other people in there, discuss some of the challenges that you may have with entrepreneurial education, and maybe make some nice contacts along the way. I do see— let us know where you're joining in from too. So I see Ben is coming from Atlanta, Georgia. We have Tara from New York City. I grew up just north of New York City in Westchester County. Myself, currently based in Colorado, but I know one of the big things that we do at these FI events is just get an amazing international audience where we can sort of become a melting pot, not just of cultures but of ideas. So I see Brussels, Mexico City, Stanford, Connecticut, also very close to where I grew up, but a lot of other places as well. So thank you all for joining. A couple things today, I'm gonna go through a presentation and then we are gonna try to make this event interactive. We'll be doing some Q&A at the end of the event. So please do, if you have any questions, just put them into the chat. I'm not gonna be scanning the chat at all times. It's hard to do that while I'm doing the presentation, but we do have members of the Founder Institute team who will be in there. And they'll be gathering your questions and I'll address them at the end. And then also we're going to go back into a networking portion at the end of the event as well, where we can share some ideas and maybe kind of crack this challenging thing that is entrepreneurship education. So quickly, let me just talk a little bit about where we come from at the Founder Institute on the entrepreneurship education front. We are the world's largest network of incubators, accelerators, and investors around the world. We've been doing this since 2009. We run over 1,100 Founder Institute cohorts at this point, and I have some of the gray hairs to prove it. Um, and we've done this across all cultures, incubating all types of businesses, uh, across a variety of stages. Um, but the bigger thing for Founder Institute really is that, um, we are an earlier-stage accelerator. So some people say, hey, maybe you should call yourselves an incubator or a pre-accelerator. And to be honest with you, we've considered some of those things for our core program. But at the same time, you think of like an incubator, it doesn't emphasize speed. You think of a pre-accelerator, it doesn't necessarily— like, the goal of our program isn't to get people into accelerators. So, you know, we've stuck with the accelerator. Terminology, but really we work with people that are typically first-time founders or solo founders. Sometimes they're part-time, really still trying to figure out if they should launch this thing or not. And a lot of the people that come into our programs are employees that are turning into entrepreneurs. So as we kind of like to say, we have to deprogram a little bit some of the ways that they've been educated, whether it was through an MBA or something like that, and some of the ways that they've been educated just through through their professional experience within large companies. So we do look at ourselves a little bit as kind of the combination of entrepreneurship education and, um, you know, and that education to the founders, right? So we look at it as educating founders while also accelerating companies. So hopefully we can impart some of those, um, learnings today. And before I get into some specifics here, and I have a lot to share, I literally was spending the last hour or so just cutting down because I have so much to share on this topic, and I'll probably have to run other versions of this event. But if I were to boil down the biggest issue that we see— and we partner with a lot of universities, by the way, we work with universities on curriculums, on providing their alumni with access to resources, and a lot of different things— but if I were to boil down the biggest issue that I see with universities, and if you ask any accelerator operator, they will likely say the same thing, and it's that universities and traditional educators look at entrepreneurship as a process, right? When you're thinking about the curriculum design and how you're going to help people learn something, you typically look at it as a process. And a process is a series of actions or steps to achieve a specific end, right? And that usually means things are repeatable, they have a defined end, and they're effective at simpler objectives. Entrepreneurship is not simple, unfortunately. I wish it was, and I wish somebody had that kind of secret potion. But really, for entrepreneurship, to teach somebody how to be an entrepreneur is to kind of teach them there is no end, right? It's to teach them that it's— you don't know what you don't know, and it's a process of continuous learning. It's a nonlinear journey. It's messy. And when I see a lot of university curriculums that are really focused on, you know, really heavy on analysis and planning, right? The problem is, is that, and this is what, you know, most entrepreneurs will tell you, is that the successful business many years down the line, whenever it becomes successful, right, is very rarely, almost never, the exact same idea that it was and that was planned out in the beginning, right? It is always a journey of, uh, of adjusting the vision, um, you know, based on feedback that you get. And what we always say is that the— all of the value in a startup is created in the evolution and the execution of an initial idea, an initial plan over time in response to customer and market feedback. And when you create a curriculum that's very focused on a process, you know, processes again are very defined. It's a defined outcome. It's simple. It doesn't allow for all of the adjustments that need to be made within entrepreneurship. And that really is the crux of entrepreneurship, right? It's the ability to evolve over time. In response to that feedback. So really, you know, when we talk about being an entrepreneur, is there some planning involved? Is there some analysis involved? Is there some financial skills involved? Sure. But honestly, those are all sort of tertiary. The core thing with any entrepreneur is the execution. And, you know, I was debating whether or not to quote Mike Tyson in my deck because he's not exactly like the greatest guy in the world to quote, but it is a pretty famous quote and it makes a lot of sense within the world of entrepreneurship. Because all of the planning you can do, right, as soon as you get punched in the mouth, all of that goes out the door. And, and that's the problem with most of the curriculums that I see around entrepreneurship is that they're solely focused on the planning and they don't allow for those adjustments in real time. So you shouldn't look at— if there's one thing I can impart on you today, right, I'm going to share a lot of little pieces of information here, hopefully a lot of tips that can help you. But if there's one thing that I've learned with you is that you should be designing these entrepreneurial training programs, education courses, whatever it is that you're doing, as systems, not as processes. Okay? A process, again, is very determinant. It goes to a specific end, whereas a system is interrelated. It has a lot of different components coming in. It looks at it much more holistic, and it looks at it as much more of a broader objective. And the system that we see work, and, and that if you look at not just how Founder Institute works but really all accelerators work, is something that looks like this, okay? It's, yes, they have an intake, right? So they'll identify high potential founders, and that's super important. I'll start with that in a second. Um, then they will provide a process, right? So I'm not saying the process is not valuable, but that process is only valuable in so much that it is also combined with you reinforcing habits and creating an environment, right, that create essentially a cycle of learning so that somebody can learn the entrepreneurial skills and maybe build something of value in the future. So that's going to be the crux of my talk today is going through these three things, but just Again, if there's one thing I impart on you, is that you need to look at these things as a system, not as a process, right? Is that harder? Yes. But it's required because entrepreneurship is something that's constantly evolving. It's not repeatable, right? If it was repeatable, then some of the best investors in the world would, would have better hit rates than like the 10% or so that they typically have. It's something that's constantly changing, so you have to create a system, not a process. Okay, so on the intake side, and I know that this part, you know, may be a little bit of a challenge, or maybe a lot of a challenge for a lot of educators traditionally in the university space, right? But, you know, you want to find people that are willing and that need to that are willing to put in the work to be a founder. So within the Founders Institute, because we work with people so early, we actually encourage people to drop out in the early parts of the program. And trust me, we've been thinking for years, okay, how can we like reposition the word dropout? 'Cause dropout, you know, it makes it sound like somebody's quitting and it just has a negative connotation to it. But in reality, you know, for a lot of people coming into our program, the dropout is, is actually a very positive thing, right? And again, this is where you're looking at it as a system, not a process. If the process is to achieve an end goal, then somebody's going to achieve that end goal whether or not it's the smart business thing to do or not, right? Um, if it is a system, uh, they're more likely to, to look at it in a more holistic way. So, uh, the people that do drop out of the Founder Institute program, it generally splits up this way: about 20 percent will say it's not the right role. And when I say it's not the right role, it's basically saying, you know what, like, I kind of thought entrepreneurship wasn't this hard. I wasn't expecting this level of work. I, you know, I like doing this, you know, whether it's, oh, I like doing design, or I like doing this or that, right? And that's why I wanted to become an entrepreneur. But now I'm realizing that I'm actually going to do very little of that. I'm going to do a lot of everything. Right? So about 20% of people drop out of our programs because of that. About 40% will drop out because they'll say it's not the right time. Right? And to be honest, you know, and a lot of times it really is not the right time. Oh, I just had a baby, or, you know, just financially, it's not the right time. But to be honest, I actually would put the majority of this 40% in that 20% of that it's not the right role. Right? It's just phrased differently of people realizing, you know what, entrepreneurship is just not for me. Not the right idea is about 30%. And again, this is super, super valuable for somebody. If you can put somebody through a system where they realize that the idea that they had, the business that they were thinking about building, it's just not— it doesn't make sense. You shouldn't do it. Don't waste your next 3 years of your life. Don't waste your life savings trying to build this thing, right? That is an extremely positive outcome. I'm not sure how much more value you can provide to somebody if that's going to be the end result. Um, and then finally, about 10% of the people who come through our program, uh, that'll drop out will say, okay, it's just not the right process, right? And that's fine too. Founder Institute moves really fast. It's kind of intense. Um, but at the end of the day, the idea here is that You know, and I know that this can be challenging for, for universities, right? Because in some cases, I know a lot of programs just like, okay, somebody applies to the program and then they can get in, or somebody can opt into a course or whatever it is. But you should try to get creative and create some kind of filters in the beginning to make sure that you're finding the people that are willing to put in the work. And let me show you just how, you know, traditional accelerators will do this, right? A traditional accelerator, um, you know, will identify entrepreneurial potential in, in a couple of ways, right? First, they're going to look at execution metrics, right? Because that's going to show them, okay, it's not about how good somebody is at pitching or whatever. It's like, no, what have they actually done in the past? What are the quantitative things that we can look at? And if you look at a traditional startup accelerator, this is their business business model, okay? It's based on getting a markup on their investment. So they'll make a very small investment into a team that has some kind of validation and early traction. They'll give them— they'll put them through a very intensive program to basically make them fundable through professional investors, like, in a very quick period of time, right? Most of these programs culminate with the demo day to showcase themselves to these investors. Those investors invest in the companies at a markup, and immediately within 3, 4 months' time, these accelerators can show, oh wow, look, I invested in this company 4 months ago, and now this company's worth 30% more, right? I'm simplifying things here to be clear, but this is the business model. And so when you look at how most traditional accelerators are going to gear their programs and how they're going to judge people, it's going to be done on basically a reverse engineering process, right? You look at it, and this is something that we publish, uh, because we see deals from all over the world on a daily basis, right? So we can see at any given time, okay, like, what are the general terms that are being thrown around for different funding deals depending on the type of company, the type of traction, etc., right? And then even the word traction, which investors love to use, means a lot of different things depending on the type of business that you are, right? So this is something that we publish. You can see this at fi.co/benchmarks. We just released our most recent version was in June. And traditional accelerators will look at these metrics and then they're just gonna reverse engineer and they're gonna say, okay, well, we need to, if our goal is to get them either to this pre-seed or the seed round at the end of our demo day, then we need to make sure that we're finding people that we can kind of get to that process within a 3 to 4 month timeframe, right? So again, their written applications are gonna be very much on identifying those execution metrics. They're also going to have an extremely heavy emphasis on teams, and teams for 2 reasons. Number 1 is they see it as de-risking, right? Building a startup's really hard. For one person, it's even harder. But I think a big thing that they'll see as well is that it just shows, and it's an execution signal in and of itself. If a solo founder is there and clearly doesn't have all the skills that are necessary to build this business, most of the time an accelerator, and this is the same thing with a lot of angel investors as well, is they'll look at this and be like, okay, are you really, you haven't been able to sell somebody else on this vision that you have? Like, That tells me that maybe you're not a great salesperson, or you maybe are just not able to kind of rally people around this vision and this mission that you have. Then they'll do interviews, which is in a lot of cases just validating those execution signals, ensuring a venture-scale vision, and all of these different things. And, you know, something that you— we see a lot more now too is actually seeing these companies in action, right? And these founders in action. So how can you validate that a founder has high potential and is willing to put in the work? It's because you've actually seen them put in the work. So you'll see that we have— there's a lot of pre-programs, right? Things like YC has Startup School, Techstars has Founder Catalyst, Founder Institute, we run some boot camps and things like that, right? But these are all opportunities for you to see how people perform. And if I were to make a recommendation to like a traditional university, on, hey, how, what are some more traditional ways that fit into the things that we're already doing and how we can kind of qualify and identify, you know, people that are willing to put in the work to go through an entrepreneurship program. It may be through something like this, right? It's to put together, whether it's a competition or something like that, to actually see people in action, you know, is a great way to narrow them down. Now, this was something at the crux of one of the challenges of Founder Institute when we first starting these things out back in 2009, was that, hey, if we're working with founders in a lot of cases before they're a founder, right, they may still be an employee, um, they just have some back of the napkin idea. We know that that idea is going to change over time, right? So kind of trying to evaluate that idea at that early stage is kind of just a waste of time. It's a completely meaningless exercise. You know, the idea is going to change. All of the value in that idea will be in the founder's ability to execute it. So we kind of took a different track. We said, okay, well, um, if we're working with founders before there's any company, then we need to figure out a way to actually evaluate the founders, right? And in the absence of any kind of business metrics that a traditional accelerator may look at, We have to try to boil down the individual, the founder, into metrics themselves. And, and that was what spawned something called the Entrepreneur DNA Assessment. You can learn more about this at dna.fi.co. But essentially what we said was, and we worked with some leading social scientists on this over the years, but in the beginning it was a 3-hour test. I don't know how we got people to take it, but the idea was to test everything in the social sciences that could reliably be measured in an online format, right? Then over time in our accelerator itself, we then correlate those metrics that they have on the test with their performance metrics in the program, and then we track them over time in the quote-unquote "real world," right, to see how they do. And, you know, we then, we then see what are the traits and the personality traits and the social science traits that actually correlate either positively or negatively with building a great business. Now, this is something that took a lot of time, right? We're 16 years in at this point. We've collected millions of data points, over 200,000 assessments, over 8,000 alumni companies, you know, etc. This was something— so if anybody would like to try out the Entrepreneur DNA assessment, not just for yourself but for students, we're giving away some free tests, and the reason why we're doing this is that when we look at our stats, we actually have a lot of educators that are using the assessment and just kind of giving copies of it to their students and using the free version of it, which is limited, but it's still— it's showing a use case for us. So if you would like to use this, fill out this application and you can get some of that information, but The crux of it is, right, is then doing all of this analysis over time, correlating entrepreneurial or correlating personality traits to entrepreneurial success. We've honed in on 26 different personality traits. And I'm going to go through this quickly. But if you did want to learn more, we're obviously going to be sharing a video of this deck. But you can learn more at dna.fi.co as well. But I'll go through a couple of the highlights right now. So in, in research, and some of you may know this, right, there's something known as ceiling effect traits. Something that's a ceiling effect trait literally means that the population that you are using on some kind of test or survey or whatever it is, they score so high on certain components of your assessment that it makes it hard for you to actually judge the difference between all the people, right? Because there's not enough variation between them because they're all scoring so high. So it literally means that it's like they're scoring so high, it's off the charts, you have to recalibrate the scoring on it. And there were 3 traits that we literally had to recalibrate the scoring because we were seeing such strong correlation with entrepreneurial success. Curiosity is one of them. Perseverance. And self-reliance. And on the other side of the equation, right, there's a ceiling effect. There's also something called the floor effect, and the floor effect is the exact opposite. It's because people score so low that you basically have to readjust the scoring in order to show, you know, meaningful distinctions between applicants. And the biggest one that we saw with the floor effect was patience. This was one that my wife laughed out loud when I I told it to her because she tells me I'm the most impatient person in the world. And I like to think of myself as a decent entrepreneur. So that seems to track, at least, at least in her mind. And not only did we look at just the individual traits, right, then we worked with our social scientists to say, OK, well, you know, there's 26 different traits that we're seeing correlate. Clearly, there's probably buckets of traits, right, different personality combinations that we're also seeing correlate really well, you know, with entrepreneurship. And by doing that, we put personality buckets together, and we kind of gave them these nice, like, kind of fancy names, right? It's like, okay, somebody who's super outgoing, super confident, who's super sales-oriented, right, obviously has deficiencies in other places. But we've seen that that personality bucket, so to speak, correlate really highly with entrepreneurship. We named that the Hustler, right? So, and we've done this with a couple of different personality profiles here. So you could see that. And we've also analyzed things by the stage of business. So things at the start, right? Being able to take people from, or being able to find people that can really go from that zero That ability to turn nothing into something. It really tracks with things like proactivity, competitiveness, risk tolerance, decisiveness. And then the funny thing is, is that when we then looked at some of the companies that had longevity over time, right, their CEOs and their founders, it kind of flipped the script a little bit. At this point, then the patience became a virtue, not a sin. As it did in the beginning, right? So we're able to kind of analyze these traits not just on the entrepreneurial potential of getting, turning something or turning nothing into something, but also in the ability to do it over time. We can apply these things across teams, you know, especially by looking at the components of teams and what traits need to be sort of present and how they can counteract other traits. And sorry about that. And analysis by region, right? This was a slide that I showed, a presentation that I gave in Australia a couple of years ago. And it was really funny because I was telling them, hey guys, like you have a lot of really great entrepreneurial personality traits, but collaboration is something that you really struggle with, at least according to our data. Right, this is my first time in Australia. I'm by no means an expert on Australian culture, but when I did explain it to them, you know, somebody stood up and explained to me that the concept of something called the— what was it— the Poppy Effect, or I'm now I'm forgetting the exact name of it, but it literally was something that culturally Australians acknowledge, you know, just being an island nation or an island continent, I guess. Where, you know, just generally speaking, the culture sees themselves as a little bit less collaborative than others. And if somebody's successful, it's actually in some cases, you know, shunned and looked down upon. So we're able to look at all these different cultural dynamics. But the, the crux of all this is, right, when we look at the personality traits of people, and just to take a step back, on where we were here before I started this and lost my internet connection, was that you really do have to find people, uh, that are willing to put in the work and that have the entrepreneurial personality traits. Okay, you can do it through testing, which we do. You can do it through putting them through some pre-program or whatever and being able to see them over time, right? You can do it like other accelerators, uh, where you're actually looking at execution metrics to see what they've done in the past. Something that we're seeing, there's just an explosion of interest in entrepreneurship, right? Especially with the younger generation. A lot of them are— they're not watching cable and things. They're following TikTok and they're following YouTube creators, right? Creators are by their nature entrepreneurial. So a lot of them want to be entrepreneurs. And, you know, I think it's The problem is, is that a lot of people are not willing to put in the work, and that is, in my opinion, a really big responsibility of educators is to make it very clear to them that, that there's a lot of work to be put in here and to go out of your way to try to identify those strengths and weaknesses on the front end. Now, the good news is that one thing that we see is that with all those personality traits that I've shown, is there's not one kind of entrepreneur, okay? I know we all have these visions in our head of, okay, like I mentioned the hustler before, right? I'm sure all of you can probably mention or name one quote-unquote hustler in your life, probably somebody who's been good at business, the kind of person who's just selling all the time, all right? But that's not the only, um, combination that we've seen have success. They come in all different shapes and sizes. So, um, you know, opening up the aperture there and not just focusing in on one specific archetype is something that you should definitely do. The other thing is that there's great opportunities to individualize support. All right. Getting to know people because it's not just learning, it's not just memorization when it comes to entrepreneurship. Again, using the Mike Tyson quote, you're going to get punched in the mouth. So this is— these are some screenshots of the platform that we have and that the administrators of Founder Institute Accelerators use around the world where at any given time when they're working with founders and trying to help them grow, they can see the results of their DNA assessment here, you know, to help kind of push the right buttons, to help encourage them along the way and to deal with inevitable failures and all of those negative things that are going to come with entrepreneurship, right? And one of the sealing traits that I mentioned before, perseverance, it is something that can be learned. Right? It is something that can be encouraged. It's just not in most people's nature to, you know, if they have a helping hand as they're going through the entrepreneurship learning process, they're going to internalize it a lot better. OK. So in the process— or sorry, in the system that I was mentioning, right, the second part is the process. And as I said before, process is important. It just can't be the end-all be-all. And this should be pretty apparent to anybody who is in the business or has done any kind of curriculum development within entrepreneurship, right? I list a couple of things here. There's a bunch of books that I have here. You know, a lot of this stuff has been largely commoditized. Any single curriculum that you see, whether it's okay if it's a process, right? These are the things that you need to do in this sequential order. It's going to be a derivative of one of these 5 things or a combination of these 5 things, right? It's customer development, agile development, lean startup, scientific method, business model canvas. So my recommendation is always to treat the process insomuch that it just helps people move quickly, right? And it helps give them focus. But other than that, do not, you know, spend too much time on that because again, I'm trying— a process is a small part of a system, right? And unfortunately, what I see right now is most people focus too much on the process. So, you know, use it as a way to just provide structure and clarity, but not to be the whole crux of any entrepreneurship. Education system that you create. So the third thing here is to create entrepreneurial habits. A lot of entrepreneurial habits are not natural. These are things that feel so incredibly unnatural in the beginning, and it's like a muscle, it needs to be built up over time. So any aspiring entrepreneur, if you're giving them a system, that's great, right? It's like, okay, do this, do this, do this, do this, and this. But if you're not also giving them, you know, instilling these habits, reinforcing these habits, no matter what, no matter what challenges they're facing, no matter how successful they're being as well, then you're doing them a disservice. And I break it down into basically 4 main habits. And the first one is to move fast. One of the core theses around Founder Institute Institute and what we do with founders— and again, this is something you'll see in, in all accelerators too, right? They'll implement it in a different way, but all accelerators are going to make founders extremely focused and have them move extremely quickly. Is there a little bit of analysis involved? Sure. But if you were to look at like, I don't know, 100% scale, let's I would say it's maybe 10% analysis and then 90% action. Um, to— and, and this is something where I see a big problem with a lot of, um, entrepreneurship education right now is that it focuses a lot on analysis, right? It's using all these different frameworks on how to break down a business and look at competitive factors and SWOT analyses and all these different things, right? Um, but really that I'm not saying that those things aren't useful, but that's not teaching somebody how to be an entrepreneur. That's teaching somebody how to be a consultant, how to be an idea person or a strategy person, right? And are those parts of entrepreneurship? Are those important for entrepreneurs? Sure. But the much more important thing is action, right? So instead of taking, you know, this ready, aim, fire mindset, It's ready. Yes, a little bit of analysis, then actually trying things in the real world, getting feedback, moving quickly, and then altering the plan from there. And the biggest thing here, right, is that when we look at entrepreneurs, it's— they have to overcome a lot of different challenges and a lot of different constraints. And it's incredibly hard for you to plan your way. Through getting through constraints, right? You sort of just have to start throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks. And that's what helps you start breaking through those barriers, getting through those constraints. And this is why any acceleration program that you see, Founder Institute included, it's going to provide very, very short and intensive sprints. This removes any possibility of analysis paralysis, right? Because you gotta get moving. Like, okay, your plan goes into place tomorrow. So you literally have a couple hours today to figure it out. You're going to make some educated guesses, that's fine, all right? But then you're going to start putting it into action tomorrow. You put those blinders on. The time boxing is typically around 1 week, is what you're going to see in most programs, and this is what we do in Founder Institute as well. Um, and the good thing here too is that with these short intensive sprints, you're really trying to simplify things, um, because at At first, for most people, if this is their first business or if they're learning entrepreneurship, they're going to be intimidated by this, right? And the way to lower that amount of intimidation is to set simple, attainable metrics. They're going to have excuses. They're going to say, hey, this is too hard. It's impossible. It'll take too long. It'll cost too much, right? This is the entrepreneurial wall or something that we refer to a lot. In the Founder Institute where every new entrepreneur is going to hit this wall at some point, and it usually presents itself in a chicken and egg problem, right? They'll say, oh well, I could get this customer, but they need this, so I can't, right? Or I, um, I could build this product, but I don't have the skills to build it. Whatever it is, right? It's always a chicken and egg problem. And entrepreneurs right off the bat have to be trained and learn the process of overcoming these constraints. And by creating these super short and intensive sprints, you're able to guide them in that way, right? You say, look, okay, you know what, you're right, you can't build this product, you're not going to be able to have this thing for the customer. But if you strip it down and say, look, you only need to find 10 new users this week, right? You can find 10 new users. All right, now you're starting to remove all the baggage that they're thinking about. Everybody who's gone through traditional business thinking is always thinking about scale and economies of and all of these things that are not relevant at all to entrepreneurs, right? So if you start saying, no, you don't need to create a marketing campaign, you don't need to create a funnel, you need to get 10 people, right? So why don't you get on the phone or send some emails or get on LinkedIn and just reach out to, I don't know, to get 10 people, reach out to 100 people on LinkedIn. It's a couple hours of work. It's not that hard, right? So they time box and they simplify these things to a much smaller degree to help them achieve those things, right? And just a couple of examples here, right, and I'll give you the FI example as well, but on SprinterFirst, for example, they have these 1-week sprints where literally every single week you define a problem, you test it with interviews and prototypes, and then on Friday you decide either to move forward with it and double down or basically abandon it and try something else, all right? One-week sprints. Think about how that constraint removes all of the baggage that we've learned about creating businesses and just promotes people to move quickly. Y Combinator— I'm not sure if they still do this, by the way, but I know it was a famous thing when they were first founded, at least, where their goal with their companies was each company— and this is something 500 Startups did this as well, right? They called it the one metric that matters. So you'd come into the program and you'd figure out, okay, you know what, in order for your business to be successful, yes, you could focus on 20 metrics. This is the one that matters, right? And every single week you just say, okay, what is the metric right now? Number of users, let's just say as an example, right? Okay, you have 2 users right now, right? This means next week we just want you to grow this by 10%. And then the week after that, we want you to grow this by 10%, right? Right? And over time that compounds and it becomes a lot higher, but it gives you the ability to just focus on a very small number of people in the beginning, attainable, um, goals, and, um, and then allowing you to then, you know, basically focus over time to actually grow the business. So all of these things are sort of removing, um, the baggage, um, of what you would traditionally see in business training, which is things like scale and strategy and it brings it down into very simplified components. So something that we do in Founder Institute is try to help people figure out simplified milestones, right? In most people's heads, they're trying to change the world or whatever it is, right? So they think of a milestone as, okay, I need, my milestone is I need to raise $1 million, right? And we're just like, no, that's like a meta, meta milestone. Let's think about like if that's step 100 in your milestones, what is step 1, right? And I use this example here. This is something that we were recently doing at Founder Institute. We were saying, okay, look, we want to create a new course for poor people and we see demand on this course, right? And we think this is going to work. So we could use a traditional kind of business thinking and we could build the full curriculum for this course. We could launch a full site, we can launch a full marketing campaign, and then we can get 100 people to enroll in the course, right? And we'll make a lot of money, right? Or we could create simplified milestones and we say, all right, you know what? In order to start selling and actually figuring out if people want this course, why don't we not create the full curriculum at first? Why don't we just establish kind of the skeleton of the curriculum, right? Okay, well, this is, we obviously see a demand. For this type of education. Okay, using all of our knowledge and methodologies on curriculum design, we'll break it into a couple different components. We'll know, okay, on every single week we want to achieve these, these different things, right? These are the key topics that we want to cover. We can then take all that information, put it into a landing page, and then we can launch a low-effort marketing campaign and to just validate whether or not we want to move forward With this project, we wanna get 10 people to enroll in the course, you know, utilizing a small amount of marketing. If we're able to do that, then it would make sense for us to kind of put all of our eggs in the basket and go forward with the campaign, right? This is the kind of structured, kind of cyclical, step-by-step thinking, simplified milestones that entrepreneurs need to think with. And this is something that we push in the FI program, and as you could see, a lot of the accelerators do this as well. And I know it wouldn't be any kind of relevant presentation these days if I didn't mention AI, right? So I can't speak for how other accelerators are leveraging AI, but I can speak for how we are. We see AI as pretty much falling under this respect where it allows people to move really, really fast. It increases their speed because it can perform a lot of their analysis, number one, right? But number two, it increases their ability to just move quickly and have more reps on whatever it is that we're doing. So there's just a GIF here where it just shows like we have AI built into our platform and we're really trying to use it for all of the little types of analyses that founders need to do along the way to utilize AI to, to help them do those kinds of things. So the second thing with entrepreneurial traits is the compound learning. So you can push people to move fast, right? But you can also move fast and kind of move stupidly. The only value of speed is that you, if you are utilizing that speed in order to learn and create basically, you know, learning cycles. And this is a term we use at Founder Institute, which is compounded learning. The biggest advantage that an entrepreneur has, and it literally is like one of two advantages that entrepreneurs have over big companies, right, is the fact that they're small and kind of ignorant, and they're not constrained by boards and shareholders and things like this, so they could move really, really quickly. Right? They can run a lot of experiments really, really quickly, take the learning from those experiments, tack it on to the next experiment so that they can create sort of a hockey stick of learning, right? So sort of like compounded interest, it's the same concept. You can take the learning and compound it over time. A traditional big corporation, no matter what they do, right? And they're all trying to do it in some respect. But no matter what they do, they'll never be able to achieve this kind of level of learning, right? Because there's too much bureaucracy, there's too many levels of approval for all the different things that they could do, they have to protect their brand, right? There's all these different reasons. And the problem is, is that we work with a lot of entrepreneurs, or at least when we start working with them, they're still on this traditional big corp learning path, right? They're not utilizing that strength, they're not utilizing that speed in order to create that compounded learning. So here, right, and this is essentially how I would define the compounded learning, is just first you do very quick analysis, you test something, you determine whether or not you succeed or fail, you internalize that learning, and then the next cycle The next test that you create is, you know, starts at a higher knowledge base, right? So you just kind of see it as a series of cycles building on top of each other so that you can get this compounded learning cycle. And with this, right, and this is something that we all do at any accelerator, is to make sure that that learning is viable. right? And the best way to do that is through data. This is something that I don't think enough universities focus on, is actually having people present data, right? Hard data every single week on what it is that they're learning, focusing— what did you learn this week, right? That should probably be the first thing that you're asking, and making sure that the data is not false 'Cause false positives can be super deadly for entrepreneurs. It's a great way for somebody to spend a lot of their time and money on something that don't work. And false positives is something too we should acknowledge that are inherent to any entrepreneur, any first-time entrepreneur, because they will immediately come in with some type of affinity for their idea, right? So they're going to go into things like customer interviews and analysis, not in an inherently unbiased way. They're going to go in, um, with a mindset of kind of proving their existing hypothesis, right? Totally, um, biased way to look at things. And again, a great way to pursue a business that's going to waste a lot of time and money. Um, so a lot of training that we do in Founder Institute and a lot of training, um, that accelerators will do is really getting into the weeds on scientific method style experimentation. Okay. And customer interviewing. Customer interviewing is something that is wholly unnatural for most first-time entrepreneurs unless they sort of went to school and did research, you know, in a PhD or something like that. But the ability to actually dive in, empathize with customers, and not try to drive a specific outcome is something that's really, really unnatural, and you'll see most accelerator programs are going to focus on that because these key things right here, scientific method style experimentation, be able to talk to customers in a way where you're actually eliciting real insights, not inadvertently just kind of validating the ideas you already have in your head, are incredibly important. So the third entrepreneurial habit here is failure. Okay, entrepreneurs reframe failure. It is actually, you know, we're just talking about that they need to learn really quickly, right? They need to move fast so that they can learn quickly. They need to compound that learning so that they can improve quickly. Um, and but one of the best ways to learn is to fail. I mean, literally to fail. And everybody fails. It's something that with a lot of entrepreneurs, the first couple of times that they fail, they're going to feel like a failure. And I think that's probably just human nature for most people. But the ability to just reframe that failure of saying, look, you didn't fail, you learned really effectively. Right, is incredibly important. And that's probably one of the chief reasons too why you shouldn't look at these things as a process, because processes kind of inherently try to avoid failure, whereas a system will use failure as a really effective way to learn. Um, it's a reframing of the mindset, right? And this isn't something that's easy, it's something that's done over time through repetition. It's seeing the fact that, look, I'm going to be doing an experiment right now. It's either going to succeed or fail, but if I do it correctly, either way I'm going to learn, right? So the worst result of any experiment is not to learn anything, right? Failure is infinitely better than not learning anything on any experiment. And at least the example that I try to use when I'm speaking to new entrepreneurs to kind of start to lower or increase their tolerance, I'd say, for failure is this amazing stat. Roger Federer, probably the greatest tennis player of all time. I think it was a commencement speech he did not too long ago, but he literally only won 54% of the points that he played. All right, so the greatest of all time in this sport won 54% of the time. The margins are so small. So if you're creating systems, if you're creating curriculum, if you're creating a process where failure is not encouraged as an outcome, you're doing these founders a very, very big disservice. And accepting failure as well and looking at it as not an end, by any means, right, but just as a natural step in the learning process, allows entrepreneurs— what I've seen is it allows them to unlock what we call the art of calculated risk-taking, right? We all know that most entrepreneurs, generally speaking, should, should be able to take some risks, right? Um, to actually put that into process, uh, what we see is you know, if they're willing to see a failure, right, as an outcome, they are much better at then going and reverse engineering what a plan could be to take a calculated risk. And the method that we always tell people is, look, you want to build if-then plans where you have a validation milestone where it will create an easy decision, right? So you're able to say, you know what, if I, if I do this and I do that, and this happens, then I'd be stupid to not move forward to the next step on this project, right? And conversely, if this didn't happen, then I'd be an idiot to move forward on the next step in this project, right? And there you can kind of look again at the example that I gave before on a course, right? You could build a whole curriculum, spend all this time kind of putting something out there, or you can create a simple if-then statement, right? You know what, if I'm able to just put a landing page up, um, send out a couple tweets and things like this, and if I'm able to get 10 people to register, then you know what, that means I should move forward with this project because the validation is there, right? So the art of calculated risk-taking is really something, in my opinion, that's not achievable. You're not able to even be in the right mindset of it if you're not willing to accept, and not just accept, but if you're not willing to embrace failure as the most effective way to learn. So the last entrepreneurial habit here, and I got about 10 minutes left here in the presentation for anybody, so if you do have questions, please throw them into the chat and I'll get to them in a couple of minutes. But the last habit that we try to instill in entrepreneurs, and that you'll see most accelerators do as well, is pitching. Okay, pitching is not the end. It's not the end result. It shouldn't be the capstone on any project or curriculum. It shouldn't be, okay, uh, you know, at the end of this program you're going to pitch, right? And I know most accelerators, yes, they will end in a demo day, but I promise you they're pitching 100 times for that demo day, right? That is just sort of a culmination. Pitching is not the end-all. It's not to gain support for your idea. Entrepreneurs pitch nonstop. They pitch to get feedback. They pitch to test different messages to see, okay, people are getting this message, they're not getting this message. They pitch to identify issues. They pitch to gain support, yes, eventually, but it's not just from investors. To get potential partners, co-founders, all of these different things. Entrepreneurs are always pitching. So the big misconception here is that, um, that the pitching and sort of the education of entrepreneurship are— it's almost like people will see the pitch as the culmination, or it's like the final exam is the pitch. But you actually don't improve as an entrepreneur and learn the entrepreneurial skills and actually improve your idea or business or whatever it is that you're doing without pitching constantly and getting that feedback, right? Um, so you're doing them a disservice if you're not allowing them to pitch until the end, or if you're not really having a focus on it until the end. And that's most of the programs that I see. And it's not just because you're not allowing them to learn how to improve their business, you're not allowing them to learn just how to communicate their idea, but you're not giving them the reps to turn themselves into great storytellers. And this was something, and I don't remember who told me this, but it's something that's always stuck with me to this day, is when they say the founder of any company is the chief storytelling officer, right? Especially when it's at the very beginning, because Ideas, any idea that anybody has, right? We all have ideas. They all float in the wind and they don't really go anywhere until somebody can attach a story to that idea to make it stick. So communication is an incredibly important skill for any entrepreneur to learn. And, you know, typically figuring out the right story to attach to any idea or the business that you have, you'd have to hit the lottery to just be able to look at a piece of paper and go come up with it, right? You're going to have to generate it over time by getting feedback. Uh, and in the Founder Institute program, at least in our FI Core Accelerator, every single week our founders are live pitching on their strategy. So every week there's a different topic, right, whether it's finance, marketing, whatever. And every single week they're live pitching to mentors on how they're going to attack that specific topic for their business, right? They're live pitching their business. So more of you might think of like an investor pitch, right, but a very short one. 1 minute is how it starts, right, where they're literally just trying to communicate their idea as quickly as possible. And then they're also submitting a recorded pitch, and this is something that we, to be honest, we didn't really learn this until COVID, but by forcing people to submit a recorded pitch, you actually, it probably increases the amount of time they put into the pitch by like 2 or 3x, just because it's sort of unnatural for people to record themselves. And they'll look at it, in a lot of cases, they'll say, okay, I got that one sentence wrong, right? But that whole process just creates a lot more learning and a lot more reinforcement for them to actually go through that process of recording themselves and uploading it. All right, so that's something that I would definitely recommend is the power of requiring an uploaded pitch. We do it every week, which is definitely intense, but that recorded pitch is in a lot of cases a lot more powerful than just saying, hey, we're gonna have a Zoom today, jump on here and pitch me, because in a lot of cases they're just gonna wing that, right? The recorded pitch, they're gonna be a lot less likely to wing. Okay, and then the final thing here, right, is with those habits is creating the environment. And if I were to break down the environment into two quick things, it's going to be helpful mentorship and these constructive peer-to-peer dynamics. So Founder Institute now has over 35,000 mentors all around the world, and we very much focus on mentors that are practitioners, okay? Um, typically people that have built businesses, uh, themselves from the ground up. Um, ideally they're still in the grind themselves, right? Either because they're investing in early businesses advising early businesses. And what we typically find is that these types of people, they actually might be consultants right now, right? But it's because they're consultants because they have done this in the past. But we typically do reject consultants and theorists as mentors in Founder Institute. And one problem that I do see with a lot of entrepreneurship education is that they just don't really understand how funding lifecycles work for startups. And they'll bring in VCs, um, to talk to like idea stage founders, and they're just not talking the same language. Okay, so you should bring in investors. I think bringing in investors is very helpful, but they need to align with the stage of the founders that you're working at. And if, like most people on this webinar, you are working with founders that have, um, that are at the early stages, right, and just learning entrepreneurship, that means that you're going to be doing them a disservice if you're giving them VCs. You need to be actually exposing them to people that do invest and will have the relevant feedback and insights on these kind of idea stage and pre-seed businesses, which are going to be angels and micro VCs, not your traditional venture capitals. Um, the mentors— most programs I see, they'll bring them in for the purposes of lecturing. Okay, but the biggest value that you can bring in mentors for within the concept of entrepreneurship is feedback. It's— we do have lectures in our programs now, but it was about a couple years ago where we significantly de-emphasized the lecturing components, where now we much more drive towards what we call feedback at scale. And feedback touchpoints is a key metric that we have on our product. Right, where we want to ensure that as an entrepreneur is building out their business and getting, gathering a lot of data from the market, from customer interviews and all this stuff, that they have a sounding board to get feedback, right? So at least in our programs, we have live sessions where they're getting feedback every single week. We have office hours where they're getting feedback. We have review sessions where they're getting feedback kind of around major milestones. And one of the most effective things that we ever did in Founder Institute was something that we called no 3s allowed. We always tried to boil down feedback in FI. Yes, there's qualitative feedback where people can leave reviews, right? But we also wanted to always drive towards quantitative where it was based on numbers. And in the first days of FI, we had a 1 to 5 rating system where 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 were allowed. What we quickly realized, all right, it was about a year or two in, was it was something— I don't remember the exact number, but it was something like 70 or 80% of the ratings were 3s on that rating scale, right? Um, why is that? It's because, well, when you're bringing in mentors that understand the trials and tribulations of entrepreneurship, they generally want to be nice. Right? The problem is, is that nice feedback, polite feedback, neutral feedback provides no value whatsoever to the entrepreneur. They need brutal feedback, honest feedback. So what we did was we instituted a rule called no 3s allowed, and it honestly had much more impact than we ever thought it possibly could. Because now what we see is, you know, if you think about thought process, most mentors, again, because they want to be nice, generally speaking, right, they understand that any entrepreneur that's pitching them or sharing their ideas, grinding away on it, and, you know, has kind of a full stack of cards ahead of them to try to make this thing successful, most of the time they will go into a mindset of, okay, you know what, I'm going to give this a 3. But since we prevent that, we then polarize it. We say, okay, well, you can't choose 3. You guys, you either have to choose a 4, which is pretty positive, or a 2, which is pretty negative, right? And it's literally by forcing them to go through that thought process, we also are able to elicit really, really valuable customer feedback, right? Because they'll describe, they'll say, okay, you know what, I was give you a 3, but I can't give you a 3. So I have to be inherently positive or negative with this feedback. I'm going to go negative. And these are, these are the reasons why. Right? Steal this from, from us right now. If you start doing this with any of the mentors that you have, any of the instructors, any judges on pitching or whatever it is that you're doing in your, in your curriculums, I promise you that this is going to significantly improve the feedback that you're getting. Now, it's going to generate feedback that in a lot of cases is brutally honest, I would say. But again, that's what entrepreneurs need at the early stages. And at least, uh, for us, right, and, and I know that this is something that other accelerators do as well, we do it through platform, um, through basically the founder dashboard that people use in our programs. But founders are inundated with feedback, um, throughout the program, right? And that's a good thing. So we have to make sure that that feedback is actionable. So we provide that feedback in a way where they can kind of sort through it and see all the feedback that they're getting, you know, focused on what specific part of their business, right? So just kind of help them sort through the madness a little bit as they're going and building the business. And then the final thing that I'll say here is pure dynamics, right? And I think most people have kind of, you know, come privy to the fact that these cohort-based programs are generally speaking, are going to create better learning outcomes. You know, what we see is that there's 3 main ways to create, to leverage the power of the peers in any Founder Institute cohort, in any accelerator cohort to accelerate their learning, right? The first thing is to really push the shared learning. And without fail, we talk to new founders coming into our programs all the time in the early weeks, we tend to get a lot of complaints. And, um, the complaints will be, why am I spending my time talking to other founders who are sort of at the same stage as me? Like, I came into Founders Institute because I want to talk to mentors, right? I want to talk to people that have done it before. And we typically tell them, hey guys, like, just trust us, okay? Trust the process. Um, and without fail, the ones that stick around will tell us later on, wow, yeah, I really thought those those peer groups and me, like, learning and working a lot with other founders, I really thought that was a waste of time and I had no idea that that might actually be the most valuable thing that I got from this program, right? Without fail, this was the dynamic that we see. And what we do is that we have these peer working groups where every single week they share their learnings, tactics, and strategies, right? And these groups rotate, but We do tend to try to create them based off the stage of business that people are at and the type of sector, if we can do that as well. Right? So these peer working groups are incredibly important because some of it is just emotional support, we know, right, is that people can kind of vent. But the biggest part of it with the shared learning is to say, OK, yeah, we're all kind of tackling the same challenges. Hey, I tried this, this, and that. This didn't work. One person and says, "Okay, well, I tried this, this worked," right, that shared learning allows them all to move a lot faster. The second thing with the peer groups is leadership development. So we actually run these groups to kind of mimic what a board meeting would look like. The groups elect a president, right, and again, these presidents rotate over time, and that president is sort of in charge of taking all the meeting notes, they create the agenda, they create minutes, but more importantly, they're also accountable for making sure that the people in the group are actually keeping up with the pace of the work. So it helps to build leadership skills as well. And we use it specifically to build leadership skills within the context of a board meeting, because we're building startups that will typically be creating boards. And then the final thing with peers is definitely the gamification component, right? Like a lot of people, we have leaderboards, All of the time when founders are doing those pitches that I mentioned before, the business pitches that they're doing is in front of the entire cohort, right? And these are all designed to create what we like to call these kind of healthy peer pressure dynamics, right? These forcing functions for people to up their game, whereas in a lot of cases, people may be sort of aiming to the lowest common denominator. When everything is done in public and in front of the whole cohort, it drives people to actually do the opposite, right, to try to catch the highest common or the highest denominator at the top, the people that are really excelling. So at least that's how we do it at F5. So as a final note here, and I'll get to some questions in a moment if you do have any other questions, is that something that we're seeing here now, guys, is you know, as AI continues to take over more and more of business, right, across business of all kinds, typically computers are really great at specialized tasks. That puts much more of an onus on what you may call soft skills for the future, you know, the future workforce of this future economy that we're going into very, very quickly. So, you know, at least for us, and this is the feedback, and we work with a lot of governments and a lot of universities, right? A lot of those soft skills— conflict mitigation and creativity, project planning, right? These are all things that are going to be a little bit more challenging for AI to replicate, and they pretty much all align with what you may call entrepreneurial skills. So, um, I think that, you know, the educational institutions that are really prioritizing, um, you know, kind of breeding entrepreneurial skills and teaching these things to their students are the ones that preparing their students best for this AI-dominated economy, because those are the types of people that are going to be able to do the things that AI can't, can't as easily replicate. Okay, well, thank you everybody. I'll put this link up here again, but let me get to a couple of questions here. And, and thank you all for joining. I did go a little bit over on time, so if you did stick around. I appreciate it. Let me see some of the questions. So I'm looking in the chat here. Do we have any questions, guys? Okay, yes, we do. All right, question from Judith. So Judith asked, what are your thoughts on the mentality fail often, fail fast? When it comes to entrepreneurship? For example, would you recommend sharing one's pitch deck with prospective investors even if it's not yet refined? So let me break down that question into two parts, Judith, because that second, that actual example you gave there is pretty extreme. So I would not recommend a founder share a not-refined pitch deck with prospective investors. Okay, so I'll just throw that out there. Um, uh, we did want to offer this to some people. What we do when we bring founders through our programs is we do it in a very sequential way where we have them build a pipeline of investors, and they actually start by pitching their least— like, their lowest priority investors first, right, in order to get feedback and do that refinement before they then share with people that, that they think, you know, have the highest chance or have the highest value to them as an investor, right? So we always look at these things as sequences where, yes, you do need to learn. The only way to learn is to start getting feedback. That doesn't mean that you should send, send something that's not polished to like your highest, uh, highest quality lead or your highest quality, uh, investor that you're targeting, right? We have them do it sort of in an opposite way. But to answer the bigger question that you have of the fail fast, fail often, like, yes, it is. I mean, was it Facebook? It's just, you know, move fast and break things. It really is the mindset that you need to provide to an entrepreneur. And, you know, I think Zuckerberg came up with that, what, in like 2008, 2009? And just think about how exponentially faster the rate of innovation is. And the rate of just needing to put out new features and new products to stay in line with the current economy, right? And as AI begins to, you know, penetrate more and more things, that's only going to continue exponentially moving faster. So, you know, you can think of it as some kind of trope or something, a move fast and break things, but I see it as a term that literally every single day is becoming more and more critical. And that's where kind of providing a process and only focusing on process and entrepreneurship education and, you know, emphasizing things like analysis over action are really doing a disservice to entrepreneurs. It's not teaching them entrepreneurial skills. It's really teaching them to be consultants and analysts, you know, versus actually building something that can be successful in the marketplace today. Okay, so the second question here is an anonymous question. How do you define success for companies that go through the FI program? So I'm assuming that question was related to the Entrepreneur DNA assessment that we had, right? And obviously through the DNA assessment, we boiled down people into a series of metrics. Right, based on their personality traits. And then depending on their success in the program and over time, we then correlated those and we identified the traits that we see, you know, that correlate positively and negatively with entrepreneurship. So within the FI program itself, we were defining success in a couple of different ways. As I mentioned before, every single founder in the program gets rated by a lot of different people every single week of throughout the process, right? So they're rated by the pitches that they're doing, they're rated by their peers and their working groups, and they're also rated by the program leaders, and they're rated by the mentors, right? So for every single FI program, we have this longitudinal rating across every single week. So we could really boil down using that 1 to 5 scale every single week in the program how well they're doing. Then over time, right, after the program in the real world, it gets a little bit more subjective, admittedly, right? But basically, we have a portfolio support team that works with our alumni, and they're in charge of tracking their progress over time. And we then define success, you know, we kind of look at it in windows, right? We'll look at success within sort of a 6-month window to see, okay, who really has that exit velocity that's able to really go quickly. And then we'll look at longer windows, and we'll track that based on things like money raised, team size, revenue, and then obviously in the longer term, things like exits or just building a sustainable business over time, right? But that's how we've, that's how we've done that. So question for Tara, what red flags make you hesitant to admit people into the FI program? There's something that we track, and I'm not the social scientist on staff here, but there's something that we track, and it's, you know, the layman term for it that we use on our test— I know the social scientist is a lot more complicated than this— but the layman's term that we use for it is excuse-making. And when somebody kind of trips up that flag when they're taking our assessment, that is something that our admissions team sees very, very clearly. That, uh, that this person has this propensity to make excuses. Uh, that is something that we have seen very much over time correlate, uh, very negatively with, with getting, uh, an early stage business off the ground. Um, and at least I think, in my opinion, it's, you know, a lot of entrepreneurship is just sort of overcoming a lot of these excuses, right? It's like, oh, it's going to cost too much, or I don't have I don't have the skill set to do this, or I can't do this, or I can't do that, right? It's all these constraints, and good entrepreneurs are the ones that are able to overcome constraints. So, you know, a lot of those constraints, if you look at it in that way, are excuses. So that's, that's one of the biggest flags that we have that we, that we use as a screening process during, during admissions. Okay, so there's a question from Eddie. Eddie was asking, please unpack your view of the opportunities to personalize training and support. Detail what you see can be done and should be done. So let me show you actually. Okay, so it's, it's a general question. Right? But what I'm going to bring up here is an example of a report that we have because I do think entrepreneurship, right, it's not something that's super simple. It's like, okay, well, you need to learn X skill and Y skill and Z skill and you just need to check these boxes, right? At the end of the day, to teach somebody how to be an entrepreneur, you're going to have to help them break through barriers, overcome obstacles, learn to acknowledge failure, right? These are all things that are pretty touchy-feely and that don't come natural and then are not traditionally taught within, within school. So I want to show you guys here, and I'm sorry, I'm just trying to find it real quick, but for every single founder that we have in our programs. And why don't I just bring up— sorry, I was trying to find a PDF, but I'm just going to show you guys the LiveFI platform. How's that? So let me bring this up. To start answering your question, as I bring this up, Eddie, it's not, um, it's not something where it's one-size-fits-all, right? Every founder that comes into our programs, you know, as I was mentioning before, it's not like we look for one archetype. Some of them are going to have certain strengths, some of them are going to have certain weaknesses, and that means that, um, you know, how you coach them to be successful is going to be very different as well, right? So right now I am sharing Okay, so this is the FI platform that you're seeing right now from an administrator's perspective, okay? Now I'm logged in. This is our— it's a demo semester because I didn't want to show you guys real people's personality traits and things right now. That'd be a pretty egregious violation of privacy. So this is a, you know, a theoretical semester, right, for Wakanda where we have people like Bruce Wayne and Lois Lane and and things like that. But this is what our administrators use in the FI program as they're running the program. So at any given time, as they're coaching entrepreneurs throughout the process, right, they could see here— and there's Laura Mipsum here, right, because this is the demo— but at any given time, like, let's say that Dick Grayson is having a really hard time right now overcoming some obstacles, not dealing well with failure, whatever it is, we give our administrators the tools to look very deeply into what it is that they're doing, right? What is, what are the assignments that they're doing? What is the feedback that they're receiving from founders? But the most important thing here is that they're able to look very deeply into this Onspring or DNA assessment, right? And we have these DNA assessments, and this is what is known as the manager's report. All right, so we also have some VCs, some corporations as well who are trying to find intrapreneurs who we provide this data to when they take the test. But this allows you to see this person's entrepreneur profile and it gives you tips, you know, again, all sourced from PhDs and the social science, social scientists that we've worked with over the last 16 15 years, right? It literally gives you tips based on all of their traits, whether it's their positive entrepreneurial traits or their negative entrepreneurial traits, on how to best kind of manage, motivate, and, um, you know, guide, essentially sherpa some of these entrepreneurs through what is inevitably going to be a rocky sometimes very emotional startup and entrepreneurship process, right? So, you know, again, like I said, it's not— every single entrepreneur is different. So it really, you know, each of these, depending on what their scores are, right, we provide these tips to our administrators, to our teachers, essentially, to help coach and to help these people be more successful. So, you know, we've, as you could see, I mean, we brought it down to a very, very granular level. And, you know, it is sort of a radical way of thinking, I think, for a lot of educators. But I personally think that, you know, entrepreneurship is such a different animal than your typical, you know, thing that you need to teach that, you know, that you kind of need that, that level of detail, right? You need to see, OK, you know what, I could put pressure on this person, but they have a low tolerance for pressure. So that's not going to be the best way to motivate them. Right? So I should use other ways to motivate them, use other ways to get them over this hump that they're going through. So that's how we tackle it. And OK, and I think we had one more question. Sorry, now I had because I was sharing my screen, now my windows are jumbled up. Okay, last question was from Colin. What are some of the ways you've been able to get organizations or even entrepreneur support organizations to act more entrepreneurial? So a couple different ways. There are 3 major types of organizations that we work with. We work with corporations, We work with governments and we work with universities. With corporations, typically, we work with them on an intrapreneurship basis. So we use our platform, we use that DNA assessment to find the most entrepreneurial people within their organization. Right? So not just the people that we think that they should help empower through intrapreneurship activities to help them launch internal ventures. But also statistically, you'll see that the most entrepreneurial people in organizations are typically the ones that are the highest probability of churning, right, of leaving. So we help them identify those people, and then we use the FI methodology to basically help them launch ventures and move quickly. So this is something that I do I give talks to intrapreneurs every month. And one thing that I learned, and to be honest with you, I worked at a big company myself for one year in my entire career. Right? So I am very much a startup person. So it took me a little while of working with some of the big companies to really start to to get a good handle on the restrictions that they have, you know, for intrapreneurship. And the one thing that I'll say just really quickly is that it's just as hard, right? Like intrapreneurs at a large corporation have— it's not any easier than it is to be an entrepreneur without the budget and all these things. It's like, it's just a different set of challenges. So we work with them, you know, but again, it's the same concepts. Guys. It's instilling the entrepreneurial mindset, creating systems. This is something within organizations, it's a little bit harder, right? Because a lot of organizations don't look at failure the way that an entrepreneur might, right? So we have to create systems and structures and other types of brands and things like this, other test projects that are at arm's length from the brand of the corporation in order to, to run those types of tests. Right? But that's typically what we do with the corporations is to try to mimic as much as possible how entrepreneurs do it. And, you know, a lot of the bureaucracy is some of the biggest challenges there. Within the government and the university side, a lot of the times when we're working with them, it's with our platform. And as you probably noticed today, when we talk about what the Founder Institute does. It's, it's not a curriculum, it's not a SaaS platform or anything like that. It really is a combination of process, mindset, and environment, right? So if we're able to instill those things for these organizations, whether it's a government doing economic development and, or it's a university, you know, preparing people for a pitch competition, or really just trying to improve their entrepreneurship education outcomes, right? And those are the different things that we do.