Founder Institute Alumni Panel - 1 Feb 2021

Hello everyone and welcome to the Founder Institute Alumni Q&A panel. My name is Ryan Micheletti and I'm Head of Global Operations for the Founder Institute. Today we've got 3 really great alumni who've graduated from different programs around the world to answer your questions. And so for those of you who are not familiar with Founder Institute, we are the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. And we've helped launch over 5,000 alumni companies from the Founder Institute program across 200 cities over the last 11 years. And so if you're interested in learning more about Founder Institute, we're currently enrolling across 6 continents, and you can see a list of those cities at fi.co/enrolling. So for the agenda today, it's pretty straightforward. In a moment, I'll introduce the alumni, And we're really here to answer your questions. We get a lot of requests from people who wanna join the program to either speak with or get introductions to alumni and people who've gone through the program. The problem is that it would take a ton of time to, and they would waste a lot of time of our alumni's precious time to actually answer those questions and speak with you one-on-one. So we decided to start running these Q&A panels so that you can ask it directly. And hear from the alumni themselves. So without further ado, I would love to first introduce Annalise. You are the CMO and co-founder of Kiboo. Do you want to say hi and do a quick introduction of your company?

Yes, first, so Kiboo is a marketplace for the events industry. So basically we are redefining the way events are organized, and after the pandemic we had to reinvent ourselves, and now we are focusing on corporate digital events And we do matchmaking between the event organizers and the event vendors.

Awesome, thank you for joining us today. Next up is Juan José. You are the founder and CEO at Wizdom, and you graduated from F5 Mexico City. Do you want to say hi and do a quick intro on your company?

Absolutely, thank you, Ryan. Well, as you say, I'm Juan José, I'm CEO of Wizdom. Wizdom is a social platform created by community builders for community builders. What that means is if you want to build or grow your digital communities and you care about having participative members and not just passive audiences, and most important, perhaps you are fed up with the broken state of social media right now, hindering democracies and whatnot, we build Wizim exactly for those user cases. That's what we do.

Awesome, and thank you for joining us today. You also went through the Funding Lab program, which I'm sure we'll get a lot of questions about. And last but certainly not least, Anatoly, you're the co-founder of Pact and you're from the Toronto program. Why don't you do a quick introduction?

Hello, hello everyone. Yep, Anatoly here from Pact. We're building an agreement platform, basically the future of dealmaking for SMBs. We're combining a chat platform with a set of dealmaking tools that would help you along the dealmaking process. From negotiating the contract to actually creating it, sharing it back in chat, signing, and then managing your relationship. We believe that agreements are the foundation of our businesses and that currently people are not spending as much attention to their agreement processes. And they're awful. You're all around your email, all of a bunch of tools. It takes a lot of time, pain, you lose customers. We're trying to fix that. And yeah, I've graduated from the Toronto Batch in 2020. And now we're in the funding lab as well.

Awesome. Well, welcome alumni and welcome to everyone in the audience. So just so everyone knows, this is live and we want to get to your questions. So go ahead and put your questions in the chat. And if you haven't already, tell us where you're from. We have programs all over the world and I run a lot of them. So it'd be interesting just to see where people are. And to kick this off, I'm going to ask the question to each of the alumni. Actually two questions into one. The first is, at what stage were you when you began the program and what was the biggest reason you joined? So, and Elise, ladies first, why don't you take a stab at that?

Yeah, sure. Well, when we joined, we were like in a rough MVP mode that we didn't know was called MVP even. But we had already like this idea and we started working with some developers and starting investing our money on the idea. So when we joined, the main reason was because we wanted to go like for real, like, and have all this structure and knowledge about how to building up startup. Because despite that we've been in corporate and different like jobs before and doing a lot of digital marketing, we didn't know anything about like the startup world and how it works. So we wanted to have that that knowledge and experience. And I remember that one thing that Lorena, our director, told me when I was in the call with her. She told me like, this is the, like, make it or break it. Like, you'll know if you have entrepreneurship skills in these 3 months instead of spending maybe 4 years of your life and then end up knowing that you are not built for this. So I think that was the main driver for us.

Awesome. That's great. And so I'll ask Juan José next the same question. You know, where were you like in terms of stage of company when you joined the program and what was one of the main reasons why you joined the program?

Love it. Well, the stage, we were really, really early. We had a purpose, we had an idea, and we had a somewhat successful pilot. And based on that purpose, the idea was to build something, quote unquote, whatever that meant, that allowed people to engage in a digital community around common causes. And the main reason we had to join the program were actually two. The first is that although Wizem was not my first entrepreneurial adventure, it was the first purely technological, and I wanted to be part of an active community of tech-based, impact-driven entrepreneurs that share a global ambition or a global point of view. And the second and maybe most important for me was that when I was doing my research about Founder Institute, I came across several blog posts and interviews and whatnot about the crude and harsh and candid feedback you received in the program. And some of the blog posts even warning, were warnings about the culture of the program. But then I saw this interview with Adeo, when he literally said something like, "Yeah, I know I was blunt. I know I thought the ruthless honesty was good for every entrepreneur, but I've learned through the time that the best way to help entrepreneurs is to understand how they receive the message." So, "How can I ensure," said Adeo in this interview, "that my message gets home or got home?" And that was really one of the main reasons I decided to apply because it's not only about the harsh culture because yeah, the way of the entrepreneur is hard, but it's also the way of the help people. So that change of mindset was really critical for us to join the program.

Yeah, that's a really good point. I'm glad you brought that up. You know, I think that the tough love component is there, but I think the key Part of that is the love part, right? We're there for you and sure it's tough and everyone's kind of been through the wringer, but at the end of the day, we love working with founders like you who are working on big ideas. So that's really great. And, and then, Anatoly, let's go to you. What stage were you at when you began the Toronto program and what was one of the main reasons you joined?

Great, thank you. Well, we already had a demo product and we were past our like Lean Canvas, business model development, all of that. You know, we had like all the folders and folders of information. And we were like, do we really need to go through a FI? Like really? It was mid-2020. It was just when COVID was at its worst. And we were assessing the opportunity to network and keep connecting with people and getting feedback and getting access to, you know, the tech ecosystem. And part of our reasoning was that Sunil, our director, he is quite established here in Toronto. And I personally trusted him back at that point of time. And I thought that it's great that one of the managing directors for Techstars here for Canada is leading FI as well. And that was a big sign for us. And our main idea was to keep the momentum going and keep networking with people, getting feedback, iterating and upgrading everything we had. And I would say it was totally worth it. We were hesitating, would we get enough value, right? Like, is it like just like a program where they just teach you something and then it ends somehow? Well, no, it's a continuous process with access to a bunch of people and even panels like this, you know, like you wouldn't have got that other way. So I think our main idea was to shift from the demo product to actually having some traction and we got that.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a really good point as well. You know, we had our graduation recently for the Silicon Valley program that I run with Mike Supravici. And one of the founders was just saying, like, talking about the value of F5 versus other accelerators and obviously it was positive feedback. I don't wanna put words in anyone's mouth, but what have you noticed, like, if you've gone through another program or done some other kind of accelerator, some of the pros and cons of doing Founder Institute versus like, let's say, more traditional accelerator?

Well, I'll jump in. In my opinion, Founder Institute was the first accelerator program we went in, and then we went into another one in Spain, and it was very different in terms of the demands, like the level of, yeah, of the deliverables you had to make every week. And how they push you. I think in Founder Institute that is very hard, and starting by the fact that from almost 40 groups or companies that we started in the program, only 5 got to graduate in the end. So it's very competitive and it takes you like to the limit, and yeah, it takes a very special kind of people to get it to the end. I have some friends that they didn't make it through the fourth week and then they repeated in the next one and now they they finished it. So also I think it's for you to be prepared for that kind of, yeah, like harsh feedback and harsh love, as you were saying. And yeah, in the other program, it was more about having tons of interviews with mentors and you like repeating your pitch over and over and over again, which also it's helpful, but it's a very different kind of accelerator.

Any other comments from Anatoly or Juan José? Sure.

For me, the main differentiator could be the combination of this action bias that the Founder Institute has, that is amazing. It's okay, yeah, you're gonna talk with mentors and you're gonna have feedback, but where are your progress? No, you have to be working on your product, on your startup. And that's amazing. But that combined with Let me say this: love for the impact and love for the entrepreneurs by the mentors. For example, you talk about Mike Suprovici. So Mike is amazing. Mike is always there for giving the best advice in the best moment for the entrepreneur. And that combination is great because it can be harsh advice. It can be really tough to hear, but it's objective and it's from the heart. So for me, that combination with Action bias is one of the great differentiators for the program.

Awesome. Anything else?

Yeah, yeah, I also had a quick comment. So how most other programs are structured is that they in a way have just like the curriculum and you study it and then you maybe even have some deliverables, but that's it. At FI, the, the whole focus on the communities and your working groups and merging and colliding and, you know, pitching ideas back and forth to your other fellow founders that you participate in, which is divided in like working groups. So you're bundled into working groups and then you are working together with them, building up relationships like friendships and getting some really good feedback. I like that component a lot. And then another thing is that if you think startups are tough, like if you're like working on a real startup, it's Formula One of business pretty much, right? Like you have to know why you're going there. If you have a regular mom-and-pop shop and you think it's a startup, then probably that wouldn't be the best fit, right? Because it's not as scalable, you'd have a lot of roadblocks and it would just be challenging. If you exactly know that, okay, you could grow this idea to something really big, then you use Founder Institute as this rocket, right? So like, I like the sequence steps involved in the process. So first of all, you jump in, you kind of prepare the background, and then you propel off working with customers, getting traction, and then you have an opportunity to get to Funding Lab, actually raise something and get introductions. And then after Funding Lab, you could sell to all of the network if you have something that the network is interested in, if you're not very too niche. And you could basically provide back to the community as well, And then it's all just like a big vortex of events happening around. So that's the thing I like.

Awesome. Thanks, Anatoly. So we've got a lot of really good questions here. So I'm just going to start going down the list. So Philip, you've got a question for Ana and Juan. What were some of your team challenges during the accelerator program?

Well, on our side, I would say that working as a team, even though it was only me and my co-founder, we tried to manage the tasks and the things we had to do for the Founder Institute, but also for our startup at the same time. I think keeping the pace up with this was hard and also Because during the process of the acceleration program, we bumped into the wall like 5 times. We thought like, oh, now we have it, this is it. And then we went out to validate and it wasn't it. So we had to go back and then you start over, but then you are already some weeks along in the material and in the course. So you have to keep up with that and then do it everything again, but at the same time, and then at the same time operate your startup. I think that was very demanding and it pushed us to our limits, even to some point my co-founder said like, I don't want to do this anymore. Like not Founder Institute and not the startup, please. Like, yeah, we're not going anywhere. We're just going in circles. This is not working. We're not going to get nowhere. So it took a lot like to work together and like say, okay, let's look things from different points of view. We have these that is working. Let's focus on that. And then we just set up, like, after we finished the program, I told him like, hey, like, we were on the last 5, we have a chance, we have to believe in what we're doing. And we set up like, if in 3 months we don't see actual, like, traction or something happening, then we will leave it as it is. And well, thankfully, like now, more than 1 year after, we are still here, we raised some funds. So we can still go on with our startup. But yeah, I think like the personal and professional demands that it takes, and I think it's no different from running a real startup. So it's a very, uh, breath of reality that you face and you get to test yourself in different things.

Definitely. What about you, Juan José?

I must agree with almost everything that Ana just said. I would add two things. The first is really personal. I'm a business dad, I'm married, I have kids. If you hear 101 Dalmatians, it's because my kids are watching that. But I'm also really, really passionate about businesses. So the balance between life and work and startups and traction and whatnot and be here for my health or my family? It's a really tough challenge at least for me. That was one of the challenges on the program and both programs— Founder Institute and The Foundry Lab. And the second is more appropriate by the program is how we process the feedback we received because sometimes you receive really awful feedback by a really rude person but it's really good feedback. So you have to go beyond the fashion of the feedback and process what he's telling you. And other times you have a great mentor with great tact and with great respect for the founders and he gives you really bad advice and you have to go beyond the niceties and say, "Okay, yeah, thank you for your feedback, but it really sucked for what we are building." So that was really challenging because you are under stress of building something and listening a lot of opinions on your product. And you have to calibrate how you identify and understand what is being told to you.

Yeah, we get that a lot, right? You're gonna get feedback from so many different people in so many different ways that not everyone is right. And you as the executive, you have to synthesize that information and then make the call and head off in that direction. So really great point. And Anatoly, I'll ask you this because it's kind of related. This comes from Andrew Scott. How did you organize the rest of your startup team to support you while you were going through the program? Because you had a team of a couple people that weren't actually enrolled in the program, right?

Yeah, exactly. So me being the CEO and just mainly talking with people and investors and being involved in the fundraising process, We decided that I would go with the program and be doing most of it. Probably one person is fully capable of bearing the hardships and, you know, the hell weeks that you have, the sprints. Pretty much if you're just, you know, endurant enough business-wise overall, you'll get through it. It's just like your willpower and a good product and keep listening to feedback and upgrading and you'll make it. I had to have two other co-founders and they were partially jumping in and helping me with assignments when it was touching upon their areas of experience. So I have a lawyer who is our legal tech kind of co-founder. He helped me with more of the legal stuff and actually helped me incorporate and do all of the other things that we needed for the business. And the tech guy, the CTO, and co-founder, he also helped us out more on the technical side and with like a landing page twist when we were testing our advertising efforts during the program. So typically you're like structuring it as, I wouldn't say that, you shouldn't treat probably FI as like the program program that you're like just learning. I was trying to apply everything and just like each section was applicable to all different areas of your business. So what I was trying to do is to blend the reality together kind of and like grow the startup and do the project together. And in that way, it kind of worked out well. So, so have your co-founders as a backup to help you with assignments if you cannot do that. Have any other team members participate in the smaller tasks. Pretty much Founding Lab is like, Founders Institute is like a map and then you plan however you're planning your team to operate as if it was was a launched business.

Awesome, great advice. A couple questions here. So this comes from Arian from Hong Kong. This question is about mentors, and it's sort of like related to HQ a little bit, but does the program encourage you to reach out to your network globally? So let's start with that. There's actually two parts to that. Any, any takers?

Um, yep, I can go. Personally, I have a very good experience with mentors, not only during the program and the ones that are presented to us at the— at that moment, but also afterwards. They push you a lot into going and talk to other mentors, even out from the network of Founder Institute. But when you say like, hey, I'm doing this program and I have to talk to mentors, they normally will do it very kindly. But also when we went to the accelerator in Spain, after being in Spain, we were going to Lisbon and the UK and Paris. And I proactively started getting in touch with mentors from other Founder Institute cohorts in different countries. And we had very good response. We had meetings, like a lot of meetings with them in each city where we were. So we were trying to do an overview of if it made sense to scale into a European country, and that helped us a lot to have that overview. So yeah, answering to the question, I think it's, it's very clear that you have to go after them. They are not gonna come to you offering their help, but if you get in touch only on LinkedIn, even you can get a lot of doors opening.

I had a funny story about this actually. So, um, there was a lady, um, I was doing my research as part of the FI assignment to like find mentors and advisors and like strengthen up the advisory board. I was doing some research to find, uh, a legal tech, additional legal tech advisor. And I found a lady, uh, her name is Mariam. Um, she, she is wonderful and she is on our advisory board right now. I got in touch with her, we've chatted quickly. And then she's like, yeah, I'm actually a mentor for Refi, if I'm not mistaken. She just started, you know, she just started being a mentor, but I reached out before and it all ended up finally that like she became our advisor and I made her participate more as the mentor because she actually got into it and I explained a few things and then she understood it and then she was a little bit more active. So, and I reached out myself. She was located in the US. I'm located in Canada, in Toronto. And I was reaching out to a bunch of other San Francisco-based and like all around US and even in the UK and South Africa. Basically FII made me reach out to people all around the world. And yeah, you do that a lot and it works sometimes and you're lucky when it works and you're happy.

Juan Jose, from a Funding Lab perspective, 'cause for those of you who are new to FII, we have our core program, our accelerator that's run in all these different cities, but when you graduate, you could then can join Funding Lab Funding Lab, which is an accelerator program solely dedicated to fundraising. And so that's free for all of our alumni. We just wanna help you fundraise 'cause that will benefit the network. So Juan Jose, maybe you wanna talk a little bit about mentors and the network that you experienced from a Funding Lab perspective? Sure, sure.

Let me start with a quick story or a quick anecdote on that. One of the assignments on the Founder Lab was to reach out to mentors to help us understand our weaknesses. And the next week, you know, I had a special assignment that is an extra push by Mike, by the program director, that asked me to raise the bar and go pitch to about 20-something people. It went well, but one people of that pitching sprint was one mentor. I once wrote to him and he gave me his advice and whatnot. After the pitching and after the mentorship, he's no longer a mentor. He's now a friend. And that has been really amazing. And I think that's one of the core values of this relationship with mentors in the Founder Lab. Because you are right now not only building upon an idea, you're right now building your company and raising funds and pursuing very specific objectives. And on that, you are almost on the same arena of some of your mentors. So the pain is the same, the gain is the same. So the friendship is really amazing. But being said that, the global network of advisors and mentors, I believe shouldn't be called network. It should be called family because you won't gonna get well with all of them, obviously, but you are family. And if you can help each other, that's what you experience on Foundry Institute and that's been really, really amazing. Again, I agree with Annalise. They ain't gonna reach you. You have to go and knock and send an email and say, "Hey, do you remember me? I just wrote you 2 days ago. Please don't forget about me." But they are there for you. So it's amazing.

That's great. And yeah, I mean, I always use the example, you know, we'll give you the global platform, but you gotta go out and do the work and hustle. And, you know, if you think we're just gonna introduce you to like Marc Andreessen or whatever, right? Like, it's not gonna happen. You gotta prove yourself and you gotta go out and do the work. And we're sort of like a force multiplier because we'll know people in different markets or we'll be able to give you advice and help you for the entire life of your company. I mean, Juan José, when did you graduate your program?

From Founder Institute in spring 2019 and Founder Lab just in December.

Almost 2 years ago, right? So we're still helping you. And Anatoly, you were kind of over the summer. In Ana Luisa, I think it was like last year or maybe a year and a half now. So even though the program's 3 months long, we're there to help the company for the rest of its life. And, you know, frankly, it's because, you know, not only do we care about founders, but there's a financial incentive through the Equity Collective to do so. You know, we're not gonna win and we're not gonna, you know, impact the world unless we help create really strong companies. And so our goal is to take the network and arrange it in a way and help line it up to help founders succeed. So the kind of second part of this question is kind of geared more towards someone from HQ, so I'll just answer it directly. So, Arian, you asked, our founding team is in California, which is true. How do we and our international network of mentors commit time with founders from Asia? So to give you an idea, we have 20,000 mentors all around the world who have mentored in various capacities. Office hours, doing program sessions, doing public events with us. And then every single city in each chapter sort of has its own subset of mentors, because prior to COVID-19, everything was in person. So we would have, you know, 100+ mentors in Hong Kong that are physically located there that were helping the founders in the Hong Kong program, for example, since that's where you're from. And so the core accelerator program itself you're mainly going to be dealing with people who are local to you, meaning mentors from Hong Kong. When you graduate the program, that then unlocks the Silicon Valley support. So the things like Funding Lab or Product Market Fit Lab, which are free programs for our alumni. You have a search the mentor network tool where you can search the, the entire FI mentor network based on like keyword or region. So if you're looking for someone in legal tech, you could type in legal tech. Or I saw a question around like chemical synthesis, right? You could look at that and see like what mentors have that in their LinkedIn, which is pretty helpful. And so, you know, at the end of the day, especially when you're first launching your company, it's really important to meet people locally because it's not just about business advice, it's about relationships. Because those mentors could potentially become your advisors, your investors, or certainly introduce you to some that they know. And so the more— the earlier stage your company is, the closer you're going to want to be with your mentors physically, because that's where they're going to be able to add the most value. But then you also have this sort of global network, or as Juan Jose mentioned, family that can help you if you were to, let's say, move to San Francisco and you need like a landing zone in San Francisco of mentors and people to help. So hopefully that answers your question. If you want, you can put another one in the chat. And sort of a follow-on, I see another question here from you. Are FI companies open to testing out prototypes? Yes. In fact, you'll be working with a lot of people in the program, and I'm sure you'll be sharing prototypes and, you know, working with each other on the various aspects of the company. So let's go on. So it looks like Rizka, you asked, is it possible to keep in touch with your mentors after you graduate the program? Yes, but I'll let the alumni chime in. So Anatoly, are you still talking with mentors even though you graduated last year?

Yeah, I owe so many beers to people now that I couldn't even count. It's like because of the lockdown, I cannot properly compensate them with a proper pinta or two, but Definitely, we're in touch. As I'm right now going through the Funding Lab, like the second iteration, the second process after the main Founders Institute program, they are becoming our connectors, basically people who would connect you to potential investors. And that's essential and critical in the fundraising process. Moreover, they're providing a bunch of feedback on the pitch decks and then like overall Yeah, so we're in touch. It stays, it sticks, and then you keep kind of building relationships with people. It just expands actually. It's like the good thing is it actually expands.

Another question here from Andrew Scott about mentors is, were the mentors from the same industries as the founders, or is it a mix of those who were and those who had startup experience in other industries? Oh, I can quickly answer that, but it's mentors from many different industries because we're sort of industry agnostic in terms of the core program. We have mentors from all over, and the key is like when we look for mentors, and usually it's our director teams that recruit mentors for their own programs, you know, these mentors are people with startup experience. So whether it's a successful exit or they raise capital or they've built a company, they have that sort of like startup high growth experience. We try to avoid consultants and professors and people who haven't launched a startup because there's just things, you know, as a founder that are more tactical and more operational and less theoretical. And so that's sort of the key thing that we look for when we're building out our mentor network in these different cities. But we do have vertical programs. So we've got a food tech program in Helsinki, we have an AI program in Pittsburgh, And all of those mentors that are sort of specialists, you'll be able to use the search the network tool to kind of find them. So regardless of what industry you're in, we usually have, you know, hundreds of mentors or people within the network who have expertise in that, in that area. So let's keep going to another question here. So this comes from Alan, and this is just kind of about entrepreneurship in general. How do you evaluate your idea and how many ideas have you gone through before you've landed product-market fit? So we'll start with that. There's a follow-on question, but how did you evaluate your idea going into the program?

Well, maybe I can start with this one. There are two questions so far. How many ideas we had and how do we evaluate ideas? How many ideas we had? I don't know. We had tons of ideas. Let me— maybe a tune-ish approximation is one idea per week because the speed of pivoting, the speed of feedback is so freaking crazy that you have to be on the spot tweaking your idea. For us, one of our main learnings on the program was that evaluating an idea is really easy. Anybody can evaluate an idea. The main thing is how the market evaluates your idea and more importantly, how the market evaluates your product. Whatever if it is a prototype or an MVP or a beta or your final product. That's how do I, at least, and our company evaluate the idea when we have a new idea, for example, is how the market responds to that idea and if that aligns to our main purpose. For us, the core thing is the purpose, and after the purpose comes the market, and after the market comes the idea.

That's great. Anatoly or Annalise, do you have anything else to add around startup ideas?

Well, I just say that, yeah, it's tons of ideas. And in the program that I was, we had some people coming in without any idea at all. And they just started like doing this idea validation through the program. So for example, ourselves, we started with this idea of being like the Airbnb of the event venues. And throughout the program, we went through different models. We went then to see to be like booking.com, but for all events. And then we identified another problem and we started thinking about being a fintech for the event industry where we would like give loans to the big agencies that have to wait months for companies to pay them. So lots of ideas and you have to be prepared to be flexible and to be open to the feedback from the customers. I think that's the main topic to address because on Founder Institute they push you a lot to do like real interviews with real customers. And sometimes you are scared because you don't have the product ready and you say like, what am I gonna present? Or how am I gonna sell this, which is only in my head? But it's very useful because like, if you go around and tell your parents or your friends like, hey, I have this idea, most of them will tell you like, oh yeah, it's great, it's gonna be very successful. I would pay for it, yes, of course. But then it's only when you face like real clients, it's when you see the reality and you start seeing all the gaps in your idea that everybody thinks is very perfect around you. And then one question is enough from the client for you to realize that it's not that great idea or you are not really solving a problem. So yeah, you have to be ready for that and to be very positive and take the feedback and say like, okay, It's like, there's this quote that they use a lot in Founder Institute, which is fail fast. So it's better if you go into a client's interview thinking like, okay, please tell me that I'm doing it wrong. So I know that this is not the path and I can go and try the next one and the next one and the next one because there are lots of roads to test and you won't do them all if you don't do one by one. So I think yes, about the dates, Validation is a lot. And then also like pivoting. I would say that we changed business models like 5 times in 1 year, like big, big business models, not just like iterations. And it's also like the fastest you do it, the cheaper it would be and the less resources it will take from you. And yeah, so you need a lot of ideas. You need to be very creative. And also you can take the ideas from the clients themselves. No, you don't have to come up with all the ideas. Ideas, you just have to have your eyes wide open and listen carefully to what they are trying to tell you because most of the time they will tell you like, this is what I want. And sometimes you are so bonded to your idea that you are like, no, no, no, but I want it to be like this. But the client is telling you what he's willing to pay for. And I think that is where, when you find like the idea is gonna resonate because they are willing to pay for it.

To provide a—

Go ahead, Anatoly.

Yeah, to provide a little bit of like polarity of thought here. We haven't been changing at all, like the idea, the main topic. We had a slightly different experience. Firstly, because we had a demo already developed and we had like a bunch of conversations beforehand. And it was a pain for us in the early days, indeed, when we were just explaining what we're doing. Or first we were saying that we're building like a chat app for businesses, which no one got and only like the few people who are actually in the thing actually got it. Then I read a book of April Dunford's book about positioning, April Dunford. So it's really nice. We've changed the verbiage a little bit and I came up with this concept of the agreement platform and there were no agreement platforms existing. So it was a pain for me to explain it and like formulate it and draw this like paint point and actually formulate everything. That's what— what if I helped you to come up with— but we actually weren't changing it. We were fixing smaller things and like addressing smaller kind of gaps or like, like, you know, thinking mistakes or like issues that we didn't have thought of through. But overall, we went in with an idea and we came out with the same idea, but like with all of the background developed that we needed for it to be developed. Typically I would recommend you having like the top 3 ideas in your mind and just like pick like the top one that you love most and that you're most passionate with. And then try stick with it. And then like iterate, as Anna said, like keep updating it, keep listening to the feedback from the mentors, from, from customers. And that's how you build a product. If you don't have anything, right? Like if you're just coming in fresh with just like a desire to be an entrepreneur, then you have to do a lot of interviews and actually find that pain point. But if you do have something and it's truly innovative and people are like breaking down in like 40-60, where 40 saying it's cool, 60 says like, I don't get it, what it is. You're probably onto something, keep struggling through it and you'll get somewhere. Like if you have someone who actually buys into it, just grab into it and just like struggle through and just, you know, make it happen. Yeah. That's my experience.

Yeah, that, that passion part is, is probably the most important component as well, right? So Alan, for you, you know, if you don't love the idea, if you don't love what you're doing, then you shouldn't do it because the struggle is real. And as soon as things get really hard, if you don't have that passion or that fire that's going to like keep you working through the night and really motivate you when times are tough, then, you know, you're gonna eventually stop working on your company or even worse, resent it and not want to do it anymore. And so really, like, you know, if you're evaluating different ideas, go with, you know, what do you love the most? What are you most passionate about? Because that's going to be the fuel that will help you on your ascent and really keep it a fun project that you're passionate about. And kind of along that note, there's a question here. It's like, How would— and this is kind of less about the program but just entrepreneurship in general— but could you share how you managed feeling down either during the program or just through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship? Like, what has kept you working hard on your project even though it's a little bit of an emotional roller coaster?

Yes, absolutely. I think you couldn't describe it better because when everything is going good, when you have great feedback, you are here, and then like in 2 hours you can be here because you had a mentor's feedback saying like your idea sucks and it's never gonna happen. So you have to learn to deal with frustration and take the strength from your passion, as you were mentioning. And also I think it's very useful to see around in your group of other founders that everybody is in the same boat and everybody's going through the same that you are not alone, that you are not the only one that had to pivot the idea or the only one that, I don't know, hasn't had the validation enough to move forward. So I think that when you see that your teammates are doing some improvements and it's working for them, then you feel like, okay, it can also work for me. And you see, yeah, the results in the end as a group and how everybody can learn from the other ones and Yeah, just feeling that you're not alone because I think if there's people in the audience that have never been in entrepreneurship, they need to know that they are going into a very lonely path where people around you that have their normal 9-to-5 jobs and their friends and family that don't know about this startup life, they won't understand. Sometimes they can tell you like you're crazy for doing that, you should have stick to your corporate job and like you're leaving everything behind just for a dream that you're never gonna get. You have to like get strength from the other teammates that are doing the same as you and going through the same things and that will understand why you are doing that. So I think, yeah, the accompaniment from the other founders, the mentors, the directors from the programs was That's very important for us to be able to cope with those moments.

Yeah, that peer support is really, really important, especially because you're doing something that's kind of unconventional. I had a founder who graduated our program recently. He's from Nashville, and Nashville is actually, you know, a burgeoning startup hub. And he was just saying that like the people in the ecosystem, you know, he just wasn't getting that response. Like he was doing this like kind of very bold idea. And most people that he was speaking with, you know, even the startup community there, they just weren't at the same level of like trying to like change the world and have these big ideas. And so by surrounding yourself with like-minded people, it not only makes the journey more fun, but also more bearable because as you said, it can be pretty tough at times. Juan José or Anatoly, is there anything you'd like to add to that?

Sure, maybe In addition to community and peer support, I would say look after your health, your physical and mental health on a daily basis. It's exercise, take a walk, use a mask, whatever, I don't know. And I have two, let me call them mindsets that helped me through the bad times because going through the good times is really nice, but it's when you see the falling on the roller coaster, you say, 'Oh shit, why did I decide to write this, this right?' The first mindset is have hope, no? And hope is not an illusion of something good is around the corner. For me, hope is, okay, you are in the dark spot of your existence, don't worry, no? It's what is coming is not yet here, and the 'yet' part is key. You have to stay waiting for something. And waiting, not sit down, but working on that. So okay, let's have hope that this idea that I love, this passion I have, this bold drive that moves me forward is not yet to give me results, but it's not yet, not now, no, absolutely. And the second mindset is that entrepreneurship and especially startup entrepreneurship journey is something like an abyss. You won't see never the end of the abyss. You will be feeling the adrenaline when you are falling through the abyss. But quoting Victor Hugo by Les Misérables, he said, okay, yeah, you have to jump to the abyss, but there are abysses that save your soul. So if you really are passionate about the impact you are building to the world, So don't worry, no, maybe it's not yet here, the result, but this abyss is a doorway to, quote unquote, salvation for this drive you have for your life.

Love it. That's great. Anatoly, anything from you?

Yeah, it's not as philosophical as Juan's, probably I can't beat that. But with all the respect to the sprints and to basically failing fast and, you know, keep iterating on the product and like keep it fast, keep it fast, do the sprints, do the sprints. In the end of the day, building a company is a marathon. And I'd like everyone to, to be honest, to think about it that way. Although you have a bunch of small sprints, if you kind of aggregate them together, it's still, you're long running the long way. Right. I used to hate running and jogging. And during BFI, I kind of got into the habit of running. And especially when I was just like done for the day, I'm like burnt out, like, you know, eyes are dying. I can't even like see. I'm like, okay, I'm running. And when I'm running, I have a bunch of crazy negative ideas first, and then it kind of settles and then you get, okay, but it's not that bad. Okay. I still have something. 'Ah, that person was responsive and then okay, I can build on that and this,' and you structure your ideas while you're running. So basically having that physical activity indeed did help and because I was running long, it did feel like the marathon and I was drawing parallels together. So that helped big time. And I think that's the most single big important thing during the FI that I had.

Yeah, that's a good point. And I'm going to tie this into the next question here around like leaving your job and like at what point did you leave your job. But, you know, part of that, I remember when I first launched my first startup, I was like a starving entrepreneur for 4 years and it was just like really, really tough. And, you know, at the end of the day, I look back and I'm like, oh, I'm really glad I persevered through that. But You know, if you, you want to make sure that before you even like come to the table that you're in a comfortable place. So make sure you don't have like just tons of student debt, make sure that you have some savings built up. Because what will happen is if you don't have the bandwidth, right, to properly launch the company, you'll start to resent it and you're going to start feeling more helpless and more hopeless. So make sure you come to the table with a little bit of an infrastructure. And that's going to make a huge difference just mentally and just kind of accepting the fact that you, you know, while it's nice to think, oh, you know, this time next year I'm going to have, you know, half a million dollars of money raised in the bank, like, things take a lot longer than you might think. And it's important that you kind of have that realistic expectation of what you're really getting into. Because if you know that it's a marathon and not a sprint, then you're not just gonna, you know, go and run the first like 5 miles and then quit. You know that you need to hang on for the entire marathon. So a question here, um, from Sepeda is, at what point did you leave your job, and does FI mean that you have to leave your job? Did anyone come into the program with a full-time job?

Yeah, myself. Yeah, I came into the program with 1.5 full-time jobs. I was working in my previous venture, and on that venture we just closed a deal with a big financial company here in Mexico to build their innovation system, our innovation vertical on the company. It was amazing, it was really fun. And I was working on that at the same time we were starting Founder Institute. And the question was really pressuring me. When should I quit my previous startup? When should I tell these financial people, "Hey, what would you know, I'm leaving you." But something, and let me go back to the mentor question, one mentor told me really helped me. He told me, "Hey, don't worry about that. You will have to leave your work or your current job when your new startup asks you to do so. So don't worry. The startups are like small kids. When they need something, they ask for it and they yell for it. You're gonna be aware when you need to leave your job." That took pressure out of my shoulders and really helped me to decide to leave my job around 2 weeks after finishing the program.

That's great. And, you know, just to kind of add to that, you don't have to leave your job to join FI, or even when you graduate FI. That's not a requirement. You know, will freeing up 40 hours of work a week help you and help your startup grow? Absolutely. I mean, I've seen founders who quit their job and then their startup growth just goes like this. And it's just because it's just a factor of putting time into it, but not everyone's ready when the program ends, and that's okay. You know, it could take a couple months, could take a year, but I will say this, like, you know, though you get a lot of momentum in the program and you want to make sure that you keep that momentum going when you graduate. And there's ways that we help, you know, your peer group will help, but we can talk more about that later. So for Anatoly or Anneliese, Did you come into the program with a full-time job, or at what point did you decide to leave your job?

Yes, well, we did the program together, my co-founder and I, as I mentioned before. So he was full-time into Kibo, and I was working for a fintech startup as CMO. So it was very, um, it was just like in the 4-5 weeks that I realized that if we wanted to be serious about this and if we really believed in our startup, then I should go full-time. So yeah, at some point on the program they told us like, how would you expect an investor to believe in your project if you are not believing and investing in it as it should, no? Because if you are the one behind it, the only way it's going to work is if you are 100% focused on this. So as you mentioned, it's not mandatory, but Yeah, we thought it was best and now I realize that it had to be done that way.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Go ahead, Anatoly.

Yeah, well, I jumped in being full-time working on this project because like in probably in January 2020, I got laid off because I was working on a contract with the bank in AML and they were shrinking their ML and I was a contractor, not a full-time guy, so like I got like chopped. So I'm an immigrant to Canada, so I'm not like a citizen, I don't have like my mom's and my dad's and everyone, the relatives are back home in Ukraine. So it was challenging a little bit, but I could just say this, that building life is challenging. So I mean, like anything is challenging, right? Like, yeah, you have to have a separate probably cash stream while you're working on the startup until it generates money, right? So if you're working for a long time to build it up, think of like a smart creative way of how you could like consult someone on the side or like how could you do some extra work with your startup, something less scalable probably, right? Like something you're doing legal tech, you have a lawyer, okay, provide some legal services if he's licensed to do so. You know, like come up with some creative ways of generating money so that you're not dependent. Think creatively, right? And if you'd have an additional small revenue stream that could pay your bills, your food and everything else, you are then like self-sufficient and autonomous and you could allocate all of your free time to the fun stuff and building your startup. That's probably the best way because I'll reveal a secret. After you get funding, you don't issue yourself the largest salary in the world. Probably you don't issue anything and you keep struggling even with like half a million or a million in your bank account because you need to hire this guy, that guy, a bunch of marketing spend, some additional research, and then you're like, oh, but where's my money? I don't have anything, right? That's right. That's how you build a startup. So they still need some extra resource, right?

Yeah, that's awesome. And yeah, having that kind of reality check is always good. So I know we're almost out of time here, so I usually wrap up with one last question to each of the alumni. So let's start with you, Annalise. What tips would you give someone to be successful in the Founder Institute?

Ah, that's an interesting one, huh? Because I think that being open to feedback and everything you learn, even though if it goes against like the things you've already built, but just be open to it. It doesn't mean you have to change everything because they say so. But to create your own criteria about it and also collaborate a lot with the teams and the mentors because it's where you get the most, yeah, the most rich feedback and you can see that another founder is having the same problem that you have in a different industry or whatever, but you can, yeah, you can get a lot of feedback from there and also learn from their mistakes as well. So I think that and be prepared to invest a lot of time, effort, even crying sometimes, like when you feel that you don't want to go anymore, but you have to do it because you believe in your project. So yeah, it takes a lot of effort and personal time as well because you have to be prepared to stop going to parties on weekends because you have to do validation and talk to mentors and redo the homework, as I said, like, and it's not really homework because it's, you're working on your own project. So it's more about like, yeah, just dedicating full time for 3 months. And if you believe that your idea, it's worth it, then you, you should definitely pursue it. And I think the Founder Institute is a great way to know in, as I've mentioned since the beginning, like if you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur and to lead a startup into other territories, then you should definitely do it.

So Anatoly, same question. What tips would you give someone to be successful in the Founder Institute?

Ana Liz did a great job. I do have a few, just maybe a few points of adding. Have the big picture, the big game in your mind. Just know where you're going, just like feel it and just stick to it as your like light in the end of the tunnel. Be grateful for the struggle. So like just, it's you building your business. So whatever homework you're doing, whatever kind of feedback you get, whatever like comments you get helps you build stronger business. And building a business is probably not for everyone. Although you could do, you could be like a good co-founder, but like if you're the main person running the business, it's a constant 24/7 struggle and you have to be in a proper mindset and you have to be able to endure, which leads to my third kind of point. Just persevere, endure, and keep pushing. Like just keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing and then you'll, you'll Maybe you'll get there and you have to be ready to maybe get there, but that's why you have to keep on and hold on to the big idea and like how you want to change this whole thing. That's pretty much it.

Awesome. And Juan José, last but not least, any tips for founders who are looking to join the program?

Absolutely. Well, giving tips after Anatoly and Ana is really hard, but I would have 5 main tips that work also for me. Maybe the first is give first. You are not entitled to anything. Just give first. The second tip is pivot everything. Pivot everything except your vision and your purpose. The third would be maybe stay open. A lightning could strike. And what I mean by that is opportunities are usually ugly and your status quo as a founder is usually really sexy appealing. The fourth may be perhaps focus only on three things: talk to customers, build the product, and stay healthy and mentally sane. The rest is just noise. Quoting some experts out there. And the fifth tip maybe could be, yeah, if someone tells you that something is not working with your startup or your product, believe them. But if they told you how to fix it, do not believe them. So that would be my tips for the founders. I love it.

That's awesome. So, well, I want to thank you, Juan José and Anatoly and Annalise, for joining us today. For founders in the audience, you're gonna get a copy of this webinar over the next few days, so thank you for joining us as well. And thank you to Felicia in the background who's been producing the event. I really appreciate everyone's time and we look forward to answering your questions. If you ever have any questions, you can always just reply back to one of the emails we've sent you and someone from our team will pick it up and be able to speak with you. So thank you again, alumni, and I look forward to continue to help you with your companies.

No, thank you, Ryan, and thank you, founders.

Thank you, thank you for the space. I hope this was useful.

Thanks for having us today. Have a great evening ahead.

Pleasure. Thanks everyone.

Stay safe.