Founder Institute Global Information Session (April 22nd Online Event)

Hey everybody, welcome to this Founder Institute global online information session. My name is Jonathan Gritchen. I'm a co-founder of the Founder Institute. I know that we have people scheduled to join here from, from all over the world. So please, if at any time, all right, during these webinars, really the value is that we can answer your questions. Okay? You can go find a video about the Founder Institute, right? That's not going to be the unique part of this event. The unique part is that I'm going to be here and I want to hear your questions and I want to answer your questions. All right? So at any time, please don't be shy, throw your questions into the chat. You can see that we have somebody in the chat room right now who's going to be taking those questions, feeding them to me, and I'll even say hello, everybody. So yeah, I want to hear your questions, all right? And the way that this event's gonna work is I'm going to go through a presentation first that'll bring you through sort of the A to the Z of how Founder Institute works, the methodology, et cetera. That presentation should take 15, 20 minutes. But again, after that, I want to answer your questions. All right, so at any time you have questions, throw them into the chat, and I'm excited to hear them. Alright, so with that being said, I'm going to share my presentation now and we will get started. Alright, let me just fire this up. And here we go. Alright, so, um, welcome to this Founder Institute information session. So the Founder Institute is the world's largest pre-seed accelerator. So as you might expect, we have some pretty large metrics from around the globe. We're in a lot of cities, we have a lot of mentors, and a lot of portfolio companies have created a good amount of value. And the company was established in 2009 in Silicon Valley, and basically we were using a small unused classroom at Stanford University when we first started the first cohort. We really didn't have a plan to go global or anything like that. We just, we just put a program together pretty quickly, it resonated really well, and then we started getting inbound demand to bring it to different cities, and we just started to roll out naturally along the way. And we started the program back in 2009, and, you know, the mission hasn't changed. We believe that entrepreneurs can create a real impact on society, but we believe that most startups are going to fail because of the lack of expert feedback and a lack of focus, especially in these early stages. So we created the program to help pre-seed founders and entrepreneurs get to traction and funding, which we have seem to sort of be the two biggest roadblocks in the beginning for any small company. And we help you do that through a devoted support network and a structured growth process. So I said there we were launched in 2009. So let's, let's talk about 2009 for a moment. This was right in the middle of what was known as the Great Recession, the housing crash, whatever you want to call it. And unfortunately, if you look at this chart, it's probably going to ring pretty familiar to what's going on, the terrible things that are going on in the global economy and just in our society today. We were actually founded in April of 2009. If you look at this chart, we're sort of like right there at the very bottom is when the Founder Institute was founded. I just want to be clear about some things. I don't want to come off as insensitive at all during this presentation. right? A lot of people right now are losing their jobs. A lot of people are losing their life savings. A lot of people are dying, right? Um, and you know, but on this webinar, I want to focus on the silver linings, right? Uh, if you want to focus on the negatives, just go, go to CNN, go, uh, fire up your TV right there. There's no shortage of that, but I want to look at the silver linings. And if you're going to find a silver lining with all of the devastation that's going on in the world right now, it is the opportunity that situations like this present for entrepreneurs, all right? You know, there's a reason why one of the biggest startup conferences in the world is called Disrupt, and it's because startups thrive in a state of disruption. And right now is probably, probably, I don't even think it's probably, like we're going through the single largest societal disruption since World War II, and that ended 75 years ago. Okay, right now this is the time when consumer needs are changing, right? Problems that I had a month ago, I don't have anymore. So when you have a situation where consumer needs are changing really quickly, there's all these new problems to be solved, right? And these problems are solved by products that entrepreneurs can create. And the big companies, they're right now, they're restructuring, they're figuring out their long-term strategy, they're in a in a state of stasis right now, right? They're not moving. They're not moving quickly. They're not gonna be solving these problems. Entrepreneurs are the ones that can solve these problems while the big companies are essentially stalled. And don't even talk about relying on the government to solve your problems. Like, that's not gonna happen, right? So this is the time for entrepreneurs to build something. We thrive in a state of disruption. And the cost of doing business right now is low as well. Real estate, obviously, gonna be very low. You're gonna have access to talents that you would normally have no business having access to. Just the cost of services, everything right now is very low. And in 2009, in Founder Institute, we were running events at venues for like pennies. We took advantage of a lot of those cost savings to really get the initial traction. For our business. And we weren't the only ones, okay? Here's just a quick list of other companies that were founded during the Great Recession. And look, you can say what you will, I'm not putting these companies up here because I necessarily think all of them were successful, right? But these are category-defining companies. Think about what was going on back then, right? It was a housing crisis. People had properties that weren't, worth nearly as much as they were a couple of months ago. Who then came along? Airbnb, the sharing economy is something that formed out of that crisis. Blockchain really, during that crisis, shot into— I wouldn't say the mainstream, but that really was a big injection for blockchain to come up because of all the financial hardships that were going on in the world. A lot of these direct-to-consumer brands, places like Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, that's when those companies started their genesis too, to get out of the retail stores. That were struggling. Crowdfunding, right? GoFundMe started during that time as well when people were having financial difficulties. You know, coworking, another one, right? With WeWork and even Zoom, which we're using right now. All right? So, if I leave you with anything today, it's this, all right? This is the time for entrepreneurs to build, okay? Whether you do it with FI or not, I don't care, all right? Just promise me that you're going to take this to heart, that this is the time to build. All right? This is the time where kind of the next big companies that we're going to be talking about for the next decade, they're planting their seeds right now, or they are kind of, you know, getting their really initial traction right now. So if you're an entrepreneur that's sort of at the idea stage, maybe you just had an idea for a company, you know, now's the time to do it. If you don't do it now, you're not going to have as good of an opportunity. All right? Assuming that you have some financial cushion. Okay, I certainly don't wanna, I don't wanna tell entrepreneurs that are going through financial hardships right now to kind of throw everything on the line, right? But if you have an idea and you're in a decent state of financial security, this is the time to go for it. And also, if you're in the early stages of building a business, this is the time to move really quickly to adjust to the needs of your customers, okay? If speed isn't an advantage for you as a startup, then what is? You know what I mean? The big companies, they're not moving quickly to meet the needs of their customers. You need to do that. And if you could do that correctly, then you're gonna use this time to have some pretty, pretty meteoric growth. Okay, so, you know, and speaking of adjusting to the needs of your customers, the core program has gone virtual, right? Every city that we're enrolling in right now, and I believe we're enrolling in something like 80 cities at the moment, every city is scheduled to start the program online. And the plan is to go back to an in-person program basically as soon as it is safe to do so. I'll pick up here. I think you all get the gist of what I was talking about before. The core program has gone virtual, and during the virtual program, people are— they're joining the programs or these feedback sessions through Zoom. They're using our newly released office hours tools to schedule office hours with local leaders and mentors. And they're also collaborating with their cohort via Slack. The feedback that we've been getting from these programs has been overwhelmingly positive. So as I said, in every city, we are starting the program virtual, and then the plan is to go back to physical when it's safe to do so. The only program right now that is 100% virtual is our Silicon Valley program. So let's talk about how you join the core program. So I've used the term pre-seed a couple times, so let me dive in a little bit into, what that means. So the pre-seed stage basically falls into 3 categories, right? On the earliest end of the spectrum, you have people with a pure idea that are pre-incorporation, they still have a full-time job. In the middle of the spectrum, you'll have small full-time teams that are incorporating and testing out early versions of their product. And then on the latest end of the spectrum, you know, people with a live product that are still pre-funding. And in any given cohort, the distribution is usually pretty even across these 3 segments. And as a result, you know, obviously these, these people people need different things, right? So for the people on the earlier end of the spectrum, they go into the Launch Track of the core program, and that's gonna focus them on things like validation and go-to-market, whereas the Growth Track is gonna be for the later-stage founders and teams, and it's gonna focus them more on really getting that growth curve moving and also preparing to raise funding if that's the route that they wanna take. So the core program lasts 4 months, But it's really just a small part of this, this full Founder Institute lifecycle. After the core program, we built a number of structured post programs called Founder Lab to help our alumni get to their next milestones, and I'll dive into that a little bit later in the presentation. So as I've said, we've been doing this since 2009. We're 11 years old now. We just recently turned 11, which makes me feel old. And our alumni have done some awesome stuff, so you can learn more about them at fi.co. Companies. All right, so I've been talking a lot about, you know, like what FI is, what the opportunity is, and I'm going to talk about, you know, um, how we do it, right? Um, and it's pretty simple. And since day one, we've basically had this, uh, a pretty similar strategy. It's that number one, we find great people. Number two, we give them a devoted support network. Number three, we put them through a structured growth process. And number four, we provide a lifetime of support. All right. Um, so first we find great people and, you know, one of our core values at FI is that, uh, great companies start with great people, right? Ideas really don't mean a lot. All of the value that's created in any business is through the evolution of that idea into a great product. And that evolution is seen through, through, you know, a million little decisions that are made by the founders, right? The founders are the greatest variable in success or failure of any business. So we focus on finding great boundaries, and we predominantly do this through a social science admissions process. You might have heard about this. I'm not going to dive too deep into this here, but if you're interested in learning about our admissions process, check out fi.co/dna. All right, so second, we provide you with a devoted support network, and we do that because we know that great companies are not built alone. Okay, the number of founders that I meet that are like scared of sharing their ideas, right? It's the wrong thing to be scared about. You should be sharing your idea with every single person you can to get as much feedback as you can because that's going to give you the best chance of success. So we give you, excuse me, the world's largest startup mentor network, and every FI cohort is going to have a great mentor-to-founder ratio. These mentors are there to provide you with weekly feedback, evaluation of your business in progress, help you kind of interpret all the data and feedback that you're collecting as you build your business. And most importantly, and this is unique to Founder Institute, these mentors are invested in your success through something called our Equity Collective. And this is what I really think is sort of the heart of the Founders Institute, to be honest with you. And here's how it works, right? About halfway through the Founder Institute program— this is not something that you do as you're joining FI, right? About halfway through, everybody who's going to graduate the cohort contributes 4% of warrants into an equity collective that the Founder Institute manages for 15 years. Now, any financial returns to this collective, alright, and let me talk about that real quick. Financial returns does not mean any kind of profit sharing or revenue sharing, okay? It's just equity, right? So it means if you sell your business and/or if there's some kind of secondary stock offering or if you IPO or anything like that, right? If the Founder Institute receives money back from your part of the equity collective, we then take that money and distribute it out equally across your cohort, okay? So 25% or 1% of the 4% goes right back to the alumni, okay, of the cohort. So you actually share in the value of all the other businesses that are being built in your specific cohort. If one of them or multiple of them are successful, you'll actually get a check. The second part is the 1% goes to the mentors, right? And this is kind of the unique thing that we do with mentors. It's not shared evenly with each mentor. Their individual allocation of that 1% is based on the anonymous ratings that they receive from the founders. So the more a mentor helps, the more office hours they do, the more introductions they make, all that good stuff, the higher their ratings are and the larger, you know, of an individual portion they get of the 1%, right? So we're really trying to align incentives here. The third 1% goes to your local leaders. These are the people that are running your local programs, bringing the network together, and really acting as advisors in your business, you know, every step of the way. And then finally, the last That last 1% comes to us at the Founder Institute headquarters, and really that's our main model for growth, right, is to have 1% in a lot of companies. And it kind of keeps us in check because, you know, we help you for many years after this core 4-month program, and obviously it's in our best interest to do so because we own that 1%. So the whole goal here is to give you a strong support network, you know, for every step of the process as you're building out the company, long after the 4-month core program, right? And what's the best way to do that? At least we think it's through financial incentives, right? So that's the whole point of the Equity Collective. And if you have more questions about it, please throw them into the chat, but also you can check out fi.co/liquidity. All right, then we— so we find great people, we give them a structured support network, and now we put you through a structured process, right? And in times like today where you have to move fast, this is even doubly important. We believe that one of the biggest challenges that early-stage companies face is focus, right? Knowing what to focus on and when. Knowing what the next steps are. You could be focusing on 100 different things at any given time, right? But time is your scarcest resource, right? Every single day you spend building your business, your runway or the time you have until you run out of money gets closer and closer and closer, right? So you have to move fast and you have to focus on the right things at the right time. So, uh, we've built, uh, this structured process essentially to remove all the uncertainty as you build your business, helping you focus on the right things in a sequential fashion to make progress quickly. Um, and not only are we pushing you to move fast, but again, every week you're going to be, um, getting feedback and guidance in these feedback sessions and office hours with mentors to make sure that not only are you making fast progress, but you're making smart progress. Um, and, um And all throughout the process, the mentors are also gonna be sharing with you the best practices on how they did it and some of the things that they had to learn the hard way in their entrepreneur journey. So here's a look at our latest core methodology. This is the Launch Track, right? So go back to earlier in the presentation. The Launch Track is for people on the earlier end of the spectrum, idea and kind of early prototype MVP stage. And it's gonna focus you on really go-to-market and launching the business, right? As you can see on the top row, it includes these 14 weekly feedback sessions and they take place once a week at night and currently on Zoom. And each one has a specific topic that the mentors are gonna kind of be providing the feedback on, right? Such as revenue, go-to-market, etc. And then outside of these sessions, you're gonna undergo a series of really structured growth sprints to build out your business. Now this is not quote-unquote homework, okay? These are actually things where you're building out your business, getting customers, building of customers, developing products, et cetera. And these sprints are all very structured and sequential, and as you can see here, the idea is that you're sort of stacking your progress as the program goes along. And here's a look at the growth track. So again, this is for people that are on the later end of the spectrum. It's gonna focus you much more on, you know, actually generating traction. And as you can see, you know, it focuses on some more advanced things like traction, preparing for investor diligence, building a great advisory board, and stuff like that. And, you know, to help you move faster during this time when moving fast is doubly important, we even have some added benefits for people in the virtual programs. First of all, we're doing these weekly AMAs, or ask me anythings, with the Founder Institute team. Adeo, our CEO, has actually been leading them. They're taking place every Friday morning, so just allowing founders from all around the world to just pick our brain as well to help them make some crucial decisions. Secondly, in the virtual programs, you're getting even more office hours than you had access to in the past. And we just released a new office hours scheduling tool as well, and we're slowly releasing that to every city because it's a little buggy at the moment, to be honest with you. But, uh, and that's, that's really going to streamline that process so that you can quickly find mentors, book office hours with them, and have those office hours. We're also offering a fast track to some of these post programs, and, uh, and And also, one of the perks of being an FI grad is that you can join any program around the world, kind of audit a program around the world after you graduate. So if you wanted to go to an in-person program in your city, for example, in maybe a year or two, you can join that program as well as an FI graduate. All right, so the last thing that we do here is a lifetime of support. So as soon as you complete the program, you have the strong support network through through the Equity Collective. And now the global network really opens up to you. You can work directly with the Silicon Valley team. You can interact with the 4,000+ alumni from around the globe, connect with all of the mentors around the globe, and there's also a ton of partner discounts. And as I'd mentioned before, we also have these structured post programs, which we refer to as Founder Labs. So these are pretty similar to the core program, except they're all 100% virtual, and they're all just designed to continue providing you with structure and feedback after the core program to reach your next milestones. Okay, now these programs again are 100% virtual and they're also 100% free for alumni, right? We're not trying to upsell you to a series of products or anything like that. These are just in place. This is sort of how the Founder Institute earns our 1%, so to speak, right? Is by providing this, this, the structure and feedback for you every step of the way. And we currently have 3 Founder Lab programs. The first, we have Product Market Fit Lab, which is really to help you get to the product market fit. As quickly as possible. Obviously, this is geared more towards the early-stage founders. We have Funding Lab, which is geared to help you close your lead investor within 6 months. And then for the later-stage founders, we have something called Venture Lab, and that's geared towards helping you close your Series A. And here's a quick look at Funding Lab, right? It's currently in v12, and this looks pretty familiar, right? Because this is our methodology. We're going to give you a very structured sequential process where you can kind of stack your progress over time and combining that with consistent feedback to make sure that you're making smart progress every step of the way. All right, so before I wrap up, I always like to kind of put this caveat at the end of any time I present FI. It's that FI is hard, okay? We're here to help, obviously, but we're here to help people that are serious, that are ready to work hard and that are open to constructive, you know, aka in some cases brutal feedback. All right. And if, if, if that doesn't sound like it's right for you, then honestly, this might not be the program for you, right? FI is certainly not for everybody. You know, we're not sort of this inspirational pat you on the back, tell you your idea is brilliant kind of program. We're a program where you are going to have very specific and structured growth sprints where you need to make progress very quickly and you need to get good ratings from the mentors all throughout the way. So, you know, the Founder Institute program is hard because building an enduring business is much, much harder. Less than 40% of people generally make it through the whole program, and this is by design, okay? The program itself is a filter, and to remain in the program, you need to complete all the sprints and deliverables, right? So you need to move quickly And you also need to get high ratings from the mentors. Every single week, the mentors are gonna be rating and reviewing you. So if the mentors don't think that you're building something that makes sense or they think that your strategy is off, right, you're gonna get low ratings. And if you do that, then you essentially get put on warning and we give you the opportunity to fix the issues that the mentors are finding in your business or catch up to the work that you haven't done yet. And if you're able to do that, you stay in the program. And if you're not, you don't, right? Now, the good news is that dropouts can enroll in the next cohort for free. They can sort of roll over their admissions, and a lot of people take us up on that because, you know, they get into the program and they just realize, hey, I got to go back to the drawing board a little bit and I'll come back stronger next time. So we see that a lot. Um, and I should also mention that, you know, not making it through FI, especially if you're in the idea stages of the business, is not necessarily a bad thing, okay? If we can save you years of your life and maybe even a good portion of your life savings, um, building something that doesn't make sense, if we can help you learn that very quickly, then I consider that a success, right? So just another thing to keep in mind. And finally, we do keep costs low at the Founder Institute. There is a $25 application fee because we do incur a hard cost, but it's pretty easy to avoid that application fee. If you apply before any early deadline, you can avoid the application fee. And also, if you click on any of the links that you receive after any of these events, you can also apply for free. And we also have a course fee. So, the course fee for the program, I don't have the exact one on here because it varies by city. The course fee basically covers the cost of the, basically, minimum break-even cost of running the program. And for a limited time right now, in this time of COVID where we know a lot of people are struggling, we are offering a 30% discount to our programs, and that discount's gonna be expiring this Sunday. We offer a full refund as well on this course fee, okay? So if you drop out before the third session of the program, full refund, no questions asked, all right? As I said, Founder Institute's not for everybody, okay? So we wanna give you the opportunity to come into the program, start to interact with the mentors, start to interact with all the other founders in your cohort, really start to work with your local leaders, get into the backend of our system, see all of our growth sprints, and really see if the program's right for you. And if it's If it's not, drop out before the third session, no questions asked, full refund. And if it is, you stay in the program, and again, after that, if you do drop out after that third session, you can still roll in— roll that course fee towards the next program as well. All right. So that's all. In summary, FI is here to provide you with a devoted support network and a structured growth process to help you get to traction and funding. All right. So I am going to take off my screen here. All right. I should be back. Sorry, sorry about all that. Sorry that you couldn't see my presentation in the beginning there. That's my bad. But let's start getting to some questions. Okay. So let's see. A lot of audience questions are coming in. That's awesome. Please, you can still put your questions into the chat. I'm here to answer them. And I'm just going to start going. Going through the list. All right, so let's see. And Virginia, if you can, if you could put the names of the people that are asking the questions as well, that would be helpful. So I have a question here. How did FI become a success if it was built during the '08 recession? Yeah, sure. So again, the market was really shifting back in '08, right? So I'll kind of give you a little bit of the genesis story here. You know, we saw a need in the market, okay? The housing bubble had crashed. There were still a lot of interesting technology companies coming out and that were adjusting to this new time, but people were having a real hard time raising funding, okay? And at the time, we ran a website called thefunded.com, which was sort of this, you know, rating and review site for venture capitalists. And we had all these people that were building businesses. People wanted to build. It was a recession. A lot of people were laid off again, and they wanted to build stuff. And they were coming to to us on this site, thefunded.com, thinking that, hey, I'm ready to raise funding, I just need introductions, right? And we saw that and we'd look at these people and be like, wow, you are 1,000 steps away from being ready to raise funding in any economic climate, right? Especially not now. So that was where the gap was, right? And that's really why we created the Founder Institute, was to help fill that gap, to help people kind of get from zero to one, to get them ready either for funding or to a point where their business is operating on profits, right? So that was the gap that was found during that time. Now, secondly, the cost of doing business was low, right? And the same thing is right now. The office space was low, marketing costs were low. There were a lot of new marketing channels that were starting to come online, Facebook ads, things like that, right? That allowed us to— and those things were very cheap at the time, right? So we were able to get users very pretty quickly. We used to, in the early days of FI, when it was really just based in Silicon Valley before we really started to go global, like, we were very, very dependent on very large conferences, right? We ran a conference called the Founder Showcase, We had great speakers, Elon Musk, among others. And, you know, the costs of running those conferences were extremely low, all right? We stopped running those conferences a couple of years ago because they became too expensive, right? Now, maybe we'll start again because now the costs are going low, although I'm not sure this is the right time to start big business conferences. But my point is, is that, you know, the landscape was shifting. We saw a very specific need and gap in the market. We served that need, and we were able to take advantage of low cost of doing business to really make progress pretty quickly. All right, so Salvador asked, "I have two companies, one established in the USA and the other one in LATAM. Do you support companies in LATAM?" Yes, for sure, Salvador. So we, we have FI companies, or, you know, in 60+ countries and FI chapters in 60+ countries right now. Obviously, with any given situation, we're gonna look at at how you incorporated the business and ensure that you've done it in a way that sets you up for success. Okay? And sometimes that has to do with jurisdiction and other times it has to do with your corporate structure, right? So I'll use an example here in the US. Almost every technology company in the US is going to be a Delaware C corporation. Okay? But the easiest corporation to set up, and this is something you can do online with a couple hundred bucks, is something called an LLC, a limited liability corporation. We have a lot of founders that will come into the program with LLCs already set up, and we have to work with them to restructure that, okay? Because LLCs make it extremely hard for you to issue new shares. And if you ever want to raise funding, that's how you raise funding, is by issuing and selling shares. But also, if you ever want to recruit really good talent, you need to have things like bonus pools, option pools, and again, you know, you need shares to do that. So, you know, it's Do we support companies in LATAM? Yes, for sure. Depending on what your exact structure and jurisdiction is, we'll look at it and make sure that you've kind of set yourself up for success. So somebody asks here, is the program offered in different languages? Yes, I believe we are running the program in 9 languages, or at least we have translated our admissions assessment into 9 different languages. So the program is definitely offered in in many different languages, and depending on your city, if you're not positive, you could always reply to any email you receive from us and we can just clarify that situation for you, right? Like for example, in Brazil, the programs are run predominantly in Portuguese. I know in Colombia, for example, in Bogotá, the program is sort of a little bit of a hybrid of Spanish and English. But again, if you have any specific questions relating to where you're located, just reply any email from us and we'll let you know. All right, so what is different about the online versus the physical program? Excuse me. So honestly, the only thing that's different is that the weekly in-person meetings that you used to do, these feedback sessions that used to be in person, now they're on Zoom, right? That's really the only difference. The FI program has never been about having a shared coworking space case or anything like that, right? You would only meet in person once per week. All the other stuff that you'd be doing the other 6 days of the week were through the backend of our system, through setting up office hours and group meetings and stuff. And those were never required to be in person. People usually just did those over Skype or something. And, you know, following the growth sprints in the backend of our system, which again, that stuff is all done, you know, on your own time, right? So really, the program hasn't changed much. And we've actually been surprised, you know, like most companies, we've been in a constant state of scramble for the last month or so. I haven't slept in weeks, to be honest. And, you know, because we moved everything online and— but I've been really surprised at just how positive the feedback has been. We actually follow something in Founder Institute called our retention rate, right? This is a metric that we follow because, as I mentioned before, you can drop out before the third session of the program. Program, right? So we actually look at, okay, what percentage of people actually dropped out before that third session, right? So essentially, like, what is the value that people are seeing in the beginning? Are we delivering on the promises that we're sort of making in the beginning, and are they satisfied and thus willing to stay in the program, right? And actually, our retention rates have gone up actually pretty dramatically with this online program. Now, I don't know why, you know, some people have been throwing ideas out there like, oh, well, now these weekly sessions, they don't have to sit in traffic for an hour, then get home late and all this kind of stuff. Now they can just one-click and they're in. So maybe it's just less of a time commitment or whatever it is, right? But those retention rates have gone up. So I think the feedback has just been great. All right. How is F5 different from other accelerators? Sure. So this is a common question I get. right? People will say, you know, for example, hey, why should I do FI instead of Techstars or something, right? Or Y Combinator, 500 Startups, or whatever these seed accelerators are in your area. And my answer to them is that you shouldn't, okay? If you're able to get into a seed accelerator such as Techstars or Y Combinator or 500 Startups or Seedcamp or what have you, then you're too far along for FI, all right? Like, we're not gonna be in a great position to help help you. Those are seed accelerators that work with teams of people that already have some form of traction. We are a pre-seed accelerator that works with people before that state. Okay? So a lot of people that go through FI, they'll go on to programs like that. Techstars in particular is a program I would definitely recommend, and we have a lot of people go into that and they love it. But also, a lot of people that come into FI, they find different pathways, right? And that's fine too. But yeah, we don't compete with seed accelerators. It's apples orange, we just operate at an earlier stage. So let's see here. Somebody asks, "I already have some funding. Can I still join FI?" It depends, right? When we say pre-funding, we really mean like pre-professional funding, okay? So if you have like hundreds of thousands of dollars of angel funding, you're probably too far along for FI, right? But if we're talking like friends and family rounds or it's just small amounts of money, maybe one angel, two angels, kind of small stuff, and you're really still, you would consider yourself in those early stages where you need to get to traction quickly to kind of fill out and get a bigger round of funding, then you would fall into the later end of that spectrum I was showing you before, and you would go into our growth track. But again, specific questions like this, you guys can definitely reply to any email that you receive from us and you'll receive response pretty quickly. All right. So someone asks here, is the course fee a burden for startups? So I mean, I guess you could argue that any fee is a burden in some respect, right? Now, the course fee for us, as I said, I mean, it's, it's, it's pretty cheap. Okay. You know, in Silicon Valley right now, which is our most expensive program in the world, I believe, you know, is $1,000 $1,000, right? And we're also offering this 30% discount. But, you know, at the end of the day, you need to have a little bit of money to start a business, okay? If you're broke, not a good time to start a business, all right? Go get yourself some financial security however you can, and then maybe start to think about building a business, all right? Because, you know, even with the FI course fee, there's gonna be other costs. Costs to building a business, right? And they're not money that you pay to us. There's going to be marketing costs, maybe you need development costs, right? I mean, there's any number of things that you're going to have to spend money on as you build your business. Now, we try to have, or we do have, over $3 million in discounts to make a lot of those costs lesser. But again, it's going to cost some money to build a business and you should be prepared for that. All right, so let's see here. How many founders participate in the Founder Lab, and is it different from, from other accelerators? So I think generally speaking, our Founder Labs will start— and it's pretty similar, okay, to FI, where we'll start with the larger number and we'll end with the smaller number, right? Because if you're not doing the work and if you're not getting good feedback, then you you're gonna be asked to leave the program, right? So I think the last one started with somewhere around 50, and again, the numbers are pretty similar, and it ended somewhere around 20-ish companies, right? And we're running this program multiple times per year. And, you know, how is the program different from other accelerators? You know, I would say, Founder Institute, we are extremely process-oriented. Okay? As I was explaining before, kind of the two main ingredients of Founder Institute in our methodology is that we provide you with this dedicated support network, right? And again, we do that through the Equity Collective where you're getting constant feedback every step of the way and for years to come because everybody's financially incentivized to help you. And then the second part of our formula or our methodology is this structured process. Okay? And the post-programs are no different. So with Funding Lab, for example, I mean, we really get into the minutia of saying, "Okay, right now you need to identify, you know, 40 people or 40 contacts that you have that you think may at least be able to give you an introduction to an investor or something like that, right? Then we're gonna have you line up some meetings with some some of the lower quality investors first, right? So that you can kind of refine your pitch on the lower quality investors or the lower priority investors before you then start pitching the higher priority investors, right? To make sure that now your pitches and your messaging you think is in good shape, right? So we get really, really, really into the minutia and into the specifics in a very sequential process of helping you build out the business. But again, Founder Lab is not in any way meant to compete with a seed accelerator like that, right? It is a program for our graduates that helps us continue providing them with the structure and support to get their company ready for funding if they're not when they come out of FI. So, all right, keep the questions coming, everybody. This is great, all right? Please keep them coming. I'll stick around. For another 18 minutes till the end of the hour if the questions keep coming. Alright, so let's— please don't be shy. So how do you select mentors for the program? So the mentors, generally speaking, they are going to be founders and/or executives or investors that have, you know, been a part of fast-growth technology companies. Alright, we tend to shy away from specialists, we tend to shy away from kind of consultants consultants and we tend to shy away from academics and that kind of stuff. Now, there are certain specialists that we'll bring in. Lawyers are specialists. I mean, they're pretty valuable. And sometimes, growth hacking specialists, financial specialists, things like that. But really, at the end of the day, we want people that sort of have the top level— it's something I like to call the founder's knowledge, okay? As a founder, you need to be learning extremely quickly. All right? I don't care if you hate reading contracts, you're gonna have to read contracts and you're gonna have to understand them, right? Doesn't mean, you know, you need to get your law degree. It just means that you need to have sort of this founder's proficiency for reading contracts, right? And that's why we find it really helpful, you know, rather than bringing in like the best lawyers in the world or the best growth people in the world every week, we bring in founders, right? So they can tell you, okay, here's what you need to know about contracts, right? Here's what you need to know about NDAs. Here's what you need to know about term sheets, right? From sort of this founder's perspective. And that's really our approach, you know, to bringing the mentors in. Now obviously, there'll be a lot of people that were founders are now consultants and stuff, and that's, you know, that's totally fine. And we like to bring investors in as well so that they can kind of provide you with the that mindset of the other side of the table, and also so that you can start to build those relationships early on. And one thing that I should mention, so, you know, we're very data-driven at FI, so every single week you as a founder are going to be rated and reviewed by the mentors and the local leaders and everyone in the cohort, but so are the mentors. Every week you're rating and reviewing these mentors, okay? So if the mentors are rated poorly, you know, we see that. We track everything in the backend of our system, and, you know, they're not not asked to come back and mentor, you know what I mean? So we do have a lot of quality controls in place there. And by the way, you also rate on a weekly basis the actual program itself and the local leaders, right? So we here at Founder Institute operations, we can quickly see, oh wow, something must have happened this week in whatever city, right? The ratings have gone way down, you know what I mean? And then we can dive in there and see what's going on and fix it really, really quickly. So we're super data-driven at FI, so I'm not saying we're Not saying every mentor is awesome, right? But we're able to fix those problems very quickly. All right. So Joe asked, how much time do I need to dedicate per week to succeed? So the program itself is designed to take about 20 to 30 hours per week on average. All right. Now, that is an average, okay? So, and depending on your skill set, some weeks are going to be easier than others, right? Some of the weeks and some of the sprints that are really focused on marketing or something is going to come easier to market. Marketers and some are going to come easier for others. So, that is the goal, is for you to do about 20 to 30 hours per week. And a lot of people, it can take longer. But again, you're going to have to hustle to build a business whether you do it in FI or not. We're just here to hopefully help you do it more efficiently and cheaper. Somebody asked, if the program is virtual, is there a benefit to going to a local program versus one in another country? If you have a— So let me be clear here first. The only program that's fully virtual is our Silicon Valley program. Every other program around the world, the goal, the plan, and again, it's hard to really plan things right now, but the plan is for those programs to go back in person as soon as it's sort of safe to do so. And we're gonna, you know, that's gonna be very much on a case-by-case basis, right? But, you know, if you are in a local city and there's a program in your city that's, you know, that's going on and, you know, do that program, okay? Because the majority of the value that you're going to get as you build a business and, you know, things are gonna somewhat, you know, I don't think we're ever going back to like what our normal was before. Right? But obviously, having a local network in your city to help you build a business is extremely valuable. All right? So definitely, you know, build a business where you are. You should take the program where you see yourself building the business. Right? So now, maybe let's say you're building a fintech company or something and you're just dead set on moving to New York and you know that you need to be in New York for this company to succeed because, you know, strategically that's where you need to be. Then that's different, all right? Then maybe you might wanna look at doing the New York program, right? But what I always say is that you should take the program in this, in, you know, where you can see yourself building out your business. All right, let's see. What is the greatest benefit of FI in your opinion? Well, it's hard. It's like asking me what's the best part about my, the best feature of my baby, right? So I'm probably not the best person to ask, but, As I was saying before, I really do think our secret sauce or really the unique thing that we do is this equity collective. Because you look at most startups, and they'll give away a couple of percentage points of their company to various advisors and things like this. In the Founder Institute, you do 4%. You get value back. You're almost hedging your bets here from any of the other companies in your cohort. If they're successful, you'll get money back, but also rather than just getting a couple advisors for a couple of percentage points for 4, you're getting an entire network to help you every step of the way. So I really think that that is sort of the secret sauce of Founder Institute, and that's what I always point to people because there's plenty of programs out there that are cohort-based like FI and all this kind of stuff, but they don't have mechanisms to keep people engaged and to keep providing you with that support after that cohort ends, right? And that's something that we've certainly taken to heart here at FI, and we've sort of, you know, we knew that we would have to do that from the beginning when we started FI because we're working with companies at such an early stage, right? So just kind of letting them go out into the wilderness after 4 months is not a good strategy. All right. Have you seen founders go through the program a second time if they're building another start-up. That has definitely happened for sure. 100% that has happened. And again, this is just anecdotal in my head. It's certainly not a statistic that we track. I don't believe it's happened, you know, it's probably happened a couple of times. I don't think it's happened like 50 times or something like that, but that definitely has happened. And, you know, probably even more More commonly, what we've seen is that founders have gone through the FI program, right? And obviously, you're building one business in FI, and then maybe that business fails, or it has to take a really hard pivot, and they have to reincorporate a different business. And what a lot of founders have done— now, this is going to be like in the hundreds— have then opted into the Equity Collective with their new corporation, right? They've said, hey, "Hey, that one, the company I built with you guys, it failed for X, Y, or Z, but I took those lessons and I created this new company, and I'd like to put that company into the bonus pool or into the Equity Collective because I want to participate in the network and I don't want to do all the stuff that I normally could do." And we're always amenable to do that. And obviously, it makes everybody in the Equity Collective happy because, all right, there's one company that failed and now we're putting in another company. Company that's alive, right? Everybody is— it's a pretty good deal for everybody. All right. So I think the questions are starting to get a little— are starting to slow down a little bit here. Any other questions, please get them into the chat. I'm going to keep answering them for as long as you keep asking. All right. So what types of startups Or what types of sectors are most successful in this program? You know, that's a really hard question to answer, right? We're in so many cities that it really is going to vary by city, right? If you're in Boston, for example, like we're gonna see a lot of robotics companies. If you're in, you know, same thing with Pittsburgh, a lot of robotics and AI. In Montreal, a lot of AI. You know, places like Toronto and New York, we're gonna see a lot of fintech and prop tech and insurtech and things like that. You know, so it's really hard to say. What I will say is that, you know, we see a very wide range, okay? I think a good personification of that is tomorrow we're actually doing an online demo day. You can go to onlinestartupevents.com if you wanna see that. Tomorrow's online demo day is for companies building space tech startups, all right? So we have a company who is part of the next NASA lunar rover. Their business has been selected as part of that program that you can learn about tomorrow. We also have a company that's building building a fire-breathing engine. So, you know, so we have companies doing like really kind of hard tech hardware type of stuff, right? And then on the other end of the spectrum, we also have companies just building, you know, mobile apps, right? We wanna work with companies that are building technology or technology-based companies that have the ability to scale, right? Those are the types of companies that we're interested in working with. And it's pretty gonna be pretty consistent with anybody sort of working in a venture startup space, those are the types of businesses that they're going to work with. So honestly, we have a pretty wide spattering of businesses. We have another one called Endiotix, and they're building this robot that can sort of be remote controlled so that instead of swallowing the endoscopy pill where then you have to have it exit your system days later, this pill is designed so that it actually can be remote controlled to go through really really quickly, right? So we have a lot of like really, really interesting, cool, hard tech or advanced technology companies, I could say. And then we also have a lot of just software companies that generally can get going a little bit quicker and are cheaper to get off the ground. All right. So Joe asked, will I be able to build a network from scratch with NFI? So, for sure, Joe. So I think the best example of this, You could probably Google it, Aaron Bolly, right? He's one of the co-founders of Udemy, which is, as far as valuation, it's the most valuable company that's come out of FI. It was recently given a $2 billion valuation just a couple of months ago. He actually was from Turkey and he had immigrated to the United States and he actually took the Founder Institute program in Silicon Valley and his main goal was to to kind of plant his roots in the Valley and really get that network, right? And he's written about this before, and in the FI program, he met his co-founder, Aaron Balik, or Gagan Bihani, and they built the program, or they built the company in Silicon Valley in the program. So, you know, definitely, if getting access to a network is your goal, you know, that is one of the main purposes of the core program, right? In that core 4-month program, we're gonna keep you pretty focused on your local network, right? Other founders entrepreneurs in your city, so you can build those relationships. And then after that, then the Global Founders Institute network opens up to you, and then you could say, okay, hey, you know, who's, who's there in New York, or who's there in Singapore, or wherever, right? And you have the, you have the, the ability to do that. All right, so it looks like Salvador circled back on his question, a specific question relating to, you know, his incorporation. So my company is a, is a a C-Corp, so good. And the other in LATAM is a similar corporation for my company in LATAM. I have market traction, and so far we have sold more than $700K. I'm not sure if that means that you've raised $700K or you've generated $700,000 in revenue, but what may be the best fit to apply? You know, again, it's hard to answer because, you know, LATAM is a fairly large area, right? And in each jurisdiction is very different. So Salvador, honestly, the best thing you could do is share that information, reply to any of the emails that you received from that, share that information, and they'll dive into your exact specific situation and let you know. All right. Because yeah, the jurisdictions are very different. And in any given locale, we have recommendations on where people should incorporate and the types of structures they should use. But a US C-Corp is pretty much sort of the gold standard for sure. And obviously, if you're in Southeast Asia, for example, Singapore is a pretty simple choice of where people should incorporate. In Europe, there's a couple havens. So Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, used to be the UK pre-Brexit, but not the best place to incorporate now. All right. I think that's it. Thanks, everybody, for joining. So look, if you did have any other questions that maybe you just didn't think of today, there's a couple of ways you can get them answered, all right? Number one, we do other online information sessions, right? This was a live one. The other ones that we do have a prerecorded video, but we still have people in the chat answering all of your questions. So you can see all of those at fi.co/info-session. We also run a number of conference calls. I believe we're running 4 or 5 a week now. These are literally somebody from FI just gets on a conference call at these times and anybody can join. And there's no agenda, no presentation, like somebody's just there to answer any questions that you have. All right, so check those out at fi.co/calls. We're running a ton of online events. You can see those at fi.co/events. And finally, as I mentioned before, we have a very attentive email support team. These, you know, this is the core team at FI where they don't go to some outsourced support center or anything like that. And our response times are generally less than 12 hours. So any email that you've received from us, I know it may seem that the process isn't smooth, but you can reply to any email you receive from us and you will get a response within 12 hours. All right, thanks everyone for joining, and, um, uh, I hope, uh, I hope we'll see you in FI soon. All right, take care everybody.