Leadership in Times of Uncertainty: FI Spring 2020 Silicon Valley, Toronto, London, and Singapore

Alright, welcome everyone. We are coming at you live from Silicon Valley, and my name is Ryan Micheletti. I am head of global operations for the Founder Institute, and let me be the first to welcome everyone to this leadership and graduation event. So we're here to celebrate the commencement of the alumni of the Founder Institute program from Silicon Valley, London, Singapore, and Toronto. We decided we kind of ran a special event that had global mentors in it, and so as a result, we wanted to combine this graduation ceremony so that we could celebrate with you, people from all over the world. So to give you a quick idea of what the founders went through over the last 14 weeks, the founders and alumni of the program have worked extremely hard overcoming lots of different obstacles and building their companies to get them to traction, funding, and beyond. Uh, and these programs were, were incredibly challenging, but the founders in here certainly represent the best of the best. So, um, if you look at the stats from across the 4 programs, we had over 1,300 people apply, 200 people enrolled, and, uh, as a result, the top 30% of '74 alumni are graduating. So I want to be the first one to congratulate all of the alumni of the program. Thank you for all of your hard work, and it certainly has paid off. So just to give everyone a quick update as well, in October, we're going to be hosting a very special founder showcase event where all of these companies will present themselves and pitch their companies to a global audience. So we'll be sure to send out that information to everyone who's attending today. Today is more about keynotes and I'll get into the agenda here in a moment. So for the audience, Founder Institute is currently enrolling in over 100 cities around the world, including Silicon Valley, Toronto, Waterloo, London, and Singapore. So if you're a startup founder and you want to join the world's largest community of mentors, investors, founders in the world, go to fi.co/join and apply today. So today we've got a really amazing event for you. In a moment, I'll introduce Jonathan Grecian, who's the co-founder of FI, and Sunil Sharma, who's going to say a few words. And then we have Adeo Ressi, the CEO of Founder Institute, who's also a 10x entrepreneur. He'll give a keynote presentation, and then towards the end, I'll introduce Mike Supravici, who is the managing director of alumni success at the Founder Institute. Who will give a presentation on the Founder Institute's Alumni Success System. So basically, what happens after you graduate the program at Founder Institute. So let me just be the first to introduce John. John, do you want to say hi?

Sure, everybody. I'm Jonathan Gritchen, co-founder of Founder Institute. So I'm going to be just kind of in the background here today. I'm in the chat. So if you see anybody poking around in the chat, that's me.

Any questions that you have, please don't be shy, throw them in the chat.

I'm happy to answer any questions that you have.

Awesome. Thanks, John. So this is live. We do have founders who are in the program that are alumni. You can see them on screen. And then we also have people from all over the world tuning in. You unfortunately cannot share your camera, but that's okay. You can ask questions and engage in the chat. So next up, I'd like to introduce Sunil. So Sunil, we've been working together at FI Toronto for a very long time. Do you want to say a couple words to the alumni?

Sure, yeah, thank you. Thank you all. So a huge crowd, I love that. I love— people who know me, like, know that I really get behind just the size and scale of what Founder Institute is. It's what led me to it in the first place 6 years ago. And it's grown so much since then. And what we have in Toronto is, we seem to always do, is very large and very high caliber alumni groups from Founder Institute. And we're graduating the largest FI batch, I think, in world history with 42 founders, 39 companies. So that's exceptional. I have a bit of a nerve center happening right now where I have this computer doing Founder Institute, and right here I have my Techstars Demo Day planning, which is tomorrow. I'm gonna paste it in the group here. What's important is that, you know, I run my, My actual job is the Managing Director of Techstars Toronto, and Founder Institute has become, you know, an incredible part of the workflow into Techstars. It serves so many important purposes, including from a community level. So, you know, at Techstars, we have this one property, I guess, called Startup Weekend, you know, hackathons. There are many hackathons, many innovation challenges that people can experience. And very often at the end of those, usually on a Sunday evening, people realize that they had a lot of, you know, It was incredible energy. They met great people, but Monday morning is, is coming up and they have to go back to work and that doesn't really inspire them or keep them excited. So Founder Institute is often the perfect place for, you know, ambitious, talented, up-and-coming entrepreneurs to try their hand next. And it's not easy. I always warn people how difficult the program is. You all know that. It's 13 weeks of serious work and it's very unlike most other things in the ecosystem, but it's, it's also a great filter. And so I'm putting it into the, you know, the practice into motion with 10 of the companies at Techstars that are graduating tomorrow. Of the 10, 2 are FI alumni from my own Founder Institute. So that means I got to know the entrepreneurs over a period of time, got to watch them, got to really get to know them as people and back them. So, and that, and I can also refer Founder Institute alum to other accelerators, preferably Techstars, but they could be Y Combinator or Plug and Play or any of the other global accelerators, we're a very valued source of deal flow. And the last thing I'm gonna say, 'cause I know Adeo always wants to cut me off, right? That's Adeo's move with me. But I'm gonna say that the diversity of what I see at Founder Institute is tremendous. In this class in Toronto, just organically, we have nearly a quarter of the class as Black founders, which is just incredible. And I can only imagine if we tried to do something proactive, how much better we could be. We have about a third, generally a third of our class are women. That can improve. But again, without the local resources, I like how it's just attracting people of all different backgrounds, races, cultures, age profile. I think 90% or more of the founders we've had over 16 cohorts here, 16, over 90%, maybe 95% are immigrants to Canada or would identify as, you know, some sort of visible minority, someone like myself, born in Canada, but certainly a minority background. And that's one of the strengths, it appeals to all and whoever's willing, you know, to do the work. So on behalf of, I think now 225 mentors, who have been engaged in the Toronto program. I know they all have been so incredibly satisfied with the results of their mentorship, I guess, watching these companies take flight over 6 years. I just wanna say kudos to you all, and now we have 42 incredible new founders coming out from the Toronto ecosystem alone. So thank you all.

Awesome. Thank you, Sunil. So, you know, one of the things that we've been trying to work on is really, you know, not only build the tech corridor in Toronto and Waterloo, but also extend that corridor here to Silicon Valley. And so I think we're one of the first programs in the world that is actually connecting Toronto, Waterloo, Silicon Valley, San Francisco all together to basically launch brand new companies into the future. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce not only the CEO of Founder Institute, but a good personal friend of mine who's taught us all about entrepreneurship. And really without, you know, your leadership, Adeo, I think that there'd be, a lot less companies in the world today that are actually working on things that matter. So thank you, uh, and, uh, please welcome Adeo Ressi, CEO of Founder Institute.

Hi everybody, thank you Sunil, thank you Ryan, thank you John and the whole team that made this possible, Mike, the grads, everyone. Lots of stuff going on in the world today, and I'm going to talk to you about leadership. So of all things that, uh, to talk about today, I think leadership is probably one of the most important. So let me share my screen and get started. Excellent. Welcome. So it's difficult to talk about leadership without talking about the coronavirus right now that's affecting most of the world in a negative way. And you can see some Projections on screen for the death rate by December 1st in America, 317,000 people are anticipated to lose their lives. And it's been a challenging time for many of us. I'm working at home right now, as most of my peers. If you were to look out the window, it's surrounded by smoke because there's been some pretty aggressive wildfires in the Greater Bay Area and Silicon Valley. So most of us are not only sheltering in place because of a virus, but we're also sheltering in place because of fires. Many of us are teaching our children at home, which is a first. Many of us are struggling at work because of the effects of the virus. And just, it's been a big toll on humanity, but it's also created a lot of beauty and opportunity. And so really, I wanna focus not so much on the negative today because we all heard a lot a lot about that and we're all experiencing it, I wanna focus on the positive. And before the pandemic came into focus and we were tracking it relatively early in January of 2020, we set a vision for 2020 at the Founder Institute to bring the startup world into alignment. And it was Mike, who is one of the leaders who coined the term, startup alignment. And for us, what that meant, and this is part of a poster, is that aspiring founders are working on things that matter, uh, startups have a mission to improve our world, investors fund diverse businesses with beautiful visions of the future, and as a result of all that, the innovation ecosystem creates opportunities that benefit all life. And we came into 2020 with that being our vision, right? That we really felt 2020 was the year that the startup world would come into alignment and make the world better. And wow, did the pandemic really help, I guess you could say, because any business that seemed to be out of alignment, right, would struggle. So, you know, oil went negative is an easy example, but a lot of things that people were doing, like kind of, pointless business travel through to many, many things like crazy commutes and stuff like this that were unnecessary. All that's gone away, right? And a lot of people would have said, hey, you know, to change the world's reliance on oil is gonna take forever. Well, it took about a month, right? To stop people kind of commuting for 2 hours to a job didn't really matter, it's going to take forever to change. Well, again, it took about a month. So all these things that people said were impossible to change and like would never change, uh, or the might change a little bit but not enough, those things changed overnight. And it's the first time in, in my lifetime that I've seen such positive things happen in such a short period of time. Unfortunately brought about by a disease, but a disease that we've been working to fight to make the world a better place. And so I think many of the people who are graduating today and many of the people who are watching feel a call to lead in this time. And so I'm gonna encourage you to answer the call to lead. And that leading isn't creating a company. Right, I'm gonna talk a little bit about a vision of leadership that I have and some techniques of leadership, but I think we're all feeling, wow, you know, now's a time where change is really possible and there needs to be some leadership. And if you feel the call to lead, answer the call to lead. I believe that it's the golden age of leadership. Right now. And we've had a lot of not great leadership. You know, you had religious leadership in the past, fealty, and dictatorships, and poor democracies, and all kinds of leadership experiments that have brought us to where we are now. And we have all these models at our disposal, and it's going to create this golden age of leadership. And what will happen is that these awakened and aware leaders that are cognizant of the past and the future will articulate beautiful visions, okay? And these people that get inspired by these beautiful visions will go out and create them in the world. They're gonna start working together to create the visions that are being articulated by these new leaders. And then these new visions are going to inspire more and more of humanity to create impressive things. Industries of change are going to flourish, right? So instead of, you know, everyone getting on an airline and burning tons of fuel to go to a beach for 2 days, new types of vacations will happen, new types of entertainment, new types of work. So things that didn't make sense will go away and have been going away, but they're going to be replaced with better, more beautiful, more sustainable ways of living that these leaders will help to create, and the people will join. And we're going to tend to our home. We've not tended to our planet. We've not even tended, in many cases, to the physical spaces where we live because we've been running around working on things that don't matter. And as a result of that, by tending to the things that matter, by tending to our home, we're gonna realize the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, okay? And that will create a place where we live that we're proud of. We can be proud of our world and proud of the future that we're building for our children. And life on this planet once again will flourish. We'll see turtles crossing the road, and instead of roadkill, we'll see— we'll pull over and help an animal make it across. There are so many things that are going to be much more beautiful in our future, and those changes are starting now. And the changes are starting because we're bringing the startup world into alignment, and people like yourself are answering the call to lead. And so let me talk a little bit about what I think is important for leadership that can possibly help you. So for me, to be a good leader, I spend a lot of time working on myself. And everybody has traumas, right? Some of them are made up on their own, some of them come from the actual world, And you as a leader, or at least for me, it's very important to be aware of what those traumas are, try and clear them, and allow myself to be as pure and as thoughtful as possible when I go out and lead so that I'm not triggered, I'm not angry, I'm not frustrated, but I'm actually working constructively, positively, and trying to make myself a better person, the world around me better, better lives for my children and the like. Um, and then at least for me, I like to ask what can be. And instead of— a lot of people, and, and this is an issue that I'm seeing in the world today, but it's, it's changing, tend to do incremental innovation because they have a somewhat defeatist view where it's like, oh, we could never get rid of oil, so we're just gonna have to make more efficient engines. It's like, well, you know, oil went negative in its price, which is pretty, which means like no one wanted it, right? Basically, they had to pay someone to take it. So, you know, there you go. There is no limit to what can be. Right? Only your imagination. So I encourage you to design the world that you want to live in, and don't lead with a series of compromises, but lead with a series of big visions that you really think would be amazing. And within this world that you want to live in, find the things that you're passionate about. Examine what motivates you. I like to ask a series of recursive why questions, like, why am I interested in this? Why do I care about this? Why am I acting this way? Why is this frustrating me? And then the more why questions that I ask, the more it unpacks my true passions and interests in the world. And that allows me to start bringing everything into alignment, which, as you get more into alignment with a clear version of who you are, a clear vision of what you you wanna see in the world and understanding what you are passionate about, you can start forging beliefs and aligning yourself around those beliefs. And that creates a beautiful opportunity then to recruit believers. And belief is the new currency of success. If you look at the companies that are succeeding right now, they're succeeding like Tesla or whichever, because people believe in what they're trying to do. And so, you know, the Founder Institute has been going through one of the greatest periods of success in our history. All of our metrics are off the charts, and we believe in what we're doing. We're working with people to help them forge their own beliefs, and as a result of that, we have we're surrounded by people who share in our beliefs that entrepreneurship's gonna make the world better, that the entrepreneurs are the next leaders of our world, and that these leaders are gonna do amazing things. And as those beliefs get shared by more and more people, we see more and more success, and it's really a beautiful time. And you can make that happen in your own business. And then you want to manifest progress. And, and this is— manifesting is an interesting concept I'm talking with a lot of my entrepreneurial friends about. And it's not saying that you don't do any work. Of course, as an entrepreneur, as a leader, you're gonna have to do work. But it's more like working on the things that matter and being very cognizant on what those things are. And so instead of running around and like doing all sorts of mundane little things, like really focusing your energy and attention on the highest value things that will kind of cascade forward with more and more positive initiative and positive momentum. So really being cognizant on working on the highest value things and having that manifest into to progress is important. And then make reality, be the change that you wanna see in the world. If you're talking about sustainability and you're talking about resource conservation, you know, don't buy soda bottles for your office, right? If you even have an office these days. So be very cognizant to, Make the reality into what you want, but, you know, make it without compromise in your own existence, and then it will start manifesting further and further outward. And then once you can get all that humming, which I'm sure everyone can who's here, everyone can, and I'm speaking from experience, you're going to change the world. And I would encourage you, as you change the world, don't compromise. And the world is rife with opportunities to compromise. And those compromises present a slippery slope where, oh, you know, I'll just hire someone who doesn't believe exactly what I believe, or I'll, you know, do get a soda even though I'm all about the environment. And, you know, As you make smaller and smaller compromises, they chink away at the armor of your belief, and that can very quickly erode all the progress that you've made in the world. So try and stay as in alignment and pure to your beliefs as possible. And then if all that goes well, you know, you can really have a very positive effect on this world, which is why we do what we do here at the Founder Institute. And I want to talk about just a couple things that we're doing this year that are in alignment with our beliefs, uh, just to give you a sense, um, of how it's done, if you will. So at the beginning of this year, we took a pretty large initiative, and then at the end of last year, to define what we believe an impact company is. And it's a company that focuses on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, as part of its mission, and then has a number of KPIs, impact KPIs that it tracks. And you can read more about that, maybe John can post the link in the chat. Over time, we wanna get to a point where 80% of all the businesses that we help to create have impact as part of their mission and vision. So we wanna see 80% of our portfolio be impact companies looking to make the world a better place. And we're starting on that journey this year. And we understand that for many impact companies, it can be a bit of a tough journey today, though that's changing. So we're in the process of launching 1,000 venture funds around the world over the next 5 years to fund businesses that have impact as part of their core. At the early stages so that whether you're raising an angel round, a seed round, or a Series A, anywhere in the world from Central Asia to the Bay Area, you'll have a fund that shares your beliefs and will back your initiative to try and make the world better. So I believe that it's starting here and now, today with the graduates and the people on this, this meeting here today. Thank you for coming out. And I believe that if you feel that you have the call, answer the call to lead. Now is the time. And I appreciate everyone taking the time to be here, learning about what we see alignment to be. And I hope to see you building a future. Thank you.

All right, thank you, Adeo. That was, that was very inspiring and really amazing. You know, we had this whole talk earlier this year about startup alignment, and it's just really great to see, like, now as we get into September and the fall, just to kind of revisit some of the things that we had talked about. I mean, the world has changed so much since, since we came up with that, and I actually think that we're heading in a very positive direction. So Thank you for your leadership, Adeo. And speaking of leaders, I'd love to introduce my partner in crime here, Mike Superbici. Mike, we've been running Founder Institute Silicon Valley for years now. It's been a blast. Do you want to introduce yourself and take it away?

Yeah, hi everyone. For those of you that don't know me, and I think everybody on this call certainly probably does, but my name is Mike Superbici and I lead the Alumni Success Group here at the Founder Institute. And, you know, before I get into this presentation, I want to say a couple things. Number one, I've been truly honored to be working with everybody here. You know, everybody that is graduating, and look, I've looked at every company that is graduating right now, is basically not only mission-aligned but working on something that really matters. And I think you all are on a trajectory to make a really big difference, not only, you know, locally, but possibly even for humanity as a whole. And that's a really, really interesting and really fortunate position that both Ryan and I are in, just to be able to help in some way to get you down that path. I was speaking with actually a graduate right before here, right before we started, right when we were just kind of like testing everything out. And it felt like it was kind of like an end, right? It was like, oh, thank you, Mike, for helping and all this other stuff. You know, what I said, what I said to the graduate is what I'm about to say here is, look, this was just part of the process, but the process doesn't end, right? This isn't like an ending or anything like that. I mean, yes, it's called graduation, but what I'm about to talk about here is that, you know, my team and I are gonna be with you basically for the rest of your company's life. And sure, like the actual structured part of this program and things like that maybe have ended, you know, as of today, but there's other structural programs if you want to do that, or if you don't want to do that, we will be supporting you. So just know that the Foundry Institute is going to be with you basically for the rest of your company's life, and we're going to continue to just support you, and you always have somebody to talk to, whether it's just talking about— talking through a business challenge or talking through another challenge that you may have that's impacting your, you know, your company or something like that. So with that being said, I'm going to go ahead and share my deck. This is going to be a very different presentation than Dale's. It's very tactical, and so this is again all designed to help you kind of maximize your, your success here moving forward. All right, so today's talk is basically going to be about how the Founders Institute Alumni Success System works and how you can basically maximize it for your benefit. So today we're gonna, I'm gonna introduce my team and everybody that's involved. We're gonna talk about resources. We're gonna talk about all the postgraduate programs that are available for you to use. Select Portfolio, we're gonna go really deep into that a little bit, and then we're gonna talk about maximizing FI HQ support. Alright, so you all have met me. Adeo as well, you also met Adeo. Both him and I are going to be here to help you basically forever, and you know, we run a lot of our postgraduate programs together, and we're going to cover that in a bit. So you're going to be hearing from us and talking to us a lot. In addition, I'd also like to introduce Victor. Victor, if you're around or in the chat, if you can just say hello to everybody, that'd be great. Victor is basically our analyst, and you will be interacting with him a lot. He's going to be basically graduating you officially in the system and things like that, and he's going to be reaching out to you on a regular basis. In addition, what we do is that we basically activate the network of 15,000 mentors around your success. You know, though, you know, both, uh, both Adeo and I have a lot of experience, uh, just because, you know, we were essentially managing a pretty large portfolio of companies. You know, there's probably some folks that may even have more experience on the particular issue or the particular challenge that you may be experiencing at the time. And so what we like to do is we like to kind of leverage our 15,000 mentor network to basically help you as well. So basically, that's essentially the team. So it's not just the FI HQ team, but just know there's a lot of super engaged local mentors that want to continue to help. Basically, this is kind of a snapshot of the Alumni Success System, and then we're going to go in every single one of these areas deeply, and then you can kind of see the various stages where a lot of these benefits really help. So let's go ahead and get started. So first of all, as an alumni, you're going to get access to a lot of really cool benefits. So number one, obviously everybody here has been part of the Equity Collective. I cannot stress how valuable this Equity Collective is, right? You essentially have a team of like champions, a team of people, believers, as Adela mentioned, already kind of built in directly into your business, right? You have your local leaders, you have all the companies that have graduated with you, right? You have all these mentors. You essentially already are graduating with like a tribe of believers in your business, right? And so, you know, you definitely want to make sure you take advantage of that by staying in touch with everybody, by keeping everybody updated. So that he can continue to root for your success. In addition, you have dedicated support contact at Founders headquarters. That's going to be me as well as Victor, who you've met. We basically read every single email. We try to reply to as many of them or all of them, especially the ones that need our help. So just feel free to email us. We're basically available for you and we work on your time. So we're essentially on founder time. So it's not uncommon for people to email us on the weekends. We basically We'll reach back out on weekends and things like that. In addition, some of you have already seen this because we've invited you to join, but we host monthly graduate master sessions on very specific topics, right? So for example, on Friday, last Friday, we did one specifically on how to basically do better customer engagement through email, right? Very, very tactical. We brought like a very expert mentor on this topic and really went deep into this topic. And we do things like this on a regular basis, depending on, you know, what the community seems to need, right? So every month you're going to have basically an alumni success call and it's going to be recorded. So again, if you don't want to join at that time because you're busy with your company, all good, you can watch it whenever you want. In addition, everybody's going to be on a private mailing list so that we can, you know, notify you of important events in your area. Important promotions, important partners, things like that that you may want to be— they want to know. So everybody's going to be on this private mailing list, which is super helpful. Access to 15,000 mentors. I'm going to cover that in a bit about how you're going to do that. Partner discounts. We're at over $2 million in partner discounts. Again, very easy for you to basically access this. And, you know, another cool benefit is that you essentially have unlimited access to a lot of these Foundry Institute sessions that we've done, right? So for example, If you maybe are struggling with your go-to-market strategy, you know, you can ping your local leader and say, hey, I noticed that you're doing a go-to-market strategy right now. I'd love to kind of join your session. I also saw that there's like a really interesting mentor that maybe I want to connect with. And so you can basically join some of these sessions forever, essentially. And we also have a curated list of super tactical guides that can kind of help you in various forms of your business. So as soon as you graduate, the FI portal basically shifts and it changes into, you know, your alumni portal, let's call it that. And as part of your alumni portal, you're going to get a lot of really cool resources. So this is basically the network search tool. So you're going to be able to basically come in here, put a bunch of keywords, locations, and various specializations for mentors, and you're going to be able to search all the mentors in the network, and you're going to be able to have an opportunity to connect with them. Sometimes your best connection might be through Founder Institute headquarters, other times it might be through the local leader. So there's always going to be— you're always going to be kind of like a second degree away from some of these people that you may want to meet. In addition, you know, you're going to be able to select the partners tab, and then you're going to see all of the various partners that are available, how to basically— and it's going to say very specifically, this is how you redeem the $10,000 Amazon AWS credit, or if you want to do Google Cloud or something like that, this is how you do it. Very easy. It's all basically there available for you. In addition, you're going to have a list of curated tactical guides that we've basically been creating. Now, these are, again, very straight and to the point. You're thinking about doing a crowdfunding campaign, here's the things, here are the best practices, here are how you should think about it, all this other stuff. What are some common investor questions you might get? Look, you can see there's a common investor question guide. All sorts of stuff like this is basically going to be available for your site, off the site, and you're going to be able to always be able to, to access that information whenever you need it. And people still access the stuff even though they might have graduated 5 or 6 years ago because there's a lot of helpful information in there. All right, so in addition to that, we have a series of postgraduate programs that are designed to help you scale. Now, they all kind of fall under what we call like the Founder Lab umbrella, and they include Funding Lab, they include, you know, Venture Lab, and they also include Product Market Fit Lab, and we're going to cover them here. Now, these are— think of it— think of everything that I'm about to talk about today in this talk as kind of like a basket of tools, all right? You may use these, you may not use them. It's all good either way, right? We're going to be able to support you no matter what. So let's go ahead and start talking about Funding Lab. So basically what Funding Lab is, is our tactical fundraising assistance program. It's basically like the Founder Institute experience that you've had, but with one single goal, which is basically for you to get money. That's it, right? That's the goal. The goal is for you to basically pitch investors and close your round, right? It's similar concept as the Founder Institute's 3-month tactical fundraising program. You know, you're gonna have a dedicated fundraising coach, that's me. I help, you know, at this point hundreds if not thousands of companies raise money every single year. Certainly look at thousands of pitch decks, that's for sure. You know, we're gonna be reviewing all of your investment terms to ensure that these are good terms that are not compromising your business. We're gonna help you negotiate with, you know, with investors. Obviously we're gonna have a bunch of guides and things like that. Expert webinars, and you're going to have access to a very vibrant Slack community that— and you're going to be able to basically be just a direct message away from someone like myself. Quick note on the Funding Lab admissions process, right? So these are like the minimum criteria for fundraising, and I know all— I kind of COVID this a little bit in your fundraising sessions, but basically you have to be working exclusively on your business. We're going to be basically diligencing your company to ensure that's the case. Again, these are criteria for fundraising from professional investors, not necessarily criteria for Funding Lab, but if you don't meet the basic criteria for fundraising from professional investors, then it doesn't make sense for you to attend Funding Lab, right? And so, you know, you definitely probably— you definitely need some sort of a functioning product. That's kind of like table stakes these days for raising money from professional investors. Demonstrable customer demand or traction. This is again table stakes, 10% week-over-week growth is a really good Good statistic. And most importantly, you need to be able to have the time. A lot of people underestimate just how difficult and how brutal the fundraising process is. And you're gonna need, as a founder, you need to be able to spend a minimum of 30 hours a week for 3 months basically just pitching investors, okay? And that means that in order for you to realistically have a shot at doing this, you need to have a team because Without a team, if you're distracted by fundraising, your growth would stall and then you go into that second or third meeting with an investor and your traction went down, right? And you don't wanna be in that situation, right? So that's why it's important for you to have a team while you're doing that. There's also an FAQ on Funding Lab and I've actually posted the link here so you can learn a little bit more about the process. In addition to all of this, what we do is because we have a lot of experience helping founders raise money all over the world, As we basically match your progress and your traction to what the current market is doing, right? And so if you're telling me I wanna raise a pre-seed round in XYZ market, well, we have a pretty good idea of kind of what metrics you're competing against at that time for that particular round of financing. And so what we may say is like, look, maybe you should come back to a future one, right? And so what the admissions team does is that we want to make sure that you don't waste your time fundraising, right? That's the key, because again, it could kill your company because you could spend 30 hours a week or more doing this while being distracted. And again, fundraising a lot is a lot about return on investment, and we talked a little bit about this obviously in our, in our talk, but basically you want to make sure you raise money at the right time so that you can maximize the return on investment on your time, and we help you with that, okay? Quick thing on timing and logistics. We basically run two sessions, one in January and one in August. They match kind of like the main fundraising seasons worldwide. It's 100% virtual. Again, you're going to have weekly sprints just like you had before. We go pretty deep into these weekly sprints though, and we provide you with feedback on a lot of these weekly sprints in particular. Once you're actually setting up your round. So we give you a lot of feedback on your deck. The average founder gets roughly about 3 to 4 iterations of feedback on just their fundraising work, at least, if not more. You know, you're gonna also be working with working groups in a similar time zone. So you're gonna be experiencing a similar set of investors, which is obviously really helpful because you're gonna be able to trade information back and forth. And we get this question a lot. It's like, with regards to all of these programs, These are all free, okay? They're like all included as part of the Founder Institute experience, all right? So there's no extra anything for any of these programs. Quick thing on the structure of the actual program. Basically, month 1, you're gonna be working on your pitch deck, getting a very targeted list of investors that make sense for your business at that time, a data room to ensure that you can pass diligence, Then in month 2, you're basically gonna go on this very, very, very challenging and also very difficult investor blitz. You're gonna be pitching roughly about 50 investors or more. And then in month 3, at that point, you should have some people that are surfacing as becoming lead investors. And at that point, we will basically help you negotiate terms and help you basically close the deal with these investors. Now, once the 3-month structured portion of the program is over, we will continue to support you one-on-one until you close your round. It's just that after that point, the structure starts to get a little bit in the way because at this point you've already kind of gone through the major steps and it's just about you basically convincing more and more investors to kind of put money into your business, right? And so we will help you until you close your round, essentially. So we're with you until that point. Another important feature that we've added to Funding Lab is VC Lab integration. So Dale talked about this briefly, but basically what the Founder Institute is doing is we also run a VC accelerator, and we're essentially on track to launch 1,000 new funds over the next 5 years. They're global, ultra-inclusive, And they basically share our mission. So I've added a link here for the Mensarius Oath that every single VC Lab participant has to sign in order for them to be accepted into the program. So that basically means that their values match your values and match the values of the program. And this is a very, very important step. And, you know, Adela spoke a lot about alignment. Well, what we're doing is we're aligning the VC Lab program with the Funding Lab program at the same time, right? They run in parallel for a number of reasons. Number one, because both myself and Adeo lead both of these programs, then we're essentially kind of like supernodes for you, right? So we know which potential investors may be a good fit for you. We can help you with matching. We can help set up basically office hours between investors, which essentially becomes kind of like a way for you to get investor meetings, a very, very good way for you to get investor meetings, I should say. But more importantly, both sides are vetted, right? The Funding Lab program has reviews similar to your FI program, right? And the VC Lab program has reviews similar to your FI program. So, you know, we don't make these matches until basically everybody is 100% ready to go. This way it's like a win-win-win-win-win. For everybody. It's a win-win for you because you get to basically get introductions to venture capitalists. It's a win for the venture capitalists because the companies that they're going to see have been pre-vetted, right? And it's basically a good fit for everybody involved. And every single VC is going to basically create like a very clear investment thesis so they can help— so you can have a good opportunity to know that this person's a good fit or not a good fit for you, right? And so they make that all available in kind of like the office hours tool that you've been using to basically, you know, book myself, Ryan, and all the mentors for that. We're going to be— we use the same tool but basically for you to get investor meetings, okay? So that's Funding Lab. The program is the same as the Founder Institute in the level of intensity. And the way it works, you know, same kind of concept. And again, we run it multiple times a year, so if the timing is not right for you at that time, we will run it again later. So there's no, no, no problem whether you start the program and you drop out for whatever reason, or, you know, if the timing is not great for you. All right. In addition, we also have a program called Product Market Fit Lab, and we're starting this again in January. And the concept here, this is basically for the folks that— primarily for the folks that have joined the Founder Institute on the Launch Track. This is essentially designed to help you basically build your first product together with customers. Again, similar structure to your Founder Institute experience, you know, very, you know, very tactical weekly deliverables, weekly sprints. And at the end of the program, the companies that graduate or companies that finish the program generally will have customers with sales. In other words, they will have closed, you know, customers and they're paying you for your offering, right? So you've built the offering as a result of this and customers are paying you for it. In addition, we also have another program called Venture Lab. Okay, this is basically for the companies that are raising Series A. So the companies that are much farther along, you're, you know, you've got 50 employees now, you're basically ready to pull down $10-20 million. You know, you're, you know, you're clear, you have clear product market fit, you're ready to take your business to like a whole nother level, right? And this program is kind of a 6-month program, but it's not quite as structured as the other programs, primarily because, look, you're going to be running a company with, like I said, 50 employees, you're going to be very busy. And so the way we kind of manage through this is that we do kind of like bimonthly strategy review calls with both myself and Dale. We have a set of dedicated FI mentor advisors that we're gonna make available for you to basically close the Series A round, which is a very, very challenging thing to do. Obviously, we're gonna be going through all your materials, give you advice on that, and also we will make introductions to Series A VCs. Again, this is for when you're much farther along, but I just wanted to put this out here just because I want you to know that we're gonna be able to help you with this. And raising a Series A is a very challenging, very complicated process, takes a very long time. The diligence requirement is very, very very, very high, and so we want to make sure that you're basically maximize your chances of success because this is a very time-consuming process. Alright, finally, we have a program called like the Select Portfolio Program, okay. This is for the top 2% of Founder Institute alumni worldwide, and what that means is that the companies that are in this program basically get priority support from our team. It's think of it kind of like concierge support, right? Like we'll basically roll up our sleeves, make lots of introductions for you, on-demand help, office hours, things like that. It's basically concierge support and, you know, concierge network access, right? So we will do a lot of work trying to find right, the right mentors for you that may help, potential investors, potential partners, and things like that. And again, you know, a lot of people ask me, was like, well, what do I have to do to get into the Select Portfolio Program? Just build a great business. We'll be tracking your business, right, for over time. You will know if you, if you've been part of this because we were going to be inviting you to, to participate in this, okay? You know, every, every time you see companies that are featured, for example, in our webinars and things like that, pretty much all of them, for the most part, are select portfolio companies. And that's, that's also another benefit, right? So basically, like, if there's a webinar opportunity, there's a PR opportunity, there's a business development opportunity, right, that's there for you. You need help with mergers and acquisitions, right? So that's essentially what the Select Portfolio Program is. All right, you've heard from me a lot now, so I'm going to talk a little bit just about how to maximize our support, okay? So one of the challenges that we see is that Basically, a lot of times, you know, founders don't communicate, right? They don't communicate with their tribe, so to speak. They don't communicate with, you know, the people that want to help. They don't communicate with the mentors. Please don't do that, right? Please be proactive in communicating with us, okay? Look, if we don't know what's going on with your business, we can't really help you. The worst thing that can happen is— and this happens, by the way, all the time, all the time, and Victor can talk about this at some point as well— but look, we get an email from an alumni that's like freaking out because they got like 2 weeks of cash left or 3 weeks of cash left, and it's really challenging for us to help you at that point. 'Cause you only have 2 weeks left, what do we do, right? Like there's, you know, obviously we scramble to try to help you in any way that we can, you know, trying to either connect you to potential investors or connect you to potential loans or whatever it is that you may need. But the reality is, is that there's not a whole lot that we can do at that point. However, had this alumni sent out a regular monthly update or had at least reached out to us 4 or 5 months ahead of time, maybe 3 months ahead of time, possibly even 2 months ahead of time, there could have probably been a solution where we could have actually helped the company and be in a really good spot. And by the way, we do this all the time, right? So the top alumni, basically, you know, the company, a lot, most of the companies in Select Portfolio, for example, they send out a monthly update and the best of the best of the best, best, best companies in the Founders Institute, all the companies that have raised millions and millions of dollars, they're well on their way to success, All of them send super detailed updates about what they're— what's going on with their business. And guess what? That really helps them because basically people like us, advisors, investors, whoever they may be, they can be proactive in helping. So for example, we had an alumni reach out and say, look, we're going to do a big, you know, product launch in 2 weeks from today. And it would be really help— it would be really good if, you know, the network can help us, right? And this was not just to us. This is just like a general email they sent to every stakeholder in their business, right? What we did is we worked together with marketing on this. We basically helped them get a Product Hunt campaign and they were one of the top companies in Product Hunt. As a matter of fact, one of them was the top company in Product Hunt for that day because, you know, Foundry Studio can help increase your reach pretty dramatically. We read every single update. Every single update, okay? Every single company that sends an update to grads@fi.co, we read. So write this down, you know, send an update to grads@fi.co and we're going to basically help you in any way that we can very proactively. In addition, this creates a really big benefit for you because it basically helps you build momentum. On one hand, it's kind of a project management tool for you because every month you have to put something in the update. Right? And so it's like, oh, what do I do? You're scrambling, like, what do I do? But it's good, right? Because it forces you to have a deliverable, a KPI, you know, now that the program's over and you don't have like a weekly deliverable. So this is what I have to do. Don't think, just do this, right? You're not going to have that, you know, starting next week, right? But, you know, having something to fill in this email will really, really help, right? In addition, it helps you build momentum, right? When somebody, let's say it's an advisor, gets 2 or 3 emails from you and you're starting to kind of show like you're breaking out, right? They get more engaged. They want to help you. Oh, let me introduce you to this partner. Let me introduce you to this investor and things like that, right? So it helps build momentum for your business. So please, if you take anything away from this call today, all the alumni on this call, just put grads@fi.co on your investor update or shareholder update and just send it out. Just send it out every month. It's going to be really, really helpful for your business. You know, we talked a little bit about being proactive. Super important, right? If you're proactive, like if you— and I know this is hard, right, because sometimes you may be, you know, not comfortable sharing bad news. This happens a lot and this is another reason. You know, it's like I'm not comfortable sharing bad news. I don't want people to think of me as this or that. Look, don't— Don't worry about that with us, okay? Don't worry about that with us. We've already been through this together for the last, you know, 14 weeks. We're going to continue to be with you forever. We get bad news all the time. Share it with us so that we can be proactive in helping you. And there's a couple ways for you to do that. If you email grads, we'll read it, obviously, and we'll help you. Another way to do it is that in your profile, once this switches into this alumni view, you're going to have like a need help section where You can type in, I need help with this, right? So feel free to use that. We also read that all the time and we basically try to provide you with as much help as possible. But more importantly, don't be a stranger. You know, you're not in this on your own, though it may feel like it sometimes. Just know that the Founder Institute alumni support team is here, is here to help. Finally, help us help you. Okay. You know, Founder Institute's reach is pretty big, particularly with in the startup ecosystem and very probably pretty big with a lot of your customers, right? We have lots of followers on Twitter, LinkedIn. We're the largest meetup organizers in the world. Lots of alumni. We send out newsletters to all these people, right? We can amplify all of your news dramatically, dramatically. Like, it could be the difference between, you know, you being the, again, the top company on Product Hunt or just someone in the middle. Or, you know, it could be that, you know, you're looking to hire a new you know, head of engineering or something like that. And, you know, we actually, we actually did that for a grad and, you know, they got a lot of job ads as a result of that, right? Because we can be very targeted. We can basically, you know, promote your news on LinkedIn and that helps you get, you know, much more, much more reach, obviously. And I, and from an audience that's probably really helpful, would be really helpful for you, right? You all are startup entrepreneurs. A lot of the audience of the founders is startup folks, right? So you probably want those kinds of people helping you in your business, right? So we can help you with your job ad, right? We can help you, you know, we can help increase like your blog post rankings on Google, right? Because, you know, we can help with your SEO. There's all sorts of cool stuff that we can do. And so if you have news, let us know that you have news by emailing grads and then we'll basically help you get this, this news out as well. All right. Uh, you know, if you want to write a blog post about your FI experience, again, another cool thing, right? We'd love to share that kind of stuff out. Right. So again, help us help you. Right. Um, if you remember that and then we'll be good. So, uh, you know, that's it for me today. Uh, we're here to help, but just know that we're going to always be here to help, right? This isn't like the end of anything, right? Like if anything, anyways, it's basically just the beginning. Certainly with all of you folks that are basically becoming alumni, you know, most of the, most of the growth in your business will be in the future, and we're going to be able to be here to try to help you scale from here on out. So thank you, everybody. Really appreciate you taking the time to do this. And once again, I've been super honored to work with you all, and I'm looking forward to continuing to support you as you continue to scale your business.

Amazing. Awesome. Thank you, Mike. So that really concludes the event for today. Just, you know, before everyone jumps off, I'd like to echo Mike's comments here. It has been an honor to work with everyone. I see so much inspiration and so much collaboration happening between the chapters, and we want to continue this moving forward. So we're extremely proud and grateful for all the hard work that our alumni have demonstrated over the last 14 weeks of the program, and we're equally excited to continue helping you for years into the future. So as I mentioned, if you're an aspiring entrepreneur watching this, feel free to join, uh, the Founder Institute by going to fi.co/join. We have several Founder Institute programs starting in 2 weeks, including Silicon Valley, Singapore, London, uh, Waterloo, Toronto, Switzerland, and Israel. Um, so we'll also send out more details about the Founder Showcase event that we're going to have, uh, in the beginning of October. And once again, thank you speakers, alumni, and everyone in the audience for attending today. We wish you the best as you move forward building a brighter future for humanity. Thank you so much.