Leading Institute Info Session, July 2021: How to Lead an FI Accelerator in Your City

Janette's my partner in crime. She runs our expansion team at Founder Institute, and she is also a local leader who runs our Eastern Europe program. So as I mentioned, you know, my role at Founder Institute is head of operations, but I am also a local leader. So I run the Silicon Valley program. I've run literally 20 accelerator cohorts directly through Silicon Valley and Toronto, and then As head of operations, I help manage and run all of the different programs around the world. So hundreds of others, you know, probably like 600+ over the last 7 years. And so I can tell you, you know, both by like managing directors around the world who run the program, but also being a local leader and a director myself, the Founder Institute has been such a great platform for me as a startup leader to basically help build not only a venture portfolio, but also build the startup ecosystem in a community that I care about. So for me specifically, I launched a veteran startup accelerator back in 2012, and I've basically been using the Founder Institute as a global platform to position myself as a leader, to launch companies, and to basically build the veteran startup ecosystem. And so over the last, you know, I guess decade now, I've launched over 500 companies. The vast majority of them are through Founder Institute. And, you know, I attribute a lot of my personal success to being a local leader. So let me go ahead and jump in here. Everyone's here because they want to or are interested in learning how to become a local leader and what the Founder Institute is. And so this is a quote from Adeo Ressi, who's the CEO of Founder Institute. Basically, at the core of what we do, we believe that entrepreneurs are the best change agent to make a positive impact in the world. You just turn on the news and everyone's kind of lived through this last year of the pandemic. I mean, there's so many different problems that are plaguing humanity. We believe entrepreneurs are the best ones to solve those problems. What we're seeing right now is this global startup revolution. Although it kind of started in Silicon Valley 50 years ago, And it's starting to become more and more globalized now. And it may feel a little bit saturated in your ecosystem, but I can tell you from all the data we're looking at, we're just at the very beginning of this thing. So now is the time to basically launch accelerator programs, create startups, and help build the startup ecosystem because, you know, this new technologies and innovations are going to be the way that we solve a lot of these problems that are facing humanity. And so 12 years ago, we started the Founder Institute. And fast forward to 2021, we're now the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. So on average, we're creating 800 to 1,000 companies each year. We're in over 200 cities across 90 countries. We've launched 5,000 portfolio companies. And at our current trajectory, right, my goal as one of the leaders of Founder Institute is to launch 10,000 companies by 2025 in total from since our inception. So to help us do this, we have a mentor network of 21,000 mentors, which I'll jump into in a moment, and we've got, you know, a lot of funding for our alumni and a lot of people, you know, following us on social media. Now one thing that's not mentioned here, and I think a lot of you maybe have looked at VC Lab or maybe even came through the VC Lab program, but we launched a venture capital accelerator called VC Lab. And, you know, right now it's the world's largest network of venture capital firms. We've launched, I think by the end of this year, like 100, it'll be like 150 new VC firms. And the goal of that program is to launch 1,000 new VC firms all over the world by 2025. So on our current path, by 2025, we're gonna have 10,000 startups, probably close to like 40,000 mentors and 1,000 venture funds all within our ecosystem of Founder Institute. And so that's pretty exciting. And so just to kind of dive in a little bit into what pre-seed means, the reason why we've been able to scale so effectively is because we've focused on a very specific part of the market that other accelerators weren't addressing at the time. We're starting to see some copycats come out, but we already have global scale. So it doesn't faze us. So pre-seed, as we define it, is basically idea stage to early company. And what that means is like we can take someone who woke up yesterday that has an idea for a startup, and before they go and quit their job and, you know, work on it full time, they're going— they can go through the Founder Institute to validate the company, to go through the launch process and basically close the gap between being an employee and being an entrepreneur so that when they make that leap, That's not as scary and it's not as crazy of a leap for them. Then sort of like the average founder in our program that's not idea stage is what I would call sort of MVP stage. Maybe they hacked together a prototype or they've been working on this idea for like a year. Maybe they have a teammate or a co-founder that's part-time, but they haven't really launched the company. They haven't gone and gotten any like breakout traction and they really want to use Founder Institute to fill in the gaps and help them get to that traction and funding level. Then the later stage within pre-seed is what we call early company, and that's when you have a full-time team, a product that's in the market, early revenue, and you've maybe even raised a little bit of money. But these founders look at Founder Institute as a Silicon Valley-grade accelerator that's going to back them for the rest of their company's life because we have a ton of different, um, postgraduate programs, which I'll get into in a moment. And there's a lot of support that we provide within this network of investors and founders and mentors. And so when you look at that sort of spectrum, the pre-seed, you can see it's pretty big, right? Idea stage to someone with a full-time team, product, and traction. And so that's where, where we define pre-seed. Now I've had founders join my program who've raised $750,000 I've had founders who have already had $10,000 in revenue join the program. And even at that level, some of those companies still aren't ready for Techstars or Y Combinator or 500 Startups because it's super competitive. And so, you know, considering that, you know, and I'll use Techstars as an example because they're a really great partner of ours. You know, we're the largest referral source of startups into Techstars around the world. But even with Techstars, they have like a limit of like 10 founders per cohort, right? But they'll get 1,000 applications. So if you have 1,000 people applying to Techstars and 99% of them won't get in, where do they go to get that sort of, you know, accelerator experience to help them with their company? Well, that's where Founder Institute comes in. And so for many of you in looking at this tech ecosystem, worse— you can think of Founder Institute as almost like a feeder system that will then help grow the ecosystem and push founders into these other seed accelerators, angel groups, venture capital firms. So we basically are a deal flow mechanism for the ecosystem. And no one creates more companies in a more efficient way than Founder Institute. And I'll get into like our theory of ecosystem building in a little bit. So I mentioned that we provide lifetime support for founders at every single stage of their company. So what you're looking at here is sort of the founder journey, so to speak, where a founder will go through our 3-month accelerator program. It's part-time, 20 hours a week. When they graduate, and it's sort of if they graduate, because only the top 20 to 30% will graduate, then that unlocks the global network where they can do office hours with our team in Silicon Valley. We do a program called Funding Lab where we— it's like a fundraising accelerator that's free for our alumni. We'll actually work with them to help raise their next round of funding, whether it's pre-seed or seed. And then for companies that are raising, you know, a Series A, we have a program called Venture Lab where it's a little bit more concierge. It's not like a structured program like Founder Institute, but it's basically like, you know, we've been in Silicon Valley for 12 years and our CEO is best friends with Elon Musk. We know a lot of people. And if we have an alumni that's crushing it, that's ready to raise their Series A, you can bet that we're gonna roll out the red carpet and make as many introductions as possible to help them raise their money. In fact, one of our Montreal graduates, FightCamp, they just closed a Series B for $90 million. And so they've been, and they've gone through Funding Lab and Founder Lab, and they've kind of been through the entire spectrum of Founder Institute support. So they're a really good case study here. And then, you know, every founder gets sort of this like alumni support. And then we mentioned that, you know, we have this VC Lab program. So here's just some quick details about the program, how it's structured. So it's 14 weeks, it's part-time, and, you know, depending on your market, you can have anywhere between 20 to 100 founders per cohort. Back when we were in person, you know, for my Silicon Valley program, it was around like 30 founders per cohort, maybe 35. And now in the virtual environment, I ran a cohort with 147 founders. You know, on average, we're breaking over 100 for like major markets, but you can expect like on it for like any kind of like major metropolitan area, you can comfortably get to like 25 to 50 or 60 founders pretty consistently in this virtual environment. And so our job is to help you get there. So, um, during this 14-week program, the way it's structured is there's one evening session. So my, my program runs on Wednesday evenings, so it's one night a week for 14 weeks. Outside of that session, we have deliverables or a curriculum that founders need to follow and complete. So it's actually like company building work that they must do in order to graduate the program. And then there's also working group meetings that they do where they— every founder is put into a working group of other founders that are in the program, and it's basically this peer support group that helped them through the process of graduating the program. In addition to that, the founders will do office hours with you as the local leader, as well as with mentors who are participating in the program, and mentors get equity in the equity collective for doing office hours which I'll get into in a moment. Um, so bottom line is like, this is like, I don't know if we have any people in the military here, but this is like BUD/S training or Navy SEAL training for entrepreneurs. Super tough, 30% graduation rate. Um, but the founders that graduate are world-class and, and they're, they're going on to build some really great things. So I mentioned that there's an evening session one night a week. Um, here's what it looks like. So, and I would actually invite all of you to join one of my Silicon Valley program sessions just to kind of see, like, you know, under the hood and see what it's like. But basically, we start off with what we call founder hot seats, and this is where founders will pitch their company to our panel of mentors. So every week there's sort of a different topic. You know, yesterday when I ran my session, we had the branding session. Next week is the mentor idea review. But basically what you're going to be doing as a leader is every week You're gonna bring in 3 local mentors that have a subject matter expertise on that particular topic. So I brought in 3 branding mentors to join us. Now, during the session, the founders will pitch that panel of mentors and the mentors will give them feedback. You know, we do that for about an hour and then we move into the mentor presentations. So each of those 3 mentors will do a presentation based upon the subject of the evening. So branding, for the example of yesterday, and those mentors create their own presentations. We give them some guidelines, some maybe some talking points and like a written paragraph, but like they actually build the deck. And most of the time these mentors already have presentations they've done because they're experts in the space. So they already have a branding presentation that they've given. And so they do a 15-minute presentation each. So that lasts about 45 minutes to an hour. And then we do a Q&A session which lasts anywhere from like 15 to 30 minutes at the very end. So the session itself is about 2 hours, and then we do a post-session social where we either do breakout rooms on Zoom or we use Airmeet so that the founders can meet with each other, and then they can also meet with the directors, and then the mentors can also join and meet the founders. So we really build networking into this because the biggest value of Founder Institute is really the global network. And it's the relationships that these founders will build with each other because the mentors could be investors for their company, or they might know investors, or they could be potential partners or customers. So that's, that's an overview of the program. Let me tell you about like why be a local leader, like what are some of the benefits, and then I'll get into like the what here in a moment. So There, you know, we surveyed all of our leaders around the world, and it turns out that there were kind of like 3 main things that they really cared about. The first was helping startup founders, right? You know, most of our leaders are successful entrepreneurs or successful business people. You know, they wanna give back. They see, you know, they went through the process of launching their own company, you know, 10 years ago or however long, or maybe they're still doing it. And they know how painful of a journey it is. And so they want to help founders go through and do that process. So by doing that, you're helping entrepreneurs, but you're also building your status in the ecosystem as a startup leader. So it's not uncommon, and we have many success stories where like someone comes to Founder Institute, they want to be a local leader, maybe they're running like Startup Grind or Startup Weekend, but they want to take it to the next level and actually like run an accelerator. They come to Founder Institute, they run a couple cohorts, all of a sudden they have like this port— this venture portfolio of equity that they have in these startup companies, and then they go on to either run like a Techstars program or they go and launch a fund and become a venture capitalist. So this is really a way for local leaders to leverage Founder Institute, our global platform, our track record, to help you achieve your own personal objectives. And most of the time, our local leaders have other sort of, I guess, roles or responsibilities in the ecosystem, whether it's running another accelerator, or maybe they own a coworking space, or they're a mentor of some other program, but there's some tie that they have to the ecosystem. And Founder Institute becomes this like bolt-on global program that they're only spending like, you know, 6 to 8 hours of work a week doing, but it gives them tremendous value and leverage because we're the largest in the world. And so, you know, outside of that, you know, your goal as a local leader is to basically build a venture portfolio of startup companies. Now, you know, it's a long-term play, right? Even, you know, Udemy, which is one of our biggest, you know, unicorns and success stories, they went through the very first Founder Institute cohort 12 years ago and they still haven't exited, right? So like, you know, you're talking like a pretty long time horizon for building a venture portfolio and getting a payoff. But it's— but if you can create this like diversified portfolio of a couple hundred companies, then you're going to be in a very good financial position over time. And what we're finding is that with the advent of like SPACs and with like all the different things that are kind of happening in the ecosystem, you know, traditionally private companies are staying private longer, but now there's sort of a fast track and we're starting to see more exits. In fact, there's like 3 exits in the network that are happening right now. So there's lots of interesting things. Now, the kind of other component of why being a local leader, you know, you're joining a global community of other startup leaders, right? People that are maybe, you know, that are across 200 different cities, right? It's hard to get that kind of reach and it gives you a lot of, you know, good positioning. So, you know, maybe there's something that, you know, you could do that to leverage that, that would help you personally. And then here's sort of like the other thing that I had mentioned. It's this bottom point here, but essentially what Founder Institute allows you to do is to build your own accelerator in a part-time way with like 6 to 8 hours of work a week. And so, hold on one sec, I got out of presenter mode somehow. So the way that that works is, uh, you know, if you were to go and start your own accelerator program, right, let's say you wanted to launch a program in Bahrain, you would probably have to go and raise a couple million dollars to fund those companies. You'd have to hire a full-time team. You'd have to create your marketing campaign, your website, your, your application process. Then you'd have to go out and recruit the founders. You'd have to manage the program, create the curriculum, and then you'd also have to do all the post-program support. It's more than a full-time job and it's going to cost you millions of dollars to do, right? Conversely, you could come to Founder Institute, work part-time, we give you all the tools and materials you need, and you basically do this in a very, very efficient way. As I've meant— as I mentioned, I've literally launched 500 startups through Founder Institute part-time, right? So you can kind of see how this— how we give you the tools to help you scale, and I'll dive into what that means here in a moment. So Here are some of our leaders. You may have seen this, you know, in a previous deck or somewhere on our site, but Sunil Sharma, he's my friend. He's the managing director of Techstars Toronto. He's also the co-host of the Collision Conference, which is the web summit of North America. He came to Founder Institute, he was a VC. He's now launched like 300 companies in Toronto, and I help him run that program. Emna actually was an alumni of Founder Institute. So she went through the Founder Institute program graduated, her home country was Tunisia, and she said, I want to help launch startups in Tunisia. So she launched Founder Institute in Tunisia. She got the prime minister to speak at their first graduation, and now she's got this like network of mentors and people in that region that gives her sort of this level of influence and connections to help her own startup. Harold Hughes is also a friend. He's down in Austin. He's also an alumni from Greenville, who moved to Austin to launch his startup. And he basically is, he's doing very well with his company Bandwagon. And he joined the local leadership team because, you know, as a transplant from Greenville into Austin, he wanted to tap into the top people in the network, in the Austin ecosystem. So by becoming a local leader, he's now networked and connected to hundreds of mentors, lots of different partners, lots of different investors, and he's leveraging that position, his status as a director of Founder Institute, to help his startup and to build his brand locally. So, you know, there's literally like 500 other leaders in the network that you'll get to know over time. Here are portfolio companies. I mentioned FightCamp just raised $90 million. They're the second one here, so this is an old slide. You know, we have success stories like Udemy and FightCamp where it's like they raised tons of money, but we also have success stories where companies are raising like $2 million, We've got a lot of companies that have raised like pre-seed and are growing. And the one thing I'd like to point out here, which is super important, you know, Founder Institute's been around for 12 years. When I joined 7 years ago, we were at 1,000 companies. I mean, I think like 40 cities or something like that. So when, as we started to grow, like if you look at like, you know, the fact that we're at 5,000 companies right now, over half of our 5,000 company portfolio are like less than 4 years old. Right, in terms of their trajectory. So these are the companies that are like starting to launch companies and products and raise money and starting to grow because there's this like 2-year startup period where you're trying to figure everything else out. But, you know, so, so we're going to see a lot of really, really great success stories continue to kind of percolate across the network. So I mentioned the what. Here's what local leaders do functionally. So you're going to work 6 to 8 hours per week. To launch 20 to 30 startups per year, right? If you're in a big city, you could probably double the number of startups that are listed here. But on average, like, you know, if we look at just a standard program, let's say you start off a cohort with like 30 founders, you then graduate maybe 10, 8 to 10, 8 to 12, somewhere around that range. You can certainly graduate more like 15. It just depends on the founders and kind of the batch you get. But, you know, if you run the program twice a year, 30 founders at the start, 10 founders, you know, at graduation, you know, you're gonna create 20 companies. If you do that for 5 years, you're gonna have a portfolio of 100 startups, right? And so that's all doing this like very part-time. And, you know, as I mentioned before, most of our leaders are already working in the ecosystem. So I find that the best leaders are people who are either one, really motivated to become a startup leader, or two, they're already a startup leader and then Founder Institute work just kind of gets integrated into their normal workflow. So they're already running accelerators or incubators or things like that. And so here's functionally what you're gonna do. Everything starts with the local leadership team. You are literally the nucleus that's gonna build, that we're gonna help you build the ecosystem around you. But you can't do it alone. Some, I guess, you know, you technically can. Some of our best leaders are solo directors. But, you know, we recommend that you start the launch of your program with, you know, 2 to 3, maybe 4 at the most, local leaders. And so you're going to basically go out and find people like yourself that are motivated to become a Startup Accelerator leader, and you're going to attract them, and you're basically going to launch the program together. Um, then, you know, you're going to go through a process called the Leading Institute, which is a training program that starts next week. And I'll tell you a little bit more about this, you know, towards the end of the call. But for anyone here who's on the call that, that wants to look at potentially launching a program, or you're in the process of launching or building your team, um, I highly recommend you join the Leading Institute next week because that's going to be where we sort of start the training process and help you launch your accelerator. So in, during that training pro— program, it lasts about 6 weeks, it's part-time. We give you sort of weekly deliverables in a structured format to go out and complete to set up your program for launch. So once we actually launch the program, you're basically gonna host a couple of local online events. We're starting to do a little bit of in-person events again, depending on the region, but You know, for the next like 6 months or so, I think everything's still going to be online. But you're going to basically host like 6 local online events. We provide you with all the infrastructure and things you need. We'll promote the events and I'll kind of go into our support here in a minute. You're in charge of recruiting local mentors. This is super easy. Most of our leaders can, you know, quickly recruit like 50 startup mentors, you know, to start before they actually like officially start their first cohort. So, and then over time that list will grow to like 300 mentors depending on, on, you know, how aggressively you want to expand. During the program, you're going to give startup advice to founders and you're going to run these sessions. And the sessions are super easy to run. Again, like we give you the backend, all the tools, all the support and training to do this. And it's, it's seriously like very easy. Once you run one cohort, you just rinse and repeat. And like, you'll, you'll be amazed at how easy it is to create the amount of value that you'll create. Then you'll also establish partnerships with local ecosystem players. So other incubators, accelerators, and again, because Founder Institute tends to be the step before most other programs in the world, you know, we basically are the feeder system into the local startup ecosystem. So we create good companies that then go into other accelerators. And then you can also recruit local sponsors, banks, law firms, and that's a way to generate personal income. Now, get into the economics here of how you make money and how this all works in a second. So I mentioned all this extensive back office support from HQ. So we hold your hand the entire way. And our goal is to basically get to the point where you don't really need our, you know, weekly support, but we provide it, you know, for all of our local leaders for many years. Basically, there's two functions here. There's marketing and then there's operations. So on the marketing side, we have a, a really strong marketing engine and marketing team here at HQ that's basically going to do all of your heavy lifting for marketing. So every single week we're running a global webinar that our team at HQ runs, and we're going to promote it locally to your lists. That's going to generate interest and applications and awareness of your program. And that's gonna help you. We have a global newsletter that we manage, so you don't have to do any newsletters or updates or anything like that, which generating content, as you know, can take time. We do all of your digital marketing and social media. You're certainly gonna help us promote events and applications and things like that on your social media, but we're gonna be going out there taking out Facebook ads to promote your events. We're gonna be posting it to Meetup and Eventbrite. We have an events management system that makes it really easy for you to just basically share a link out to the event. We have a PR team, so like for like, you know, special programs or like important newsworthy items, we'll put them on it and they'll help get some press coverage. We do a ton of content marketing, so we probably are the largest startup content creator in the world. Just look at our blog and you'll see what I mean. And we promote all of that locally to your list. And then we have an automated marketing email campaign. So what this means is like as someone applies to your program to join it as a founder, We're sending them the campaign to like basically say, "Hey, here are your next steps, like make sure you do X, Y, and Z, and we do this full pipeline management for you," which transitions us over to this operations side, which is centralized admissions. So on average, your program might get like, I don't know, 200 applications or so. You don't have— you basically don't have to manage any of that except for talking and maybe doing office hours with some of the founders that are accepted in the program. We take care of all the, the application reviews. We'll accept the founders. We'll send them like supporting materials. We'll jump on calls with them. We'll invite them to Q&A calls. So there's a lot of kind of like pipeline management we do that you don't even touch, right? Everything is done online. We have a basically like a custom website that's been built over 12 years to manage startup opera or startup accelerator operations at scale. Every single week you're gonna be talking with myself or one of our team members who's a regional success manager to basically answer your questions and give you a touchpoint as you go and launch the program. We have all of the legal agreements in place. We've got a warrant and board consent in 90 countries. We take care of all the billing. So like founders who pay to join the program, sponsors who pay to sponsor the program, we take care of all that. We give you all the sales materials for sponsorship as well. So we do a lot of stuff to support you, which is why you only get to spend 6 to 8 hours a week running a full-blown accelerator. So here's the economics. Here's sort of like the monetary things behind the Founder Institute. So there's really like 3 things that you get as a local leader, economically speaking. The first is you get equity in startups. The second is you get sponsorship money. And the third is you get to share in the course fees. So I'm gonna dive into each of these in a moment. So the Equity Collective, I like to tell new leaders that you don't do Founder Institute to like make, to generate cash. Like, you know, you couldn't live off of working part-time at Founder Institute to support yourself and your family. It's like this sort of like extracurricular thing that you do that's extremely valuable where you can generate money. A lot of our leaders do, But it's really about building the startup ecosystem, positioning yourself as the leader, and building this venture portfolio. And so the way that that venture portfolio works is through something called the Equity Collective. And this is one of our best innovations that have come out of the Founder Institute. And it's really, you know, been a key to our success of scaling globally to over 200 cities. So here's how it works. About two-thirds of the way through the program, the founders need to incorporate their companies because you can't be a founder of a startup if you don't create a company. And so at that point, we call that the incorporation deadline, the founders also join the equity collective. And so that's where the— this is the equity sharing model where the proceeds are shared amongst the leaders, mentors, and founders. And so In order to join the Equity Collective, the founders sign a warrant which gives Founder Institute the right to invest in the company in the future. So it's basically a stock option. We have to exchange value to get the equity from the company. So one of the misconceptions from founders is they think, oh, like I'm just giving away 4% of my company, and that's just totally false. Early-stage founders sort of get confused when it comes to equity, but the warrant is essentially a stock option, right? There's a strike price that we have to pay. There's the number of shares that we can buy, and all of those economic terms are set at the first qualified financing, which basically means when the company raises a priced seed round of $100,000 or more. And so what we do is we basically hold on to that warrant, that right to invest, essentially until the company exits or has like some big equity distribution. And the way that that functionally works is like, you know, let's say like 10 years later, a company goes and exits. We basically, at that point in time, will execute the warrant, meaning we'll buy the shares for the strike price that was originally listed. And then when the acquirer comes in, they're going to buy those shares at a markup. For whatever the acquisition price is for those same shares. And so the delta between the price we pay and the price that the acquirer pays is the proceeds. And we take those proceeds and we distribute it to the people in the equity collective. So 25% of those proceeds go directly to the local leaders. So if you have a team of 2 people or 3 people, you'll share in that 25%. So let's say like Founder Institute gets $10 million in proceeds, right? Well, $2.5 million is shared by the local leadership team. Um, and so depending on how many local leaders you have, that will be split amongst you. Now you're responsible for paying your local taxes and all that stuff. We essentially pay you as a contractor and we just wire you the money. Um, the second sort of 25% tranche is shared by the founders. So using that $10 million example, you know, $2.5 million is shared amongst the founders who graduated the program together. So let's say you have 10 founders, right? Each of them will basically get $250,000 apiece. Not a bad return for joining a program and completing it that cost $1,000, right? And the reality is that 9 out of 10 of those companies will probably fail or not, not have like a large exit. Startups are super risky. That's why you have to go for volume and build a diverse portfolio. But, you know, for those companies that failed, they still get some kind of payout. And it's a way for these founders to diversify the risk of starting a company, right? Because if you're looking at a 90% failure rate, at least you have 10 or 20 other companies that are in the race that could potentially create some kind of payoff. The third 25% tranche goes to the mentors. So these are the people that come in for those weekly sessions They do office hours with your founders, and so that $2.5 million is split amongst like 50 different people. So the mentors are contributing less time, but they're also getting less equity for— and money from, from a distribution. And then the last 25% is held on to by Founder Institute HQ, and that's because we basically created the program and we're managing the equity. So functionally, we're giving away 75% of all proceeds that we get from any company around the world. And if you think about what that does, right, this is— this goes into our theory of ecosystem building. Now, um, if we, uh, let's just say we distribute $7.5 million back to the local ecosystem, again using this as an example, um, that's going to create the next generation of angel investors, right, of people who are, uh, forward-thinking innovative, and we're basically arming them with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to go out and reinvest that into the local ecosystem. And ideally, you know, and we've had leaders that are still running the program 10 years later, you're still cranking out companies that these other new angel investors can invest in. And so this is how you create that upward spiral that you saw in Silicon Valley 50 years ago. Where, you know, exits happened locally, the money stayed locally, right? Those people then invested into the new startups that were generated. That created critical mass that then incentivized more people to create companies, to create more innovation, that created more exits, that then created more money to be reinvested. So that's how we can basically duplicate Silicon Valley across the world. And we're already seeing this in ecosystems like Lagos, Nigeria, places where like they've got a really robust infrastructure but that the startup ecosystem is still emerging. And so this is how, you know, Founder Institute essentially works. So if you have questions on this, let me know. I'm going to continue going on. The other way that local leaders make money for their time is that you can raise sponsorship. And the bottom line here is that whatever sponsorship you raise, Founder Institute will bill the partner or the sponsor we'll keep 20% of it, and then we'll give you 80% as the local leadership team. So on average, like most major metropolitan areas can raise around $10,000. Generally it's from a law firm. Some places can also raise like $5,000 from like a bank or an accounting partner, but on average, like $10,000 per cohort, right? And you're keeping $8,000 of that. You do that twice a year, that's $16,000 in your pocket. Now you have to split that with your team, but you guys can figure out what percentage splits you want to do. But there's a lot of different like types of sponsorship, ways to do it. My recommendation, don't get distracted with sponsorship. Like $16,000 a year is nice, but you know, your goal is to build companies, right? The value is in the startup equity and building really strong companies. So this is a nice to have. No one's going to be able to live off of, you know, $20,000 in sponsorship a year, but you know, it's nice for, you know, 6 to 8 hours of work a week. And then the last sort of economic benefit to our local leaders is course fee sharing. So, you know, a lot of— so the way that the Founder Institute supports our global operations is by charging a course fee. And so depending on where you are in the world, it could be as low as $200 or as high as $1,000. And that's pretty cheap, honestly, like for— there's like startup programs, and there's like tech training programs that cost like $15,000, paying like $500 to $1,000 for like a top startup program is well worth it. And we get feedback all the time from founders that it was the best investment they ever made. They learned more at Founder Institute than through their MBA program. And so it's well worth the cost. Now, this helps us get to break even. And this is also why we've never had to raise outside capital, right? Whereas like other accelerator programs, they rely on raising funds, right, from LPs or from other companies to basically create their investment funds to then invest in the companies. Founder Institute has never had to take a dollar of outside investment, right? And so because we have this sustainable business model that gets us to break even, right? Now we're not getting rich off of course fees either, right? The value again is in the equity. But basically what happens is if you are successful And if you build a cohort of 20 or more paid founders, some of your founders won't pay, you'll give them scholarships, and there's like, you know, partnership things that we do. But let's say you get like a cohort of like 30 founders together. Let's say 5 of them receive scholarships. So you have 25 founders that actually paid for the program. You're gonna get a couple of them dropping out before the refund deadline, which is the third session. But if you still have 20 founders paid at that refund deadline, then we'll do a course fee sharing where you're gonna collect 25% of the total course fees for that cohort. So again, if you have, just for easy math purposes, if you have 20 founders that paid $1,000 apiece, that's 20,000 founders and you get 25% of that, or yeah, like $5,000, right? And so, you know, that's nice. You know, you raise $10,000 a cohort, you make $5,000 in course fees. And then you get a venture portfolio of startup equity. You know, it's, it's pretty, it's well worth it for the 6 to 8 hours a week. And then if you really crush it, right, let's say you get 100 founders in your program right now, all of a sudden it's not, you know, $5,000 in course fees. Now it's like $20,000 in course fees. So that's sort of where you can see how this, this can scale. And like the more time you put into it, the bigger your class will be, the better the founders. And so, you know, it will take a couple years to get to that level, but in the beginning, you know, most of our leaders can easily hit these basic metrics. So, uh, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop talking here in a moment and get to your questions here, but we have lots of leader testimonials who love the program. It's been great for them. Uh, that's why we have founders or leaders that are still running the program 10 years later. And the next steps for anyone here who wants to do this is that the Leading Institute starts next week. So if you want to do this, and now is the time, make sure you email myself or Jeanette. We'll send you the next steps to finish your application to join the Leading Institute. And you know, it's the middle of summer, some people don't want to do it now, that's fine. You can defer it to September, but I recommend, you know, the name of the game in startups is speed and momentum. So if you're interested in doing this, I don't think you should wait. I think you should take advantage of it now.