Networking for a Remote Startup Co-Founder, with CoFounders Lab

Hey everybody, welcome to this co-founder networking event. My name is Jonathan Gritchen. I'm a co-founder of the Founder Institute, and I do see we have several hundred people already in here, which is awesome. I was taking a look at the registration earlier today. We have people from all across Europe, all across Africa, all across the North, the Middle, and the South Americas as well. So if you are here live, let us know in the chat. This is a 100% live event. Met. Uh, hi Becky from Oslo, Norway. Um, I always like to give a little virtual high five to the first person that checks in here. We got Atlanta, Toronto, Germany, Los Angeles, South Africa, Brooklyn— I lived in Williamsburg for several years— um, Florida, Seattle, London, Baltimore, Jordan, Netherlands, Texas, Jeddah, Romania, Prague, Ireland. Awesome.

All right.

So this is— we love to create these international events. Okay. And especially in this kind of post-COVID world that we have right now as well, all of these geographic barriers that we used to have in finding business partners, finding employees, and even finding co-founders has really been broken down. I have a friend here. I'm currently in Colorado, and the speaker that I'm going to introduce in a moment as well is also in Colorado. I have a friend here who has raised I think it's $10 to $15 million. He's a co-founder in Boston that he's never met in person before, okay? COVID is really breaking down these barriers and creating so many more opportunities for people to team up with others. And there's just amazing benefits we can get from that, not only just culturally, but also financially as well. So with that being said, welcome everybody to this co-founder networking event. And before I bring on our keynote speaker today, let me just quickly describe how this event is going to work. So first, we are going to have a special keynote speaker. He's going to give a presentation. Um, the, the biggest benefit with these events is the interaction. Okay. So during his presentation, before, during, after, whatever, throw any questions that you have into the chat. Uh, we have a member of the Founder Institute team in there who's going to be collecting all of those questions. And then after his presentation, uh, we'll go through some of those questions. Now, after that portion of the event, we're gonna get into the networking. So for anybody that joined early, you would've been in this kind of virtual conference where you can join different tables based off topic, right? And also there's the option to join one-to-one, randomly one-to-one matched chats as well. So honestly, it's a great opportunity to meet other people. That really is the ultimate goal of this event, is for you to share what you're doing, to meet other like-minded people, and to bring those connections after this event, okay? So we do have a worksheet here that you can download at Bitly. Co-founder-worksheet that we'll be using as a, as sort of the frame of reference and the structure for that networking session, which will be taking place in just a little bit. All right, so with that being said, I'm going to stop sharing here and invite Stephen Price. Do you want to put your camera and your microphone on?

Hey, John, thank you very much. Yeah, appreciate you welcoming Co-Founders Lab and myself to this event. We feel very privileged privilege to speak to the audience, and I'm really excited to present today Co-Founders Lab and what we do and our ecosystem. So yeah, really appreciate you bringing me on stage. And my name is Stephen Price. I'm the CEO of Co-Founders Lab. Co-Founders Lab is a community of 400,000 people worldwide, mostly early-stage founders and entrepreneurs. And so we have a definite synergy with Founders Institute and Jonathan and Institute kindly accepted a proposal for us to do a collaborative event today. And so hopefully after today's keynote and presentation, that'll prompt you to ask some interesting questions that we can answer and give you some exposure to what we do on our platform and finding a co-founder, because that's kind of what we built our entire platform on. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to this. Thanks.

For sure. Yeah, no, and it's great to have you. Also great to have a fellow Coloradoan on here as well.

I'm actually based now in Castle Rock, but I was in Fort Collins. As you can tell from my accent, I'm definitely not from Kansas. So I'm originally—

I didn't notice. I didn't notice at all.

Yeah, Colorado definitely is the place to be. I've been speaking with some amazing, successful founders recently that are coming on as special guests. And yeah, I'm looking forward to the future and working with Founders Institute, that's for sure.

Awesome. All right. So with that being said, just for anybody in the chat, please don't be shy. Throw any questions into the chat. We'll have a short Q&A session with Stephen after the presentation. Stephen, if you want to bring the presentation up, we can get started on that. And I am going to hide my face here and hide my video or hide my audio just in case there's any barking from my dog. And Stephen, you can, you can take it away.

Okay, great. And you can see that. Okay, Jonathan.

Yep.

Okay, good stuff. Well, okay, so we'll start off here. And just before I get going, everybody, just for reference here, I'm a founder and entrepreneur. I founded 3 successful companies to exit, but I really do know how to build businesses from the ground up. So I'm a complete completely aligned with everybody in this call today as founders and entrepreneurs. So 62% of startups fail due to co-founder conflicts, and the co-founder conflict is considered the number one startup killer. So for all of the positive parts of finding a co-founder, it's quite interesting that the conflicts that do happen with that are very impactful. So it creates a real strong need to make sure that your co-founder and who you match up with definitely align with your, your view, your vision and your values, etc. So team is everything and it's statistically proven that teams built with more than, or basically rather than a solo founder, teams with co-founders are more successful than a solo founder in general. So there's a saying in Silicon Valley that it's better to have an A-team with a B idea than a B-team with an A idea. And I agree with this. Absolutely, that's— the team's everything, okay? You can have a good idea and you can grow it, nurture it, and then really, really blow it up with an amazing team. And one thing I've learned over the years is that a team and the importance of hiring the right people, bringing the right people in, is definitely one of the keys to success. So a little bit about Co-Founders Lab. Like I said, we have over 400,000 registered users, advisors, founders amongst our platform. We were in and around over 45+ cities, but now we're in this virtual world. We're actually global and worldwide. Our members are just like the audience today. They are, they're based everywhere in the world, all time zones, all locations. We've made, at the time this slide presentation was put together, it was over 550,000 introductions made, probably closer to 750,000 now. We have over 10,000 active discussions on our forums going on across our platform. We are very, very active in terms of trying to encourage communication and interaction with our founders. So this virtual and work from anywhere, work from home world we're living in right now is kind of like perfectly situated to increase these numbers. So we're growing as a platform. Okay, so Co-Founders Lab helps you throughout the startup journey, and we are quite often very much early stage, and so just a step-by-step basis of the founder, okay? So you as a founder, entrepreneur, you come up with an idea, and then what you normally do is go and find another co-founder. So where do you find those co-founders? And there are different places and different platforms you can get, but we do consider ourselves the number one globally to go and find another co-founder. So then you would go and move on to recruiting the right person, and we'll come to some of those steps later in the slide and presentation. And then eventually you would normally go to the next part, which is seeking investment, or you can even add to this going through accelerators, and Founders Institute obviously is a, is a great incubator and has a great program which you're all aware of. And so, some tips to get better results with your co-founder. So get clear on what you want, but stay open. So know your strengths and weaknesses. If you're starting your own business or you're thinking of joining someone else or open to both, strengths and weaknesses is the really important part here, okay? As entrepreneurs, we tend to be very positive, half glass full, ambitious, and in many cases, arrogant. And I was a— I was definitely that way in my early entrepreneurial careers. So one of the fundamental improvements I made was accepting that there are many more people out there that are far smarter and capable of doing various elements of your startup better than you are. So I think it's a really, really important point, and we can come back to that at some point later. So put yourself out there, online and offline. There's no excuses now. Everybody. It's so easy to interact. I even myself recently, I've joined up to Clubhouse as an example. Clubhouse has been just wonderful. It's been a great resource for information. It's a great place to listen and great place to meet people. Everyone from like-minded individuals all the way through to investors. I've actually been part of rooms where people have actually received investment and received commitments. It's crazy. So there's a plethora of Opportunities out there for you to interact online. Offline, obviously, as the world hopefully improves, I do believe we are going to get back to some face-to-face interactions, and I think that's really important. But online, the world is your oyster, and I would definitely recommend— I think my top 3 would be Twitter, Clubhouse, and LinkedIn. So what to look for in a co-founder? Risk tolerance, and we'll come to, again, we'll expand upon these a little later in the presentation, but risk tolerance, personality type, time horizon, commitment level, a value system, and skill compatibility. These 6 components, in my opinion, are pivotal to finding a successful co-founder and building on that relationship. So get creative, 'cause you may not need a technical co-founder. That tends to be what most people look for, but not necessarily. So don't wait for 6 months to find a tech co-founder. Find other ways of getting out your MVP out there. And a minimum viable product is very important that you understand what that actually means. It is trying to do it as lean as possible, most cases as cheap as possible. And the resources and tools that are out there and free now can enable even the least technical people to come up with something that they can present or create a V1 of their MVP. So educate yourself. Outperform your peers by arming yourself with knowledge. Again, the information available is fairly easy to find. People are open using social media, using— accessing people by DMs, reaching out to people. Many people are open just to give advice for free as well. And there are platforms, there are advisory platforms that you can get some good guidance from, et cetera. But educating yourself is really, really important, particularly so you're knowledgeable about your project, your company, your business, your sector, your vertical. So reduce your learning curve as quickly as possible because you really, to be successful, you really need to be as knowledgeable as possible about what you're doing. So, co-founders and the equity split investing. So, what is fair and what does it depend on? Obviously, most startups, I don't know what the percentage is, but I imagine it's an extraordinarily high percentage, financial position is going to be very impactful to how you can grow. So quite often when you bring on team members, co-founders, advisors, equity is normally the bargaining chip that you have, and it's quite important to understand that the best ways to deliver that, to make sure that people are fulfilling their part and making sure that they're being fair and staying engaged. And one of those is how you do your equity splits and how it vests, okay? Right from the inception, when the MVP is done, through acquisition, if you're launching a new business line or product or whatever that is, and up to investment and what that means. And every one of those stages can mean some kind of equity release. So the time commitment The investment part, they kind of aligned and they link in as well, like I mentioned. You want to keep people as motivated as possible, and so vesting is very important. We'll come to that, I think, on the next slide. But again, that's a simple visual reference of the pie there, right? You want the biggest piece of pie as possible for as long as possible. If you're building a company that's going to go through to post-seed investment and get into Series A, B, C, D, that gets really, really, um, that, that takes a lot of equity. So as founders, you want to be able to retain as much of your company as possible down the line. So bear that in mind. So again, like, vesting equity, just a quick explanation. So vested in equity is a tool that allows a co-founder, employee, advisor, or board member to earn their allocated shares over time. And so the key terms of that, right, so the vesting schedule is the period of time in which the equity vests. And there is a cliff, a term that you may have heard of as well. So that's sort of like the initial moment which a portion of your equity vests and you receive or earn retroactively the equity you earned up until that period. So there are two different types, and I think there are pros and cons to both of those methods. And this is just one part of investing equity as well. Like I said, it does go a bit deeper. So how Co-Founders Lab can help. We have 400,000 founders, entrepreneurs, and advisors. We also have a number of investors that are quite often just creeping around in the background and looking on the forums and looking at companies and reaching out. We have a learning center, we have a huge asset library to help every startup succeed. We have a resource section with templates, agreements, and much more kind of things you can download, even legal documents, etc. And we have various pitch practices. You can even pitch to an investor now, and these are real investors ready to write a check as well. But we have Q&As and AMAs and special guests, and we're, like I said, we're trying to align with Founders Institute, and hopefully this is the beginning of a long-term relationship with these guys where we can kind of align and really help out Founders Institute with our users as well. So there'll be some links after today's show and Jonathan will share some of that information after. So our mission at Co-Founders Lab is to arm entrepreneurs with the resources that they need to thrive and everything we do is centered around forwarding this goal. And my ethos as well, my personal ethos and kind of the culture I want to bring to Co-Founders Lab is It's sort of like helping founders and entrepreneurs understand what success really looks like. Everybody wants to build a $100 million or a billion-dollar company, a unicorn, or go to IPA, and we definitely want to encourage that and help that where we can. The realism is that most businesses are going to be fairly small relative to those targets. If you can build a million-dollar-a-year business, I mean, that's amazing success to me. If you can build a business that is— Pays your mortgage, pays your rent, it gives your family the ability to go on vacation. To me, that's success. My personal mission as well is that I want to really change what success really looks like, but we absolutely want to encourage everybody to be as successful as possible. If that's tied to a dollar value, then so be it. That's what we do. We have a premium membership system that gives many, many offers, and we're improving on this all the time. It's unlimited messages to people. We have advanced search and filtering, so you can actually identify somebody in a city or even down to a small town and somebody that's a technical co-founder or someone who's operation-focused or marketing, etc. And there's analytics that come with this and a lot more involved in our platform. But it's free to join. It doesn't cost anything to join. And you have some resources you can use for free, including finding a co-founder. Our learning center is like certificated courses, so they're taught by leading industry experts with real experience. And these are quite lengthy courses. Through and will definitely put you in a better position than you was prior to taking the courses. The certificate courses are various people built around various different topics, etc., and these are going to be helpful to you as founders and entrepreneurs, and everything from fundraising through to growth hacking, marketing, operational, building teams, everything. So there's We have lots of resources, so go and check it out. And you can have a shot here of what it looks like, and easy to download and access. We also have an advisor network, so you can book an appointment with an advisor. Some offer free sessions, some are paid sessions, but ultimately what this helps you do is it helps you retain your equity because you don't have to give up equity to get advisement from some of the world's best advisors that we have on the platform. Okay, so that's the end of the presentation. So I suppose these are kind of what everybody's looking, right? I'm looking to join a company, I'm open to either, I'm looking to, for someone to join my company, I'm looking for a founder, co-founder. So hopefully that presentation has given you some thoughts on answering some questions or what you're looking for in a co-founder. And we're going to have a scorecard that helps you sort of Analyse Your Founder and Co-Founder Fits, and I believe Jonathan's going to provide a link for that. So Jonathan, thank you very much for that.

Yeah, no, thank you. So yeah, if anybody— let's put that co-founder, let's put that co-founder link into the chat. And there's been a bunch of questions that has come in, so I'm going to start on some of these questions. A few of them, not surprisingly, are on the equity split. Right.

It seems to be reinvestment or equities definitely at the forefront of questions in nearly every Q&A and AMA that I'm involved in.

Yeah, equity splits always a pretty common question. We actually have a spreadsheet that we'll send in a follow-up email to help you calculate that. But basically the greatest thing that I loved when you showed that pie, right? The first thing that I always noticed in that pie was there were no two pieces that were equal. Right? And that is super important, right? It's not like that pie, if there's 3 co-founders, it wasn't split a third, a third, a third. If there were 2, it wasn't split in half, right? That pie definitely was differently distributed because not everybody is the same, right? So any feedback that you have on that? I mean, at least—

I think really, so something I'd like to share, and again, this is not like, this is not absolute, but it's kind of general, but I like to share with everybody the different stages of investment rounds and what they normally look like. So, like Jonathan said, in the co-founder part of that, okay, really, really early stage, it's really important to understand the value of what you perceive the company to be and what that means in terms of percentages you're giving out. I've had so many advisory sessions with founders, they're like, I've found a technical co-founder. This looks like it's going to work and we're going to go 50/50. And I'm like, well, okay, okay. I understand the theory behind that. But just for context here, normally any, some sort of like seed, pre-seed sort of stage investment, early round investment, angel investment, you're probably looking at around like 5 to 10% of equity that you're going to have to give up. And then when you get to a Series A, Each series generally is around 15 to 20%. So let's just say you're going to go from angel investment through to Series C. Best ways, you're talking about you're already going to be diluted by 55% of the company. At the front, maybe at maximum around 70%, which leaves you 30% as a founder. So that distribution is then, um, left amongst bringing on board team members, bringing on co-founders, and then all of a sudden the realization is, hey, I'm the founder of this company and I have very minimal shares associated with that. So it's, it's something to consider when you're doing the equity splits and how— with equity splits in this instance, how much of a percentage of company you're willing to give up. Um, it looks like we've lost Jonathan there for a second, so hopefully that's just a connection issue. Felicia, will you be able to chime in there and maybe guide some more questions?

Yes, I'm sorry about that. I think Jonathan is a little— his connection is lost. But we did have another question that just came in from Boris. He had a great question, which happens a lot, is that co-founders are curious about sharing their idea and what if someone steals it. So they want to know your advice on that.

Is it that kind of like the cloaked in, I don't know, like a detective or somebody with a vow that's really trying to understand. It's a concern that everybody has with their startups, okay, because we all believe that we have this amazing idea, this project or this platform or product that's going to blow up and eventually be worth hundreds of millions each day, but we're so scared to actually share that. So there's different elements to this. First and foremost, the kind of obvious thing, okay, protecting, or if you can protect your idea with IP, trademarks, etc. To be quite honest, outside of the domestic—

It's a waste of time.

Hmm?

Sorry. It's a waste of time if you're an early-stage founder.

If you're an early-stage founder, it's going to be almost impossible to protect, okay? If you come to a market with an idea, let's just say, and actually I had a conversation with a founder on Co-Founders Lab yesterday who was in the space, which is kind of like a security, sort of like a ring, the kind of Ring doorbell space. And there's so many players in that market and they're so big right now that if somebody sees that idea, what is he going to do about it?

Right.

What's he going to do? And so you get so scared into almost not even wanting to launch your idea. Jonathan, I'm not sure if you caught the question from the audience, but this is relating to like sharing your idea with a co-founder and worrying that somebody is going to take it. Quite honestly, there's always going to be that risk. You can get somebody to sign an NDA, but an NDA is only worth the paper it's written on. And if you've got the ability to enforce it, anything legally is extremely expensive. So there is a risk element. And I think any founder needs to understand how they can pitch the idea, how they convey their project and not fully give away your secret sauce. Okay. And there are ways to do that. Definitely. I mean, I've done it plenty of times, but at some point you're going to have you have to give that information up and trust your co-founder or trust your investor or the person you're pitching to. Jonathan, I don't know if you had any feedback on that.

No, I definitely do. Yeah, I'm sorry I cut out there. I'm not sure what happened. But yeah, you've heard this a million times, and I love the quote that you had. I think it was one of your first slides, right? "Better to have an A team with a B idea than a B team with an A idea," right? And I think that really describes this dynamic really well. Because the idea is just the seed, okay? Um, literally every idea changes over time in response to the market, in response to what the customers want. No idea as the seed, as the light bulb in somebody's head, is exactly what it is when it's actually making money in the market. And as a result, all of the value is created in between that light bulb moment and when it's making money in the market, right? Like, all— it's all in the execution, And that execution is done by the team. Right. So we work with a lot of early-stage entrepreneurs, and the most common example I'll get is like, oh, well, I don't want to be Winklevossed. Right. I don't want to be like, I had the idea for Facebook and then somebody stole it from me. Well, the idea for Facebook was pretty worthless, to be honest with you. The idea.

The execution.

Right. The idea was a social network and, oh, we're going to focus on a university instead. At the time, social networks were not making any money. Right. The value in it was through the execution over time and the fact that they didn't serve ads in the beginning and the fact that they went from university to university and made it exclusive. Right. Like all of those things is where the value is created. So yeah, as you said, Stephen, there is a risk. Right. But at least where we see the risk is exponentially higher to to not share the idea with other people and get the feedback, which is what creates it, which is what makes an idea valuable, right? Is the evolution of that idea by receiving feedback to make that idea better and to execute it in a way that makes something valuable. At least that's how I see it.

Yeah, yeah. Because at some point you're going to have to do some sort of like user research, user discovery, get the feedback to always continually improve your product or platform or whether your project is and And that requires exposure. You need to expose people to it. And so at some point you're going to have to take that step off the cliff and say, right, I'm going to go for it. But in general, I think it's almost kind of a misnomer as well, because there's not a million cases out there of people stealing ideas and then taking it to fruition and being super successful.

It's extremely rare.

I think it's more of an entrepreneurial gut issue. It's like, I'm scared, which I get. Everyone gets it. It's the same as actually putting your product or your project and actually putting it out there as an MVP or for beta testing. We're all scared of getting crappy feedback and people telling us, no, this doesn't work. It's not going to work. It's like, nobody wants this. I've had that. It's a similar kind of thing.

Yep. Craig put an interesting note in here too. Yeah, first to market does not always win as well. I would take that further, Craig. First to market rarely wins. Okay. It's just that the people that win sort of write the history, you know what I mean? So believe me, it's usually not the first to market that wins. Even Google AdWords was a ripoff of Yahoo or I forgot what the predecessor to Yahoo was. You know what I mean? Like, the first to market very rarely wins, actually, to be honest with you. You want to be getting as much feedback as you can. The biggest risk, the biggest fear that I at least have for entrepreneurs is that you spend a lot of money and a lot of time building something that nobody wants. And that is the risk that you have with this mentality of not trying to share it because somebody's going to steal your billion-dollar idea, right? And then you weigh those two risks against each other. And the risk of spending a lot of money and time building something nobody wants is so much higher than somebody, quote unquote, winklevossing you. You know what I mean? So let me see, are there any other questions here? We're going to go into the networking portion in a minute, and I apologize there for dropping out on connection, but let's see. Peixamán has a question: for a highly technical product, would it be preferable for both or all the co-founders to be field experts so they can build the product faster, or would you recommend, you know, from your experience, they have kind of different skill sets to bring this thing to market?

Okay. So again, this is my opinion. It's not necessarily the right opinion, but I would absolutely advocate that people stay in their lane when they're, when they're within a startup organization. We're all going to end up wearing many hats. Okay. There will be crossover points. There will be times that you merge, you collaborate and you feedback, and that's, and that's healthy. But I am a big believer in people staying specific to what their actual function is within the organization. So even if it is a highly technical and really, really technically focused product in this instance, having two CTOs for me is just a recipe for disaster. Okay. It's like there are alliances like a CTO and a CPO, like a chief product officer or someone. And we don't have to put C-suite titles here. We just stick with titles. Okay. So a product lead and then a technical lead. They are going to be very complementary to each other, and it's very likely they're going to share a strong knowledge base, which is helpful. But having two opinions, and strong opinions and strong characters, is not necessarily going to be beneficial. That kind of comes out with the scorecard that we're going to probably show or give to you guys to go over, because you want people to be complementary as opposed to conflicting, in my opinion. As I said, I'm a big believer that people stay in their lane, they stay within their roles, within their segment or sector of the business. But absolutely, team is everything and complementary work, collaboration is always going to be super important.

Right. And I always see that as the unique thing with startups is like you said, I do agree, like, you know, stay in your lane because yes, there should be agreements in place, even just verbally in the beginning. Look, when it comes to product, yeah, I'm the point person. When it comes to this, I'm the point person. But like you said, everybody does everything. So there's staying in your lane in terms of ownership. But also, if at least I have found every co-founder of an early-stage company, if you don't have people that are willing to get out of their lane at least a little bit when they— when somebody on the team needs to step up to do it, right, then that can be a problem. But, you know, you need to have people that are able to wear a lot of different hats. But then there has to be the agreement. Okay, but when it comes to this, this is my expertise.

So absolutely.

Yeah.

And you can clearly define those really early on in the relationship when you find a co-founder or founders. Same as building team members, right? It's the same sort of thing. Everyone should be accountable for what they're doing. But you need to set that out very early. The exception is, hey guys, if I need somebody, we need to pull some resources in and we're here at like 11 PM at night and we've got to pull together a template because we're doing a quick email blast about something to our subscribers. And we do it here at Co-Founders Lab. I'm doing it now. I'm practicing what I'm preaching. My title is CEO, but I kind of touch many, many points, but I absolutely know that I've got out with our new leadership team in, because they are far better at doing their role than I am. So it's just like, if they need help, I will help them out. But yeah, I agree. Yeah.

All right, so with that being said, I think we're gonna go into the next portion here of this event. Stephen, thank you so much for these awesome insights. And for anybody else in the line, and we've had a bunch of people asking, yes, we are going to share a video. Yes, with your approval, Stephen, we'll share that presentation. Absolutely. That'll be okay. And then also, in addition to that, there was this co-founder scorecard that Stephen mentioned. He shared this with me over email a couple days ago, and I was like, wow, this is a really great resource. So we're going to share that as well. And actually, we just shared that in the chat too, but we will share that over email as well because honestly, this is one of the most important important things that you can do for your business. So the more diligent you are about this process, the better. Stephen, you know, I don't know if maybe you have any— there's a last nugget that you want to give or a parting thought to people here. Obviously, we have a lot of people from all over the world, obviously have some ideas, have things that they're passionate about, have things that they're just, you know, trying to find other people to join their mission. Any final thoughts you have for them?

Yeah, I'll kind of— I think I'll leave you on the topic of the day, which is co-founders. Now is an amazing time and opportunity to find a co-founder that aligns with you. Just think of it like a dating app, okay? You may not be successful the first time around, but you can just go again and go again. But there's definitely a perfect match for you there, and I would encourage people to do this on a global level. Don't just focus on your area because now we have the opportunity where I can bring team members in whatever time zone they could be. They could be in Australia, they could be in India, it could be in Africa, they could be here in the US.

Okay.

Take advantage of this time and situation. It's exponentially growing at the moment, the founder and entrepreneurial space, because we now have the ability from working from home and not having to do that 9 to 5 commuting grind in many, many cases anyway. And so we At home, just nurture those ideas, grow those ideas. Don't be afraid to reach out to people. Upon one of the points that we touched on, take that leap of faith, yeah, but do it educated and do it based on knowledge and based on facts rather than on a whim. I'll just leave you at that.

100%. All right. Yeah, and thank you. This is actually a really good a really good segue, Stephen, to the networking portion. So let me bring up the slide here. Stephen, thank you again.

Thank you very much.

So let me bring up the networking portion of the event here. So this was a complaint that we got a couple of weeks ago when we ran a similar event where people were like, look, there's all of these different tables in the networking lounge. Why aren't there tables for Brazil or for Mexico or for California or whatever. And I had to jump back into the event and I had to tell people, look, take the blue pill, the red pill. I don't remember what the Matrix analogy was. It was like, you need to free your mind. Okay? We are now in this post-COVID reality. Yes, there's vaccines. Yes, people are going to start meeting up again this summer here in in the Northern Hemisphere, but it's still, it has literally accelerated the pace of virtual work by probably a decade. Okay, so it doesn't mean we're not just all gonna go back to, okay, everything has to be done in person. This stuff is virtual. So please take Stephen's advice there. You have to think outside the box. Think, it's not just about the person that you're gonna meet at the pub down the street from you anymore, right? Or at the coworking space in your city. It's about the people that you connect with, you know, leaving aside geography, that you connect with on, I don't know, maybe you call it a spiritual level, but just the things that you're passionate about, the skill sets that you need, et cetera. So, all right, so we're gonna go into this co-founder networking portion of this event. For the people that joined before, you probably saw it.

Sorry to interrupt you. I just wanted to let you know that I'm gonna send you a specific link for to everybody on this call today in case they want to go and see Co-Founders Lab. It's specific to Founders Institute, so I'll provide that via email now.

Okay, awesome. Yep. And we should be sending out— we just got to crunch the video from this, but usually we get out the post-event email within about 48 hours or so. So anybody that has registered for the event, you'll receive that. And Stephen, I'll be sure to send that info to you as well in case there's anyone on your end. So for the people in this networking session, number 1, you need to be on a desktop or a tablet using Chrome or Firefox. Okay, I apologize if that's not what you have, but Airmeet, the platform that we're using today, is a really cool, powerful platform for networking, and those are just the limitations this platform has. Number 2, please come in ready for be ready for video networking, okay? Believe me, yes, the virtual world has a lot of benefits, but at least seeing somebody face-to-face through a screen is still gonna have a lot of amazing benefits, all right? So be ready for virtual networking. And when we go back into the networking room, you basically have two options. Number one, you can jump around these different group chat tables, okay? Or number two, which I believe is on the top of the screen here, you can join randomly one-to-one matched chats. And I believe those chats last about 5 minutes. And, you know, somebody you don't like them or they creep you out or whatever, you can just click next and you can just, just keep cycling through. Now, the way that we like to create some structure around this, okay, is we created this co-founder worksheet, which you can download right now at bit.ly/cofounderworksheet. And it's, it's right there in the chat as well if you don't feel like typing typing it manually into your browser. And there are a couple of things that you're going to see on this co-founder worksheet. Number 1, we're going to ask you to briefly describe your idea or business, okay? Now, the emphasis here should be on the word briefly, all right? Everybody wants to talk about their business for 60 minutes, right? It's the people that can talk about it for 15 seconds and do it in a very clear, concise and compelling manner, those are going to be the ones that are able to, to find other people to build their business. Okay, here is a very simple format that we give you to do that. So my company, insert name of company, and look, if you don't have a company, I know a lot of people here don't, you could just, you could either just skip this or just put in the name, the theoretical name of the project that you have. You're developing a defined offering. Okay, so here defined offering is something I'm developing a website I'm developing a mobile app. All right. The best advice I can give you here is just to speak plain English. All right. Don't say I'm developing a VoIP AI-assisted machine learning SaaS platform, right? Like the point here is not to impress people with how cool and techie your thing sounds. The point in this whole sentence is to be super clear, super specific, right? So my company, blank is developing a website, a mobile app, a subscription service for small businesses, whatever, to help a defined audience. Now, again, the more specific the better. You probably don't want to say like women, for example, right? Because that's half the planet, not very defined. So be specific. You're trying to help them solve a problem, right? If your business isn't solving a problem, then to be honest with you, you might not have a business. And you're trying to help them solve that problem with secret sauce. Right? So secret sauce in this case, for anybody, any of the MBAs in the room here, right? I mean, that could be your, your UVP, your unique value proposition, your key differentiator, anything like that. But what's the unique point that you're taking on this? All right. And then after that, provide some insight and background. Why are you building this company? And what are you looking for in a co-founder? And then the last thing we have here is to don't be a jerk. Okay, believe me, everybody wants to talk about their business because it's so unique and it's so awesome and nobody's ever had this idea and it's so brilliant, right? Everybody wants to talk about their business for 30 minutes. Okay, it's the people that are able to talk about it and to distill it down into the most simplest form, um, into 30 seconds, 60 seconds, right, are going to be the ones that are going to be able to, to catch other people's attention. So, you know, we're all here to meet other people. Don't hog the time, okay? And for everybody who's going into these group chat tables, we need some self-policing here as well, okay? So if somebody's hogging the time, let's self-police. Somebody needs to jump in and say, okay, look, maybe we should let the next person go, right? So let's just self-police here a little bit. Don't be a jerk. Don't try to hog all the time, all right? Because believe me, even if you're just going to go in there gung-ho and just talk, you want to talk about your business all the time, it's very useful for you to hear other business ideas because you might find some other people that are doing something similar that you might want to have some further discussions with. Okay, so those are the rules. Please download bit.ly/cofounder-worksheet. It's there in the chat right now. I would recommend that you actually have that worksheet next to you when you're having the chats with other people. And we really, you know, as a rule of thumb, 3 minutes per person or so. But honestly, I would, you know, just in practice, I would recommend the people that can do it clearer and faster are going to be the most effective. So I would even recommend 1 or 2 minutes, but at a maximum, if somebody goes over 3 minutes on on your table. It's time for the masses to start self-policing and saying, okay, maybe we should move on to the next person. Okay, so that's all we got. Thank you so much, Stephen. Thank you so much, everybody, for joining. So now we're gonna transport you back into this virtual networking room. Again, don't be a jerk, follow the worksheets. Stephen, thank you so much. You're all going to get an email within about the next 48 hours or so. So don't get mad at me if maybe it takes a little bit longer, but about the next 48 hours or so, we're gonna have links to, it sounds like, an offer from Co-Founders Lab, some resources from Co-Founders Lab, and some other resources as well to help you find a co-founder for your business. All right, thank you everybody. Thank you, Stephen. And we're gonna end this session and you're gonna be transported right back into the networking room. Everybody, I hope you have fun and I hope you meet some interesting people today.

Thank you, everybody. Appreciate it.

Take care.