The Founder Institute's four-month curriculum covers everything you would expect from an early-stage startup program, including topics like "Startup Legal and IP” towards the beginning, to “Fundraising” near the end. What makes the curriculum special is the Mentors that teach it, whose passion, feedback and support helps our companies avoid rookie mistakes and set the foundation for a meaningful and enduring company.
The Founder Institute carefully recruits approximately 25 Mentors per Semester, who are normally the CEO or founder of a successful startup. Rather than specialists or consultants, we prefer Founders and CEOs to give our companies "the entrepreneur's perspective." The mentors share their experiences, best practices, and mistakes, while also providing specific guidance and feedback on the Founder companies.
In addition, the Founder Institute's unique Graduate Liquidity Pool allows our mentors to share in the equity of companies formed in each program - and, their share is based solely on the anonymous ratings they receive from the Founders both during, and after the program. In this way, the Founder Institute incentivizes mentors to take a special interest in our startups, and provide as much assistance as possible after the program.
We have a great lineup of Mentors confirmed for the Spring 2013 Johannesburg Founder Institute, including many from out of town. See the full list below.
Adeo Ressi
CEO, TheFunded.com
Adeo Ressi is Founding Member of TheFunded.com, an online community of 17,000 CEOs to research, rate, and review funding sources worldwide. Adeo also runs the Founder Institute, a mentoring program that helps entrepreneurs launch hundreds of world-class companies each year. The Institute is the eighth start-up that Adeo has founded or built, four of which were acquired and three of which are still operating.
Alan Burger
CEO/Founder, Infoslips
Alan Burger is the CEO of InfoSlips, an award winning e-billing provider. While at InfoSlips, he has helped the company grow to be the leading platform for the replacement of paper with digital digital distribution in Africa. He specializes in delivering superior recipient focused experiences for customers' documents, using InfoSlips, across multiple channels including email, mobile, online and print.
Anthony Stonefield
Managing Director, Africa, Gramercy Millennium Group
Anthony Stonefield is Gramercy Millennium Group's managing director in Africa. He is a serial entrepreneur in the technology innovation space, who throughout his career, has raised over $24M in venture financing; created, built and sold three start-ups, the last which (Moviso/Infospace Mobile) generated over $1.5 billion in revenue; created the multi-billion dollar US and European ringtone markets; pioneered downloadable music distribution in partnership with AT&T/Bell Labs; and led a Communication 2.0 project to help revolutionize telecom for Qualcomm Labs.
Christoph Sollich
The Pitch Doctor, Startup Consultant
Christoph Sollich is a freelance startup consultant specializing in business model generation, strategy, marketing and pitching. After writing his diploma thesis about “Virtual Communities” (old-school speak for “Social Networks”) and a detour through advertising (as a copywriter) he started working in startups in 2007, since 2009 as a freelancer. After winning a couple of “Best Pitch” awards (and no awards for his ideas!) at hackathons and startup weekends, startups started asking his advice about pitching - although only he refers to himself as “The Pitch Doctor”. He describes himself as supremely intelligent, very funny, extremely good-looking and excessively humble.
Eric Edelstein
Serial startup junkie, Zunguz, global sunset investments
Eric Edelstein is the CEO of ZunguZ and is a Financial Analyst turned Serial Internet Entrepreneur, and occasional Angel Investor. He has co-founded many of South Africa’s largest Internet marketing & product companies such as the incuBeta group (responsible for Click2Customers, TrafficSynergy, & Yola), Springleap, and Social Network meets Crowdsourcing, evly.com. Eric is passionate about all types of online marketing, but especially pay per click, search engine optimisation, affiliate marketing and social media. Eric speaks regularly at tech conferences, and writes for business & technology media.
Gareth Ochse
Founder, ValuationUp.com
Gareth Ochse is a former Bain & Co consultant and has over 20 years advisory experience, including strategy work for major international banks, airlines and consultancies, and corporate finance advisory work on deals ranging from $50K to $1Bn. In ValuationUp, Gareth tries to make the analytical tools used by top-tier strategy and corporate-finance consultants accessible, understandable and affordable by the 'Fortune 5,000,000'. Gareth has appeared frequently on CNBC and writes the popular column 'Finance for Entrepreneurs' in Finweek magazine.
Gavin Symanowitz
Founder CEO, Feedbackrocket.com
Gavin is the Founder and CEO of Feedbackrocket.com, blockbusterinnovation.com and getagreatboss.com. He is passionate about innovation and how it can change the world for the better. He has been a regular finalist in numerous international open innovation competitions, is a Thought Leader on the South African Innovation Network, and has been featured in the Harvard Business Review article "Learn How to Think Different(ly)".
Geoff Garrett
CEO, SalesRehab Pty Ltd
Geoff is the CEO of SalesRehab, and is a specialist in Sales Performance Improvement, providing training, consulting and technology solutions for sales improvement. Geoff has over a 15 years of experience in assisting companies achieve their desired growth and has worked with many technology companies, ranging from Xerox SA, PC Ware, Dovetail business solution's, Netscope, Microsoft and many others.
Jonathan Crisp
CEO , IDI Technology Holdings
Jonathan is the Founder and CEO of IDI Technologies which over the last ten years has grown to be the leading risk management software solutions provider in South Africa.
Justin Spratt
CEO , Quirk
Justin is the CEO of Quirk. Formerly, he ran the Mobile Voice and Wi-Fi business at Internet Solutions and prior to that he worked for investment bank Morgan Stanley on the Credit Derivatives trading desk. Justin has degrees in economics and finance, obtaining his honours and later an MBA from Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS).
Raphael Costa
CEO and Co-Founder, AdTangerine
Raphael Costa is the co-founder of AdTangerine, an innovative and unique website that has levelled the playing field in social media advertising between individuals, startups, small businesses and their much larger competitors. Raphael is also the CEO of Hizby, a leader in social awareness campaigning. His history includes building the system that is currently running business magnate Warren Buffett’s rail fleet, silo’s and terminals as well as owning Hashtag Consulting which develops and manages projects for big names in South Africa like Cell C, RedBull Mobile, SAB, MNET, DSTV, FNB and other local and international clients. Raphael is extremely passionate about the work he does and is a startup enthusiast.
Rob Sussman
Joint CEO/Founder, Integr8it Group and Zunguz
Robert Sussman is the co-founder of the Integr8 Group, the largest privately owned Information Communication and Telecommunication (ICT) Company in Africa. He is also the Founder of Zunguz, a Facebook payments platform. His accomplishments have lead him to be named as one of the continent's leading technology talents, alongside Elon Musk and Mark Shuttleworth.
Tony Davis
CEO/Managing Director , Dovetail
Tony is the CEO/Managing Director and Founder of Dovetail, the leading suppliers of Logistics Software in South Africa. His specialties include vision, strategy, leadership, team building, IT, software and logistics, and he has a strong passion for helping others achieve their personal dreams. Tony earned his BSc in Geology from University of Leicester.
Warren Van Wyk
Director/Founder, Payspace
Warren is the Director and Founder of Payspace, the leading cloud based Payroll and HR Solution in Africa. He has extensive experience in software development, and prior to Payspace, held technical positions at Bytes Technology Group and Cyborg Systems. In addition to software development, Warren's specialties include Change and Project Management, Business Strategy, and Business Analysis.
Yossi Hasson
CEO and co-founder, Synaq
Yossi is the Co-founder and CEO of SYNAQ. Prior to SYNAQ Yossi held positions at Digital Connect,Digital Solutions Group, and Habonim Dror Southern Africa. He holds a degree from Stanford University School of Business.
