The Founder Institute's four-month curriculum covers everthing 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 Winter 2012 Lisbon Founder Institute, including many from out of town. See the full list below.
Andre Ribeirinho
CEO, Adegga
Andre is the Founder and CEO at Adegga.com, a online wine recommendation service that helps people choose wine. He is also responsible for the successful Adegga Wine Market tasting event that gets together 1000 wine consumers every year. In addition to Adegga, Andre is also the Founder and the Chief Evangelist of AVIN, a unique code for wine that has been printed on over 50 million labels. Andre manages his businesses through a task-oriented approach and my goals are strictly aligned with my communication, business, personal and entrepreneurial skills. He is fluent in Portuguese, English, French and Spanish, and is passionate about about Food, Art and Architecture.
Carlos Silva
COO, Seedrs
Carlos is the co-founder and COO of seedrs, and online tools that makes investing in startups simple and rewarding. Carlos prides himself in being an excellent problem solver Whether it be in computer science, business strategy or starting up a new company he can't avoid the problem-solving approach. He is pragmatic and very passionate about his work. His specialties include Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Team and project management., Information security, Software design and development, Biometrics, and Systems optimization.
Daniela Couto
CEO, Cell2B
Daniela is currently CEO at Cell2b, a biotechnology start-up dedicated to the development of a new line of healthcare therapies to treat organ rejection in patients undergoing transplants. She has been awarded several research grants and entrepreneurial awards, namely the Women Entrepreneur Award 2011 and she was a finalist at the European Academic Enterprise Awards 2012. Daniela S. Couto graduated with the highest honors in Bioengineering in 2011 from Instituto Superior Técnico – Technical University of Lisbon, as part of the MIT-Portugal Program. Daniela developed her studies in technological innovation at Massachusetts Institute Technology for a total of 2 years. From her work resulted strong literature contributions to the field of drug-device combination products, cell therapies, and tissue engineering. Daniela holds a master degree in Biomedical Engineering from University of Minho, Portugal, with work done in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano, in Italy.
João Vasconcelos
CEO, Startup Lisboa
Joao Vasconcelos founded and managed several companies, from design to real estate and tourism. He always had a strong involvement in community and associations, particularly in ANJE where he was Vice President. He supports national entrepreneurship for many years and now adds to his business life the position of Executive Director of Startup Lisboa, Lisbon City Tech Incubator, a project sponsored by the Municipality of Lisboa, Montepio Bank, IAPMEI, Portugal Telecom, Microsoft, KPMG, Cisco and several universities.
Joao Pavao Martins
Professor, Instituto Superior Técnico
João Pavão Martins is Full Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (Technical University of Lisbon). He was one of the persons behind the creation of the Computer Science and Engineering degree of Instituto Superior Técnico and one of the founders of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the same school. He also is a software industry entrepreneur. In 1986, together with Ernesto Morgado, he founded SISCOG - Sistemas Cognitivos, SA, a start up company devoted to applications of Artificial Intelligence. Together, they led the company to develop and deploy complex software systems in railway and metro companies throughout Europe. These systems plan and manage the work of more than 20,000 people and have been awarded by several prestigious organisations in Europe and the USA. He holds an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering by Instituto Superior Técnico, a Master of Science in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence both by the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Joao Pedro Montes
Founder, Wine With Spirit
João Pedro Montes is a Board Member at ONI Telecom, Advisor to GESTMIN and Managing Partner at LS Investments. Before he served as General Manager at TimWe Group and CEO at MKTM-Mobilizing Brands, with worldwide responsibility for Mobile Marketing Services, Web Projects; and Matchmaking. He has spent his career in general management, business development, marketing and corporate finance. In Pfizer Pharmaceuticals he spent 4 years in New York and Lisbon as Business Development Director. Prior to that, João worked for Wyeth Consumer Healthcare in New York as Business Development Director; For Texaco in Colorado as Rentech-GTL Division’s General Manager and Director of Corporate Development &Finance; For and Andersen Consulting in Madrid. He has a BA from University of Lisbon, and an MBA from the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration of the University of Virginia.
Jose Manuel Guedes
Partner, tribeCRM
Jose Manuel Guedes is a Partner at tribeCRM, a relationship marketing agency focused in database marketing. His previous experience includes Professor of Database Marketing in Executive Master in Communication and Relationship Marketing at ISCTE Business School, Director of Wunderman Digital, Director General Proximity Data, Technical Director Proximity Data, Technical Director ESRI Portugal, and Analyst Programmer Santacasa Misericordia de Lisboa. Some of Jose's specialties are Database Marketing Digital Marketing -Website, Flash Presentation and Online Marketing. Jose received his degree in Engineering at Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
Marco De Abreu
CEO, João Sem Medo Center for Entrepreneurship
Marco de Abreu is the CEO of João Sem Medo Center for Entrepreneurship and is extremely passionate about learning and teaching. Marco acts as a coach and adviser and a designer of digital human fulfillment services such as internet banking and insurance. He is currently a PhD candidate at Instituto Superior Técnico.
Miguel Mira Da Silva
Professor, Instituto Superior Técnico
Miguel Mira Da Silva is a "Sloan Fellow" from the London Business School (UK) in 2005 and since 1998 has worked as a Professor of Information Systems in the Technical University of Lisbon (Portugal). Miguel also has extensive experience in the software industry and founded a software services start-up in 2010 which he later sold in 2011. He also currently acts as the leader of the "Digital Services Innovation" research group at INOV. Miguel holds a PhD in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow (UK).
Nuno Sebastiao
CEO, Feedzai
Nuno is the CEO of FeedZai Lda., a software company specialized in the processing of data in real time. FeedZai is currently developing "FeedZai Pulse", a product addressing a need in the real time data processing area. The goal of "FeedZai Pulse" is to guarantee the availability of up to second data allowing decision makers to monitor and react in real time to changes in business operations. Prior positions include; Product manager at the European Space Agency Operations Centre; Founder and president of Oristeba, a space consulting company; and Consultant with Andersen Consulting. Nuno holds a Masters of Computer Science and an MBA from London Business School.
Nuno Arantes Oliveira
CEO, Alfama
Nuno Arantes-Oliveira is a scientist and entrepreneur. He has founded and managed several companies in the healthcare, life sciences and technology transfer fields, raising over €15 million for his endeavours. Nuno has received several decorations and awards in Europe, the US and Asia. As a scientist working at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), Nuno led studies which made major contributions to our knowledge of the genetic basis of aging and lifespan control. Currently Nuno is involved in a major Personalized Medicine / Genomics project, while working as a Senior Advisor to large R&D institutions.
Paulo Rosado
CEO, Outsystems
Paulo Rosado is a founder of OutSystems and has been its CEO since 2001. During his tenure at OutSystems he has played a key role in helping pioneer cutting edge approaches to Agile methods using a combination of near shore and off shore resources focused on the delivery of web business applications. With over 500 Agile projects successfully delivered across an array of industries including Telecommunications, Finance, Insurance, Manufacturing, Retail and Biotech Mr. Rosado has become an expert in Agile processes and the organizational changes required to successfully embrace Agile delivery methods. At OutSystems Paulo plays a key role in the companies R&D efforts around using technology to optimize processes for delivering enterprise applications using Agile methods. Before OutSystems, Paulo was Executive VP of Global Marketing at Altitude Software, a CRM company present in 32 countries. Before joining Altitude, he co-founded Intervento, an e-business software infrastructure company, acting as its CEO until the company was successfully sold in 1999. Previously Paulo worked in Silicon Valley for Oracle Corp, where he held multiple positions in R&D and Product Management. Paulo has participated in multiple Executive Education programs, and holds a Master's in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Computer Engineering degree from Universidade Nova, Lisbon.
Pedro Trinite
CEO, TTR - Transactional Track Record
Pedro is a co-founder at Zuvinova a B2B company focused on providing comprehensive intelligence for business decision-makers (owns TTR – Transactional Track Record). Pedro was previously a Director at the private equity firm Iberpartners having performed several investments and advised private investors in a broad range of sectors. Pedro’s ambition to tackle challenges and entrepreneurial spirit were evidenced when he set up his own venture Drag n' Drop Information Systems, in 1999 while taking his Computer Engineering degree. He joined Accenture's Management Consulting practice in London UK in 2003. During this period Pedro advised top management executives in several major corporates across the UK, Australia, Spain and Portugal. He has an International MBA from IE Business School (Madrid) and also a Wharton GCP from University of Pennsylvania (US). .
Pedro Janela
CEO, WYGroup
Pedro is an expert entrepreneur with 12 years experience founding and developing companies in the Interactive Marketing space. Is main activity is WYgroup, where he is a shareholder and CEO. WYgroup has 140 employees and investments in 10 companies run by fellow entrepreneurs: By, White, NOSSA, Massive, Digital Intelligence, Bliss Applications, tribeCRM, That Inc, Volta. The group has billings in excess of 7,5MEuros. In 2010 he started out with three fellow Business Angels, the eggNEST seed capital fund with 1M euros to invest in new ideas, he listened and analysed more then 150 pitch ideas in the two years lifetime of the fund. eggNEST has invested in 4 companies having 4 more in the deal flow pipeline.
Pedro Bizarro
Chief Science Officer, Feedzai
Pedro Bizarro is Chief Science Officer at FeedZai. Pedro is a researcher turned entrepreneur: after a 10-year research career (Computer Science PhD at the University of Madison - Wisconsin, Fulbright Fellow, Marie Curie Fellow and winner of the BES Innovation National Competition) Pedro is now founder and CSO at FeedZai where he leads R&D efforts. Pedro is a high performance data processing expert that loves data, algorithms and visualization.
Ricardo Marvão
CEO, Evolve
Ricardo was the founder & CEO of EVOLVE Space Services which was ultimately sold to Novabase. He works primarily in the Space Sector, mostly for ESA and EUMETSAT, with several studies done and on-going on new technologies and research for the Aerospace Industry, with multiple Universities around Europe. His specialties in the space industry include: Aerospace Company Founder; satellite simulators & operating systems; Earth-Observation, Scientific and Inter-planetary Missions
Sergio Carvalho
Founder and CEO, Megamedia
Sergio is the Founder and CEO of Megamedia, a university startup that is a market leader in e-Business. He considers himself to be an optimistic realist, focused on objectives and with a strong ability to find solutions and answers to problems with strategic vision and business knowledge covering various sectors of the economy and life. He has the ability to manage different ventures, based on experience of business startup in the early career, consolidated by the participation of large corporations top management, and not least, with a background in closing and optimizing business, on behalf of PT.
Tiago Borges
Owner and Board Member, Inosat
Tiago co-founded Inovat in 2000. The company works in field of telematics, specializing in the development, production and marketing of products and services in the area of vehicle, people and object location and fleet management, in this case implementing and developing the concept mobility intelligence.
Vasco Pedro
Cofounder, dezine.com
Vasco is the co-founder of Dezine.com, an online marketplace for undiscovered design. Before this project he was co-founded and was CEO of Bueda, developing the next generation of semantic advertising for user generated content, video and images. His research focuses on how to combine multiple information sources in a parallel architecture. More specifically it focuses on the concept of Federated Ontology Search. the goal is to create a platform for ontology integration in a seamless and transparent way. He hopes to enable the creation of NLP algorithms that use ontologies without forcing researchers to constrain themselves to a particular ontology. Vasco also has extensive experience in web development, including large scale web applications, AJAX technologies, Javascript, Java , C#, MYSQL and MSSQL.
