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 for the Summer 2013 San Francisco Founder Institute, including many from out of town. See the full list below.
Aaron Patzer
Founder and CEO, Mint.com
Aaron Patzer is both the visionary and technical mind behind Mint.com. With 10 patents filed or pending, Aaron brings strong innovation skills to Mint. Prior to founding Mint, Aaron worked in the fields of bioinformatics, optical networking, computer architecture (including 3 patents in the PlayStation 3 chip), and computer aided design. Aaron holds an MSEE from Princeton University and a BS in computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering from Duke University. In 2008 he was named one of CNN Money's "Money Heroes", and a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer. In 2009, he was named to Inc Magazine's Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30, and Fortune's Top 40 Business Leaders Under 40.
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.
Bob Rosin
VP & GM, Business Development, Skype
Bob is VP & GM of business development for Skype, the communications division of Microsoft. Skype currently has over 300 million monthly active users, and with over 2 billion minutes per day of voice and video calling, Skype is the global leader in communications. Skype's international call volume represents over 1/3 of the world's international telecommunications market, and Skype is the largest video communications provider with over 50% of all Skype minutes including video. Bob's role encompasses consumer, enterprise, service provider and other partnerships across mobile, desktop, and embedded devices. Bob was head of business development for Skype during the acquisition by Microsoft for $8.5B in October 2011.
Brian Wong
Founder & CEO, Kiip
Brian Wong is the founder of kiip (pronounced "keep"), a mobile rewards network, backed by True Ventures. Kiip has raised over $4.4 million in funding to date and is redefining the advertising industry through a "moments"-based model, versus the traditional attention-based screen estate model. Very recently, Kiip was listed by Forbes as one of the "4 Hot Online Ad Companies to Put on Your Watch List", and was also named to the Dow Jones' FasTech50 List. Techcrunch and the Wall Street Journal called Brian the "youngest person to ever receive funding by a venture capital firm". He was an early Bachelors of Commerce graduate from the University of British Columbia, graduating at the age of 18, after skipping four grades in elementary and high school. He was recently lauded in Mashable as one of "The Top 5 Young Entrepreneurs to Watch", and the Vancouver Sun called him "a budding internet visionary". He was also recently a recipient of the Top 20 Under 20 awards in all of Canada. Brian was also recently listed to AdAge's Creativity Top 50, and Business Insider's Top 25 Under 25 in Silicon Valley list.
Bubba Murarka
Business Development, Facebook
Bubba Murarka is an active startup adviser, investor and event host. As a member of Facebook's Business & Corporate Development team he works with numerous startups to help them acquire and engage customers via the Facebook Platform & Advertising Solutions. Previously, Bubba started Pocketwerks & Texame, served as an Entrepreneur in Residence with Bay Partners and ran several product development teams at Microsoft. He is the primary inventor on 13 patents and enjoys playing racquetball whenever possible.
Dan Arkind
Founder & CEO, JobScore
Dan is the co-founder and CEO of JobScore, a freemium online hiring solution used by 600+ employers. Dan is a 15+ year veteran of the tech startup talent wars and has filled every role from hire 0 to150 at technology startups - including connecting co-founders. Dan spent the first part of his career recruiting for the firm that built and spun off Hotjobs.com and co-founded an entrepreneur networking group called STIRR. He hails from Sao Paulo, Brazil and when he's not starting stuff, he enjoys designing & building wood furniture.
David Sacks
CEO, Yammer
David Sacks is the Founder/CEO of Yammer, the enterprise social network, and Geni.com, a family tree of the world. Previously, Sacks was the COO and product leader of PayPal until its acquisition by eBay. He also produced and financed the hit movie Thank You For Smoking through his independent production company, Room 9 Entertainment. He has a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.
David Weekly
CEO, Oha.na
David is a Developer Advocate at Facebook, ensuring the Facebook platform is an incredible gift to developers worldwide. David has been programming since he was five and has coded for MIT, Harvard, Stanford, There.com, atWeb, and Legato. David wrote the first layman's description of MP3 in early 1997 and graduated in 2000 with a BS in Computer Science from Stanford, where he was a President Scholar and a finalist in the ACM International Programming Competition. David started PBwiki (now PBworks) in 2003 which is still running independently serving millions every month, and a small family sharing startup called Oha.na (Hawai'ian for "family") that was acqui-hired by Facebook in March 2013. He likes to throw hacker parties (he co-founded SuperHappyDevHouse in 2005 and Hacker Dojo in 2009), connect people, fly helicopters, and build useful things. David won Best Mentor in the SF Summer 2010 Session and Most Supportive Mentor across the whole global FI program in 2011. I SUPPORT YOU! :)
Garrett Camp
CEO, Stumbleupon
Garrett leads StumbleUpon’s product and business strategy. He has guided SU’s development and design since 2001, from inception to over 13M registered members. StumbleUpon is now the largest personalized content discovery engine on the web, delivering over 700 million recommendations per month within its index of 60 million pages. Garrett completed his Masters in Software Engineering at the University of Calgary, where he researched interfaces for collaborative systems, evolutionary algorithms and information retrieval. He is also a 2007 recipient of MIT Technology Review’s TR35 award.
Jared Goralnick
Founder & CEO, AwayFind
Jared Goralnick is the Founder & CEO of AwayFind, a web application that helps people to escape from email by notifying them of urgent messages. In addition to leading business development and managing the team at AwayFind, he also hosts Ignite DC, co-organizes Inbox Love, mentors at 500 Startups, and speaks about productivity, information overload, entrepreneurship, and the future of communications around the globe. He started his first full time business at 20, SET Consulting, and sold it in July 2010.
Jason Johnson
Managing Partner
Jason is co-founder of Founders Den, Rethink Books and TEDxSF. With more than 17 years of experience marketing technology products and services he was previously an Entrepreneur in Residence at Dolby Laboratories and the Vice President of business development for Global IP Solutions (acquired by Google). Prior to GIPS, he was the co-founder and CEO of InterQuest Communications (acquired by Darwin Networks).
Jay Jamison
Founder & President, Moonshoot
Jay Jamison is the Co-Founder and President of Moonshoot, an early-stage online gaming company with the mission to spark English language learning in children everywhere. Prior to starting Moonshoot, Jay held leadership roles in product management and marketing for Microsoft in Redmond and Tokyo for over 9 years.
Jim Kaskade
CEO & Serial Entrepreneur, PARC, Xerox Company
Jim Kaskade has 10+ years as a CEO/senior executive building high-tech products, teams, and businesses in the areas of cloud computing software, Software as a Service (SaaS), online and mobile digital media, online and mobile advertising, and semiconductors. He has an additional 10+ years in leadership roles developing data warehousing, Big Data, data mining, and business intelligence solutions. Jim has also founded four start-ups, and brings more than twenty-five years of experience building enterprise-class applications for Fortune 1000 companies. He is most recently incubating a new startup at PARC, a Xerox company, as an EIR.
Joe Betts Lacroix
Co-Founder, OQO
Joe Betts-LaCroix founded OQO, creator of the world’s smallest PC, in 2000, and established the resulting market category of smaller-than-laptop PCs previously called UMPCs, and now called netbooks. He is now immersed in his newest (old) obsession: life sciences (finding cures for age-related diseases) as well as generating and monetizing intellectual property and advising several startups. Prior to OQO, he has operated numerous other companies, as well as having done groundbreaking academic research at Caltech, Harvard, JPL, MIT and the IBM Almaden Research Center in various fields, including quantum biophysics, marine chemistry, human-computer interface and alternative energy. Joe has patents pending and granted for over 80 inventions in a diversity of fields, including energy conversion, antenna design, user interfaces, consumer devices, and cloud computing.
Jonathan Abrams
Founder and CEO, Nuzzel
Jonathan Abrams is the Founder & CEO of Nuzzel, and co-founder and a Managing Partner of Founders Den, a shared office space and private club for experienced entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. A seasoned entrepreneur, Jonathan previously held the title of founder & CEO at Socializr, Friendster, and HotLinks. Jonathan holds a bachelors of science in Computer Science from McMaster University.
Justin Moore
CEO, Axcient, Inc.
Justin is the Founder & CEO of Axcient and a Venture Partner at Thomvest Ventures. Axcient currently protects nearly 3 billion files and applications in the cloud and ensures data and application uptime for businesses. Justin has a broad background as an entrepreneur and investor and is recognized as an authority on cloud computing, business-to-business strategy, corporate culture and early-stage company creation. He is regularly featured on television and in print, including appearances on CNBC, in Entrepreneur, Inc., Forbes, The New York Times and numerous other news outlets. Prior to Axcient, Justin founded MK Global, which provided an innovative approach to addressing the surplus of secondary market telecommunications equipment after the dot-com collapse. Prior to MK Global, Justin founded CollegeJobs. Justin sits on CNBC's Small Business Council and HP's Startup Advisory Board.
Phil Libin
CEO, Evernote
Phil Libin is the CEO of Evernote, a web service designed to allow users to easily capture and store information, memories, and content in any environment. Prior to Evernote, Phil was a founder of two other successful tech startups: CoreStreet and Engine 5. He has been written about in publications as diverse as BusinessWeek, The New York Times, The Economist and, surprisingly, Locksmith Ledger. Phil is also an investor and advisor in several startups and the inventor of several issued and pending technology patents.
Philip Kaplan
Founder and CEO, ADHD Labs
Philip Kaplan is a serial entrepreneur and founder and CEO of ADHD Labs. Formerly he was founder and CEO of Tiny Letter, which was acquired by MailChimp, founder and CEO of Blippy, founder and CEO of AdBrite, and creator of F-edcompany.com. Philip is the best-selling author of F’d Companies (Simon & Schuster). He received a bachelor of science degree in information management and technology from Syracuse University.
Rajesh Setty
Entrepreneur, Author & Speaker, RajeshSetty.com
Rajesh Setty is a serial entrepreneur and a business alchemist based in Silicon Valley. Raj is the president of Foresight Plus, a consulting firm that brings new ideas to life and/or new life to current ideas. He is currently involved in multiple technology and publishing startups in US and India. Rajesh is an author with eleven published books to his credit and maintains a blog with more than 1800 articles. You can read more about his work at www.foresightplus.com and about his life at www.rajeshsetty.com/blog
Ron Palmeri
Founder/CEO , Minor Ventures
Ron helped found and ran Minor Ventures from 2005 to 2010 which has launched great companies such as Grand Central - now Google Voice, OpenDNS, Atmosphir and Scout Labs - now part of Lithium. Ron takes a product and markets approach to identifying great new companies and works closely with the founding teams to realize the vision and potential. Ron is currently working on a new project not yet announced.
Russ Fradin
Chairman & CEO, Dynamic Signal
Russell Fradin is the Founder and CEO of Dynamic Signal, a new startup in the Social Media Marketing and Monitoring space. Prior to founding Dynamic Signal, Russ was the co-founder and CEO of Adify, acquired by Cox for $300M in the Spring of 2008. Prior to starting Adify, Russ was the SVP of Business Development for Wine.com, the Internet’s largest seller of wine where he was responsible for creating new revenue channels for the business. Before joining Wine.com, Russ was the EVP of Corporate Development for comScore Networks. Russ began at comScore in 2000 before comScore signed its first customer and was responsible for starting many of the company’s businesses as well as structuring strategic alliances. Russ began his career at Flycast Communications and had a number of roles during his four year tenure, finally serving as Flycast/Engage’s VP of Business Development. Russ holds a BS from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Russ is the Chairman of Social Shield and is also a Board Director for Outside.in, Udemy and Red Aril.
Seth Sternberg
co-founder & ceo, Meebo
Seth is a cofounder of Meebo. Previously he worked at IBM in the M&A group. Seth majored in Political Science at Yale before he went to Stanford's Business School. Seth flies airplanes (less than he'd like to, but it's expensive!), rides motorcycles, and rollerblades.
Stephen Russell
Founder and CEO , Prism Skylabs
Steve is the CEO of Prism Skylabs. Prior to Prism Skylabs, he served as the CEO and Chairman of 3VR, the world’s leading video intelligence company, which he founded in 2002.Before 3VR, Steve was VP and GM of the Content Networking group at Internet search giant Inktomi. In 2000, Inktomi Acquired eScene Networks, a consumer video management platform company he founded. Steve is an early investor and advisor to a number of companies across the video intelligence, social media and analytics spaces, including StumbleUpon, LongTail Video, MesmoTV, Qumu, OpenDNS and UberCab, among others. He also sits on the Board of the Center for Secure Information Technologies and is an active speaker and writer, posting frequently on his blog, InHardFocus.com, which explores the many intersections of technology and society. Steve holds 11 patents and was named #8 in the American Venture’s ‘Top 40 under 40’ list. He Studied Economics and Computer Science at Stanford University, where he graduated with honors and distinction and was the recipient of the university’s Anna Laura Meyers prize for outstanding research.
Stu West
CFO, Kno, Inc.
Stu has been in strategy, M&A, finance, and operations leadership roles in Silicon Valley for over 15 years. Most recently he was CFO at Kno. Previously he served in strategy and operations roles at InfoSpace and Yahoo. Before Yahoo!, Stuart spent six years at TiVo, most recently as Chief Financial Officer, where he helped build the DVR inventor to $260 million in revenue and raised hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private financing. He started his finance career in investment banking at J.P. Morgan. His educational background includes a B.A. from Yale, and he also worked for the State Department at the United Nations and at the White House. Stu's passion for global world-changing technology extends to his philanthropic work, where he currently serves as Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia. Stu declines to confirm or deny his Wikipedia biography, which states he is also a Scottish Zoology Professor and pals with the Duke of Edinburgh.
Touraj Parang
COO, UpCounsel
Touraj Parang is COO of UpCounsel and a regular advisor to startups. As VP Strategy & Corporate Development at Webs (DIY website builder hosting 40MM+ websites), Touraj led strategic repositioning of the company, evaluated and executed transformational business development partnerships and acquisitions, and managed the successful sale of the company to Vistaprint in 12/2011 at $117.5MM. Touraj founded Jaxtr, which grew virally from 0 to 10MM registered users in less than 1 year. Jaxtr raised $20 million in financing from top tier VC's, and he sold the company in 2009. Touraj started as a lawyer at WSGR after Stanford then Yale.
Wenceslao Casares
CEO, Bling Nation
Wenceslao Casares is co-CEO of Bling Nation, a mobile payments company he founded in 2007 and a partner of MECK, Ltd, a private investment partnership. He founded Lemon Bank, a Brazilian retail bank for the poor, in June 2002. Lemon Bank became the largest microfinance institution in Brazil and was acquired by Banco do Brasil in 2009. He is also the founder of Wanako Games, a US based developer of console videogames that seeks to leverage the creativity of Latin American talent; Patagon, an Online Brokerage; Internet Argentina S.A., the first Internet Service Provider in Argentina.
Ziv Gillat
Co-Founder & VP of Business Development, Eye-Fi
Ziv Gillat is Cofounder of Eye-Fi. Previously, Ziv worked at Silverback Systems, iReady, Zaffire, Photo Access, and Apple. Ziv is a professional photographer with a passion for helping consumers backup and share their photos and videos. He received his B.S. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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