Started in Silicon Valley by Adeo Ressi in early 2009, the Founder Institute (FI) has come a long way in a short time. As of December 2010, Founder Institutes operate in 13 cities worldwide, making it the biggest Startup Incubator in the world. The latest addition to the FI locations has been Berlin, and while the first semester in the German capital is still running, facilitator Christoph Räthke is now beginning to organize the next one.
FI graduates and founders have already met with remarkable success. The founder of this year’s “Le Web” startup award winner SuperMarmite, Olivier Desmoulin, is enrolled in the Paris FI. Many other US- and Europe-based have won innovation awards and/or funding by VC and angel investors.
Now clearly, there can be no guarantee of such success for everybody. So why should you consider enrolling in the Berlin FI come April? Quite frankly, if you’re thinking about your own startup business, joining FI may be the best decision you can make. From the start, Founder Institute is not so much about business plans, but about you as a potential entrepreneur. FI believes that if you’re an entrepreneurial person, you will eventually get it made – and FI will do everything possible to get you focused and prepared, avoid mistakes, build a network of relevant people, and profit from the experience of high-profile entrepreneurs from around the world. Benefits that help anyone with a company which he wants to take to the next level, too.
Over the course of weekly sessions across 5 months, any subject critical for your startup success is covered in a hands-on way. This semester, “hands-on” has, among other things, meant mentoring by some of the most experienced German startup CEOs and entrepreneurs. People like Christian Vollmann (myvideo.de), Michael Brehm (studi.vz), Holger Rauch (zanox.de) or Kai Bolik (gameduell.de) are definitely celebrities of the German internet scene and are normally found holding visionary speeches at expensive industry conferences. However, anyone present in the Berlin FI sessions where they talked about how they met the challenges of team building, funding or product development could only be excited about the helpful and focused way they offered their experience to support FI founders. Including, of course, going out for drinks and lending an ear to individual founders’ specific questions. In addition, FI Berlin boasted several high-profile U.S. CEOs and will continue to do so, establishing an unprecedented link between German and American entrepreneurship. And to make matters full, an emerging FI “ecosystem” of partners like renowned legal advisory Taylor Wessing and Deutsche Telekom T-Labs bring in world-class assets.
Uniquely, involvement of these influential entrepreneurs is not confined to “lending an ear”. Participating in an options pool that every Berlin semester sets up from shares of the graduating companies, they actually become stakeholders. For Christoph Räthke, the way this options pool is handled is one of the most convincing aspects of the FI vision. Not only does the pool create a relationship between established and upcoming entrepreneurs, it creates a strong bond among each semester’s graduates, too. Because a sizeable part of the pool is actually spread among the graduates themselves. “FI is not about each founder aggressively pressing forward his idea, it’s about a collaborative effort that creates friends and comrades through mastering a common challenge”, says Räthke.
“Upon graduation, founders will have completed challenging tasks and met amazing people. And they will have thought about quitting more than once, because the program is quite hard”, Räthke continues. Apart from taking an acceptance test at the price of 40€, paying a semester fee of 900€, and consenting to hand over 3,5% of their company shares into said options pool, founders should be ready to invest some 15 hours/ week into the program.
If this might be for you, please contact christoph.raethke@founderinstitute.com. You’re invited to attend a session of the current semester as a guest, and both Christoph and enrolled founders will be happy to provide you with insight and information.
