VirtualProgram Schedule
Our flagship 'FI Core' program combines structured sprints with constant feedback to help you reach the milestones needed for investment and growth.
Early Application Deadline
Final Application Deadline
Orientation
Sprints
Every Founder follows the Agentic Track — an AI-personalized curriculum that adapts each sprint to be more advanced or more basic based on your stage, with powerful free AI agents to help complete the work.
The below deliverables are in addition to any custom "Epic Sprints" you may receive based on your specific challenges, and are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
- Office Hours - Book your first Office Hours with Local Leaders and Mentors to get guidance on the next steps for your business.
- Hotseat Pitch - Prepare a one sentence verbal pitch for the weekly "Founder Hotseat", where you present to Mentors during the Feedback Sessions.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Vision & Mission
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
- Market Research - Utilize our market research template to collect accurate and available market information on the customer problems you are analyzing.
- Personas - Build an initial Buyer Persona to better understand your target customer's needs, challenges, and buying process.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Impact Track: Introduction into Impact Entrepreneurship
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Customer Development Sprint
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
- Customer Interviews - Develop a longer series of customer interview questions based on your initial interviews and key assumptions, with at least ten open-ended customer interview questions for each customer problem.
- Revenue Modeling - For each remaining customer problem, develop or improve a professional landing page targeted to your initial customer archetype, and quickly build up a mailing list to receive customer feedback.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
EIR Series: Model, Assumptions and Experiments Roadmap Workshop
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Refund Deadline
Revenue & Business Models
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
- Revenue Models - Narrow down that problem to three potential revenue models, and thoroughly analyze the positives and negatives of each model.
- Professional Pitch Deck - Use our templates to develop a professional three minute long pitch deck, based on the feedback, concepts and flow that have resonated from your Hotseat pitches.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Pitch Mastery
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
- Build your Pitch Script - Practice makes perfect, especially with an early version of your pitch. The average 3 minute pitch consists of 450 words at normal talking speed. Create the written version of your script and get feedback from your peers.
- Idea Review Pitch Deck - Finalize your 3-minute pitch deck for the Mentor Idea Review, using our templates and guidelines. Practice the pitch at least five times with your peers, and revise it based on feedback. Upload a final video on the deliverables page.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
EIR Series: Model, Assumptions and Experiments Roadmap Follow up
After building your first customer journey, customer profile and validating it with customer interviews, you'll now focus on the solution-side. We'll define various value propositions and business models, then identify the most critical assumptions and define experiments to validate them.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Mentor Idea Review
Sprints
After the Mentor Idea Review, Founders receive a larger number of custom "Epic Sprints" with deliverables based on their specific challenges. Below are high-level previews of standard deliverables.
Deliverables
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
- Advisor Candidates - You will create (or fill out) an Advisory Board in the next 5 weeks, so develop a target list of new advisor candidates based off your identified needs and gaps in knowledge/ connections.
- Advisor Outreach - Leverage the FI network to get introductions to your targets where necessary, and follow our templated process to make progress on your advisory board.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Impact Track: Hardware startups and scaling challenges
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Legal & Equity
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
- Law Firm Engagement - If you don't already have a law firm, meet with your law firm candidates and sign an "engagement letter" with your chosen firm.
- Corporate Formation Agreements - If you don't already have a suitable corporation, secure all of your corporate formation agreements which govern how the business conducts itself.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Go-to-Market & Scale
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
- Alternatives - Identify two alternative models (markets or "pivots") for your go-to-market solution to discover the most lucrative market opportunity. Interview at least 2 customers for each alternative.
- Advisor Follow-Up - In the next Step you will finalize advisors, so begin finalization meetings with your top candidates, and set up test Advisor Test Projects where necessary following our templates.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Impact Track: Impact & Public Funding, Regulated Markets and their stakeholders
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Product Development
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
- Intellectual Property - If you have not already, secure and protect the intellectual property for all of the work done to date. Examine the need for patents, if applicable, following our guidelines.
- Team Analysis - Define and get extensive feedback on the requisite technical skills, soft skills, expertise, and networks will be needed in your core team.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
EIR Series: Derive an MVP from your customer interviews
Define your MVP based on your customer experiments and interviews
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Mentor Progress Review
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
- Polished Investor Pitch Deck - Create an expanded, 12-slide pitch deck incorporating any feedback from the Investor Progress Review, using our templates.
- Growth - Make progress on your growth goals, and examine or adjust how your strategy and the system to keep yourself accountable is performing.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Co-Founders & Team
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
- Hiring Process - Develop a hiring and onboarding process using our guidelines to add team members into your organization, and begin executing on the process.
- Test Projects - Develop at least one test project for each of your top two or three roles, which should create opportunities for credible candidates to demonstrate their skills.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Growth
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
- Sales - Pursue aggressive goals to close new revenue or users, which may be signups, payments, a signed contract, a pre-payment or a signed letter of intent.
- Pivot - Consider a pivot if you are not meeting your growth goals, sales, product or hiring progress targets. If you decide to Pivot, schedule a call with one of your Local Leaders to discuss your proposed pivot in the business and do the same with your advisors.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
EIR Series: How To Use AI + Common Sense to Grow Your Company Beyond Sales
Discover today's best practices to grow your sales using AI, Automation and common sense. The last three years have seen an influx of AI tools to the marketplace, 204+ tools and services to be exact, all promising to transform your sales. Truth be told, there is a ton of overlap and most are automation tools and less so AI, however the power to scale and personalize B2B outreach remains undeniable.
Learn how you can set yourself up for success with AI to grow your sales by attending this session where you will see
* What 3 qualifications you need ahead of time to use AI; without these AI cannot help you one bit.
* Which workflows work best for you based on the industry you are in
* How to sell like it is 2024, not 2010 aka social selling at scale
* What budgets are needed to see results
* Which players you need in-house to close more deals
* How to set up a growth culture that attracts sales, perfect personnel and opportunities while repelling time wasters and poor-fit players
* And more....
Most founders of companies with sales below 500K in sales find themselves in a situation where they have maxed out their referral network and their hustle to generate revenues. They now look for a reliable way to generate revenues that will prove their ICP, Offer and market expansion at scale so that they can reinvest in sales and/or raise more funds on better terms.
For founders of companies with sales between 500K and 2M the ICP is a lot clearer and they now face questions such as: investing more in sales, reducing cost per lead and per customer, scaling at will into new markets or deeper into existing markets. Systematic lead gen to finetune existing models or develop new models helps them raise another round at better terms.
Lasty, for the more mature companies, think 1M+ in sales, you will learn about the Growth Flywheel that feeds your company and its people perpetually.
Wherever you find yourself on the founder journey, you'll walk away from this class with a clear path to growing your sales and your company.
About Jonathan Khorsandi:
Jonathan is hooked on innovation, startups, ridiculous ideas and people eager to change the world.
As a tech founder he's built, consulted with and coached companies the last 26+ years which put him at the edge of change and trends before they became “a thing”.
His latest endeavor, Diwy - Do it With You, builds $1,000,000+ sales pipeline within 6 months for promising innovative B2B tech companies.
They use common sense, AI, Automation and rock solid targeting that goes beyond accessing databases that everyone else has access to.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathankhorsandi/
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Investor Pitch Review
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Equity & Funding
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
- Advisor Strategy - Set up a call with each of your advisors and briefly review your "Victory Condition", the funding strategy, hiring plan, sales plan and product plan.
- Use of Proceeds - Examine the capital needs of the business, and extend your financial model to project revenues and expenses for a total of 24 months from now.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
EIR Series: Term sheets explained - importance, pitfalls, negotiation
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Graduation
Completing the Founder Institute is an honor. The program is challenging, and the expectations are demanding.
In this final session, you will celebrate with your peers, friends and family, as well as select Mentors. Some Founders will also pitch to a live audience, and you will officially onboard to all of the post-program resources and assistance the Founder Institute provides.
Personalized by AI to your startup's needs — more advanced or more basic — with powerful free AI agents to help you complete the company building work.
Post Programs
The FI Core Program is just the beginning of a life long journey.
Founder Institute Alumni get access to a series of advanced accelerator programs, ongoing support from our Silicon Valley Team, valuable partner and service discounts, and more to continue building the business for years to come.
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Dedicated Alumni Support Team in Silicon Valley
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Access to the world's largest network of mentors and investors (40,000+)
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Private Alumni mailing lists
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$2.5M+ in partner discounts
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Invites to FI sessions & network events
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Potential introductions to investors
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A series of virtual advisory programs where you work with our Silicon Valley HQ team to reach next milestones
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Funding Lab helps get your lead investor within 6 months
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The FI Venture Network matches Alumni ready for funding with a massive pool of investors that specialize in writing 'first or second checks' of funding
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Exclusive for FI Alumni
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The Founder Institute is the world’s most proven network to turn ideas into fundable startups, and startups into global businesses. Since 2009, our structured accelerator programs have helped over 9,000 entrepreneurs raise over 2BN in funding. Based in Silicon Valley and with chapters across 100 countries, our mission is to empower communities of talented and motivated people to build impactful technology companies worldwide.
