This session helps founders narrow their idea to one problem, one customer, one core feature, and one revenue stream. Founders will define their target customer segment, clarify the problem they are solving, and create a product outline with a feature list, architecture summary, and MVP hypothesis that can be handed to a coding agent.
Date
Jul 07, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
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
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Weekly Focus
1. Kickoff: From Idea to Focused Product Scope
2. AMA #1: Idea Validation & Scope Check
3. Building Your MVP with AI
4. Integrations, Authentication & Data
5. AMA #2: Build Troubleshooting & Mid-Program Check-In
6. Launch & Go-to-Market
7. Customer Feedback & Validation
8. In-Person App Demo Day with Jonathan Greechan
9. AMA #3: Interpreting Feedback & Deciding What's Next
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Revenue Modeling
Legal & IP
Branding & Design
Financial Planning
Team & Advisors
Fundraising Prep
Post-Program Onboarding
This session gives founders live feedback on their problem statement, target customer, and MVP hypothesis. Founders will identify the riskiest assumption to test first and refine their product outline so they are ready to move into building.
Date
Jul 14, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Weekly Focus
1. Kickoff: From Idea to Focused Product Scope
2. AMA #1: Idea Validation & Scope Check
3. Building Your MVP with AI
4. Integrations, Authentication & Data
5. AMA #2: Build Troubleshooting & Mid-Program Check-In
6. Launch & Go-to-Market
7. Customer Feedback & Validation
8. In-Person App Demo Day with Jonathan Greechan
9. AMA #3: Interpreting Feedback & Deciding What's Next
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Revenue Modeling
Legal & IP
Branding & Design
Financial Planning
Team & Advisors
Fundraising Prep
Post-Program Onboarding
This session helps founders translate their product outline into structured prompts and begin building with tools like Replit, Lovable, Bolt, or Base44. Funders will understand the basic frontend, backend, and database structure of their app, implement the core user flow, and deploy a first working version to a live URL they can share.
Date
Jul 21, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Weekly Focus
1. Kickoff: From Idea to Focused Product Scope
2. AMA #1: Idea Validation & Scope Check
3. Building Your MVP with AI
4. Integrations, Authentication & Data
5. AMA #2: Build Troubleshooting & Mid-Program Check-In
6. Launch & Go-to-Market
7. Customer Feedback & Validation
8. In-Person App Demo Day with Jonathan Greechan
9. AMA #3: Interpreting Feedback & Deciding What's Next
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Revenue Modeling
Legal & IP
Branding & Design
Financial Planning
Team & Advisors
Fundraising Prep
Post-Program Onboarding
This session helps founders add the core infrastructure needed to make their product usable in the real world. Founders will connect user login, external services, and a real database, while also estimating AI API costs per user and setting an initial price using a simple cost-plus margin approach.
Date
Jul 28, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Weekly Focus
1. Kickoff: From Idea to Focused Product Scope
2. AMA #1: Idea Validation & Scope Check
3. Building Your MVP with AI
4. Integrations, Authentication & Data
5. AMA #2: Build Troubleshooting & Mid-Program Check-In
6. Launch & Go-to-Market
7. Customer Feedback & Validation
8. In-Person App Demo Day with Jonathan Greechan
9. AMA #3: Interpreting Feedback & Deciding What's Next
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Revenue Modeling
Legal & IP
Branding & Design
Financial Planning
Team & Advisors
Fundraising Prep
Post-Program Onboarding
This session gives founders focused support on technical challenges, build issues, and launch readiness. Founders will get hands-on help with broken deploys, integration bugs, and coding agent prompts, then share their app progress with mentors and refine their launch plan by identifying their first 10 target users and how to reach them.
Date
Jul 30, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Weekly Focus
1. Kickoff: From Idea to Focused Product Scope
2. AMA #1: Idea Validation & Scope Check
3. Building Your MVP with AI
4. Integrations, Authentication & Data
5. AMA #2: Build Troubleshooting & Mid-Program Check-In
6. Launch & Go-to-Market
7. Customer Feedback & Validation
8. In-Person App Demo Day with Jonathan Greechan
9. AMA #3: Interpreting Feedback & Deciding What's Next
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Revenue Modeling
Legal & IP
Branding & Design
Financial Planning
Team & Advisors
Fundraising Prep
Post-Program Onboarding
This session helps founders move from building to launching by deploying their MVP and taking immediate action to reach potential users. Founders will choose two go-to-market channels, write a clear one-sentence hook, and begin customer outreach or interviews to start generating real user feedback without relying on paid ads.
Date
Aug 04, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Weekly Focus
1. Kickoff: From Idea to Focused Product Scope
2. AMA #1: Idea Validation & Scope Check
3. Building Your MVP with AI
4. Integrations, Authentication & Data
5. AMA #2: Build Troubleshooting & Mid-Program Check-In
6. Launch & Go-to-Market
7. Customer Feedback & Validation
8. In-Person App Demo Day with Jonathan Greechan
9. AMA #3: Interpreting Feedback & Deciding What's Next
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Revenue Modeling
Legal & IP
Branding & Design
Financial Planning
Team & Advisors
Fundraising Prep
Post-Program Onboarding
This session helps founders collect structured feedback, interview potential customers, and analyze early product usage. Founders will have tested their MVP with real users, evaluated their product-market fit signal, and prepared a concise Demo Day presentation covering the problem, customer, product, and key learnings.
Date
Aug 11, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
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
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Weekly Focus
1. Kickoff: From Idea to Focused Product Scope
2. AMA #1: Idea Validation & Scope Check
3. Building Your MVP with AI
4. Integrations, Authentication & Data
5. AMA #2: Build Troubleshooting & Mid-Program Check-In
6. Launch & Go-to-Market
7. Customer Feedback & Validation
8. In-Person App Demo Day with Jonathan Greechan
9. AMA #3: Interpreting Feedback & Deciding What's Next
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Revenue Modeling
Legal & IP
Branding & Design
Financial Planning
Team & Advisors
Fundraising Prep
Post-Program Onboarding
This in-person Demo Day gives founders the opportunity to showcase a 3-minute live product demo during Seattle Tech Week 2026, with Jonathan Greechan as special guest host. Founders will present to mentors, peers, and the local tech community, receive direct feedback from experienced founders and operators, and leave with a shipped product, validated learnings, and a clear roadmap for what to build next.
Date
Aug 19, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Weekly Focus
1. Kickoff: From Idea to Focused Product Scope
2. AMA #1: Idea Validation & Scope Check
3. Building Your MVP with AI
4. Integrations, Authentication & Data
5. AMA #2: Build Troubleshooting & Mid-Program Check-In
6. Launch & Go-to-Market
7. Customer Feedback & Validation
8. In-Person App Demo Day with Jonathan Greechan
9. AMA #3: Interpreting Feedback & Deciding What's Next
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Revenue Modeling
Legal & IP
Branding & Design
Financial Planning
Team & Advisors
Fundraising Prep
Post-Program Onboarding
This session helps founders review feedback data with mentors, separate useful signals from noise, and apply a clear decision framework to their MVP. By the end of the week, founders will have reviewed their customer feedback, identified the strongest signals, and decided which changes to make before Demo Day. They will also refine their 3-minute presentation to clearly explain the problem, customer, product, and key learnings.
Date
Aug 25, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Weekly Focus
1. Kickoff: From Idea to Focused Product Scope
2. AMA #1: Idea Validation & Scope Check
3. Building Your MVP with AI
4. Integrations, Authentication & Data
5. AMA #2: Build Troubleshooting & Mid-Program Check-In
6. Launch & Go-to-Market
7. Customer Feedback & Validation
8. In-Person App Demo Day with Jonathan Greechan
9. AMA #3: Interpreting Feedback & Deciding What's Next
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Revenue Modeling
Legal & IP
Branding & Design
Financial Planning
Team & Advisors
Fundraising Prep
Post-Program Onboarding
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.
Continued Support
Dedicated Alumni Support Team in Silicon Valley
Access to the world's largest network of mentors and investors (40,000+)
Private Alumni mailing lists
$2.5M+ in partner discounts
Invites to FI sessions & network events
Potential introductions to investors
Structured Post-Programs
A series of virtual advisory programs where you work with our Silicon Valley HQ team to reach next milestones
Funding Lab helps get your lead investor within 6 months
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
This session helps founders narrow their idea to one problem, one customer, one core feature, and one revenue stream. Founders will define their target customer segment, clarify the problem they are solving, and create a product outline with a feature list, architecture summary, and MVP hypothesis that can be handed to a coding agent.
Date
Jul 07, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
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
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Jul 1406:00 pmweek 2
AMA #1: Idea Validation & Scope Check
This session gives founders live feedback on their problem statement, target customer, and MVP hypothesis. Founders will identify the riskiest assumption to test first and refine their product outline so they are ready to move into building.
Date
Jul 14, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Jul 2106:00 pmweek 3
Building Your MVP with AI
This session helps founders translate their product outline into structured prompts and begin building with tools like Replit, Lovable, Bolt, or Base44. Funders will understand the basic frontend, backend, and database structure of their app, implement the core user flow, and deploy a first working version to a live URL they can share.
Date
Jul 21, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Jul 28
Refund Deadline
Jul 2806:00 pmweek 4
Integrations, Authentication & Data
This session helps founders add the core infrastructure needed to make their product usable in the real world. Founders will connect user login, external services, and a real database, while also estimating AI API costs per user and setting an initial price using a simple cost-plus margin approach.
Date
Jul 28, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Revenue Modeling
Jul 3006:00 pmweek 4
AMA #2: Build Troubleshooting & Mid-Program Check-In
This session gives founders focused support on technical challenges, build issues, and launch readiness. Founders will get hands-on help with broken deploys, integration bugs, and coding agent prompts, then share their app progress with mentors and refine their launch plan by identifying their first 10 target users and how to reach them.
Date
Jul 30, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Revenue Modeling
Legal & IP
Branding & Design
Aug 0406:00 pmweek 5
Launch & Go-to-Market
This session helps founders move from building to launching by deploying their MVP and taking immediate action to reach potential users. Founders will choose two go-to-market channels, write a clear one-sentence hook, and begin customer outreach or interviews to start generating real user feedback without relying on paid ads.
Date
Aug 04, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Financial Planning
Team & Advisors
Fundraising Prep
Post-Program Onboarding
Aug 1106:00 pmweek 6
Customer Feedback & Validation
This session helps founders collect structured feedback, interview potential customers, and analyze early product usage. Founders will have tested their MVP with real users, evaluated their product-market fit signal, and prepared a concise Demo Day presentation covering the problem, customer, product, and key learnings.
Date
Aug 11, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
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
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Revenue Modeling
Legal & IP
Branding & Design
Aug 1906:00 pmweek 7
In-Person App Demo Day with Jonathan Greechan
This in-person Demo Day gives founders the opportunity to showcase a 3-minute live product demo during Seattle Tech Week 2026, with Jonathan Greechan as special guest host. Founders will present to mentors, peers, and the local tech community, receive direct feedback from experienced founders and operators, and leave with a shipped product, validated learnings, and a clear roadmap for what to build next.
Date
Aug 19, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Revenue Modeling
Legal & IP
Branding & Design
Financial Planning
Team & Advisors
Aug 2506:00 pmweek 8
AMA #3: Interpreting Feedback & Deciding What's Next
This session helps founders review feedback data with mentors, separate useful signals from noise, and apply a clear decision framework to their MVP. By the end of the week, founders will have reviewed their customer feedback, identified the strongest signals, and decided which changes to make before Demo Day. They will also refine their 3-minute presentation to clearly explain the problem, customer, product, and key learnings.
Date
Aug 25, 2026
Time
06:00pm PDT
Sprints
Below are just high-level previews of the 10-15 deliverables you'll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:
Deliverables
The Agentic Track
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.
The Agentic Track
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.
Sprints
Pitching
Customer Development
Leadership Development
Sales & Customer Acquisition
Product Development
Revenue Modeling
Legal & IP
Branding & Design
Financial Planning
Team & Advisors
week 9+
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.
Continued Support
Dedicated Alumni Support Team in Silicon Valley
Access to the world's largest network of mentors and investors (40,000+)
Private Alumni mailing lists
$2.5M+ in partner discounts
Invites to FI sessions & network events
Potential introductions to investors
Structured Post-Programs
A series of virtual advisory programs where you work with our Silicon Valley HQ team to reach next milestones
Funding Lab helps get your lead investor within 6 months
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
Quickly preview the program dates or copy them in plain-text format
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.
