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DePaul University

Program schedule

The FI Agentic Accelerator is 10 sessions plus Funding Day. Every founder in the cohort attends the same sessions; the work between them is set by your Playbook.

Between cohorts

DePaul is between cohorts

The sessions below are the sequence every cohort runs. Dates go up as soon as the next cohort is scheduled.

See chapters enrolling now
1 Session 1

Orientation

This is where it all begins. During Orientation, we will review the Founder Institute - DePaul program structure, curriculum, tools, and requirements. You will start to review why you have pursued entrepreneurship, and how you will use the program to be successful. We will review the progress that you have made to date and start to build a system for your success.

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 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

Customized to your startup's needs, more advanced or more basic, with AI agents to help you complete the work.

  1. Office Hours - Book your first Office Hours with Local Leaders and Mentors to get guidance on the next steps for your business.
  2. 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

Customized to your startup's needs, more advanced or more basic, with AI agents to help you complete the work.

The sprint types, with the session each one starts and ends in.
Sprint Starts Ends
Pitching Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Customer Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Leadership Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Sales & Customer Acquisition Session 3, Customer Development Continues after the program
Product Development Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Revenue Modeling Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Legal & IP Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Branding & Design Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Financial Planning After Funding Day Continues after the program
Team & Advisors After Funding Day Continues after the program
Fundraising Prep After Funding Day Continues after the program
Post-Program Onboarding After Funding Day Continues after the program
2 Session 2

Vision and Validation

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

Customized to your startup's needs, more advanced or more basic, with AI agents to help you complete the work.

  1. Market Research - Utilize our market research template to collect accurate and available market information on the customer problems you are analyzing.
  2. Personas - Build an initial Buyer Persona to better understand your target customer's needs, challenges, and buying process.
The Agentic Track

Customized to your startup's needs, more advanced or more basic, with AI agents to help you complete the work.

The sprint types, with the session each one starts and ends in.
Sprint Starts Ends
Pitching Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Customer Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Leadership Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Sales & Customer Acquisition Session 3, Customer Development Continues after the program
Product Development Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Revenue Modeling Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Legal & IP Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Branding & Design Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Financial Planning After Funding Day Continues after the program
Team & Advisors After Funding Day Continues after the program
Fundraising Prep After Funding Day Continues after the program
Post-Program Onboarding After Funding Day Continues after the program
3 Session 3

Customer Development

All businesses require customers. The degree of desire and urgency that customers feel to adopt your solution, can cause your business to grow quickly and easily, or slowly and frustratingly. Work to identify actual customers, validate your key assumptions, and be sure you are building the best and easiest business. By the end of the week, you will have a clear sense of your ideal customer and be in a position to start building a leading technology company.

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

Customized to your startup's needs, more advanced or more basic, with AI agents to help you complete the work.

  1. 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.
  2. 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

Customized to your startup's needs, more advanced or more basic, with AI agents to help you complete the work.

The sprint types, with the session each one starts and ends in.
Sprint Starts Ends
Pitching Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Customer Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Leadership Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Sales & Customer Acquisition Session 3, Customer Development Continues after the program
Product Development Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Revenue Modeling Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Legal & IP Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Branding & Design Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Financial Planning After Funding Day Continues after the program
Team & Advisors After Funding Day Continues after the program
Fundraising Prep After Funding Day Continues after the program
Post-Program Onboarding After Funding Day Continues after the program
4 Session 4

Product Mockups

Businesses need products or services as well as customers. To make sure you are building the right product, you want to get detailed customer feedback from the minimum investment in product. The way to do this is to develop a mockup, detailed drawing or outline. Customers can then give you detailed feedback on features, helping you make sure you are building the right things in the right order ... and allowing you to further validate if you should even build the product in the first place.

The Agentic Track

Customized to your startup's needs, more advanced or more basic, with AI agents to help you complete the work.

The sprint types, with the session each one starts and ends in.
Sprint Starts Ends
Pitching Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Customer Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Leadership Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Sales & Customer Acquisition Session 3, Customer Development Continues after the program
Product Development Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Revenue Modeling Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Legal & IP Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Branding & Design Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Financial Planning After Funding Day Continues after the program
Team & Advisors After Funding Day Continues after the program
Fundraising Prep After Funding Day Continues after the program
Post-Program Onboarding After Funding Day Continues after the program
5 Session 5

Revenue

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

Customized to your startup's needs, more advanced or more basic, with AI agents to help you complete the work.

  1. Revenue Models - Narrow down that problem to three potential revenue models, and thoroughly analyze the positives and negatives of each model.
  2. 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

Customized to your startup's needs, more advanced or more basic, with AI agents to help you complete the work.

The sprint types, with the session each one starts and ends in.
Sprint Starts Ends
Pitching Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Customer Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Leadership Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Sales & Customer Acquisition Session 3, Customer Development Continues after the program
Product Development Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Revenue Modeling Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Legal & IP Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Branding & Design Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Financial Planning After Funding Day Continues after the program
Team & Advisors After Funding Day Continues after the program
Fundraising Prep After Funding Day Continues after the program
Post-Program Onboarding After Funding Day Continues after the program
6 Session 6

Naming and Branding

The Agentic Track

Customized to your startup's needs, more advanced or more basic, with AI agents to help you complete the work.

The sprint types, with the session each one starts and ends in.
Sprint Starts Ends
Pitching Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Customer Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Leadership Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Sales & Customer Acquisition Session 3, Customer Development Continues after the program
Product Development Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Revenue Modeling Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Legal & IP Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Branding & Design Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Financial Planning After Funding Day Continues after the program
Team & Advisors After Funding Day Continues after the program
Fundraising Prep After Funding Day Continues after the program
Post-Program Onboarding After Funding Day Continues after the program
7 Session 7

Pitch Bootcamp

The Agentic Track

Customized to your startup's needs, more advanced or more basic, with AI agents to help you complete the work.

The sprint types, with the session each one starts and ends in.
Sprint Starts Ends
Pitching Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Customer Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Leadership Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Sales & Customer Acquisition Session 3, Customer Development Continues after the program
Product Development Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Revenue Modeling Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Legal & IP Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Branding & Design Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Financial Planning After Funding Day Continues after the program
Team & Advisors After Funding Day Continues after the program
Fundraising Prep After Funding Day Continues after the program
Post-Program Onboarding After Funding Day Continues after the program
8 Session 8

Mentor Idea Review

The Mentor Idea Review is the first major test in the Founder Institute Program, and the culmination of the Founder Institute - DePaul Business Bootcamp. During this session, every founder presents their customer problem to a panel of CEOs who review the idea and the progress in detail. After the session, you will incorporate their feedback into your planning, and decide whether to proceed to building and growing your business in the Founder Institute - DePaul Acceleration Bootcamp.

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

Customized to your startup's needs, more advanced or more basic, with AI agents to help you complete the work.

  1. 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.
  2. 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

Customized to your startup's needs, more advanced or more basic, with AI agents to help you complete the work.

The sprint types, with the session each one starts and ends in.
Sprint Starts Ends
Pitching Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Customer Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Leadership Development Session 1, Orientation Continues after the program
Sales & Customer Acquisition Session 3, Customer Development Continues after the program
Product Development Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Revenue Modeling Session 4, Revenue Continues after the program
Legal & IP Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Branding & Design Session 5, Mentor Idea Review Continues after the program
Financial Planning After Funding Day Continues after the program
Team & Advisors After Funding Day Continues after the program
Fundraising Prep After Funding Day Continues after the program
Post-Program Onboarding After Funding Day Continues after the program
Next

After Funding Day

Graduating is where the real work starts, and FI stays in your corner for it.

Every graduate joins a global alumni community with ongoing support, tools, and access to investors for years after the program ends.

What happens after I graduate?

What Graduates Get
What Graduates Get

  • Access to Funding Days to pitch to active investors

  • Exclusive support from the FI Grad team

  • Continued access to AI tools and agents for one year

  • Access to Cap and other tools for five years

  • Discounts to major annual events like FounderX

  • Limited free access to ongoing Founder Bootcamps

Learn more about our Graduates

Your Playbook

How your Playbook fits this schedule

The schedule is the spine every founder shares: 10 sessions and Funding Day. Your Playbook is the flesh on it. Two founders in the same cohort attend the same sessions and work on different deliverables between them.

See how your Playbook is built

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