Program Schedule

This is the first big checkpoint in the program to determine each Founder’s progress. During the Mentor Idea Review, every founder will present their customer problem and progress to a panel of FI Mentors for extensive review. Founders will receive a rating, and receive feedback on the validity of their idea, their customer problem, market size, the soundness of their revenue model, and more. 

Assignments

After the Mentor Idea Review, all assignments are Standard, and Founders receive a larger number of custom "Special Assignments" based on their specific challenges. 

1. Corporate Materials - Update your 3 minute pitch deck based on the Mentor Idea Review Feedback, and include a new and updated one page executive summary using our template.
2. Law Firm Identification - If you don’t already have a law firm, identify at least two local law firm candidates that have experience working with startups, and recruit one for your startup using our process and guidelines.
3. Advisor Candidates - You will create an advisory board in the next 5 weeks, so start by developing a target list of new advisor candidates based off you identified needs and gaps in knowledge/ connections. 
4. 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.  
5. Sales Follow-up - Continue to work on securing sales or commitments for revenue. For B2B solutions, get as many contracts or letters of intent as possible. For B2C solutions, aggressively your revenue (or submitted information indicating they will pay you).
6. Sales Plan - Based on the needs of your financial model and sales follow-up research, develop a plan to build and grow your revenues over the next three months.
7. Financial Model - Develop a simple financial model based on our template that focuses on expenses (“burn”) to understand your cash needs. Develop a revenue forecast for 12 months and factor in timing considerations from your sales follow-up work.
8. Business Calendar - Create a calendar to track all of your relevant business due dates, regulatory filings, and other obligations and related events.

In this session, startup lawyers and CEOs will explain various legal agreements, startup legal components (such as equity), how to protect intellectual property, the best practices for managing a law firm, and more. As usual, Mentors will also provide Founders feedback on their startup pitch and progress, ensuring that you can better explain what your company is to your growing audience.

Assignments

Below are just a few of the 10-15 assignments you’ll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:

1. Legal Concepts - Review our Legal Guide in detail to fully understand all critical startup legal components, including granting equity, vesting equity, granting options and issuing common stock versus preferred stock.
2. Capitalization Table - Develop or improve your capitalization table (“Cap Table”) that shows the ownership structure of the business, using our template and guidelines.
3. Finalize Co-Founder Legal (if any) - Create a list of any co-founders, co-founder candidates or founding Team Members that you have for your Founder Institute company, and begin the next steps in formalizing the relationship.
4. Advisor Interviews - Meet with or call each of your advisor candidates for at least 15 minutes, discuss the customer problem and progress, and narrow down to a few top advisor candidates. 
5. 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. 
6. Corporate Formation Agreements - If you don’t already have a suitable corporation, secure all of your corporate formation agreements, including bylaws or similar documents, which govern how the business conducts itself.
7. Legal Templates - Secure standard legal templates from your law firm, including a mutual non-disclosure agreement, an intellectual property assignment agreement, a basic employment agreement, a basic freelancer agreement, and a basic advisor agreement (such as https://fi.co/FAST).
8. Bonus Pool - Prepare to join the Bonus Pool, and send your law firm the necessary agreements and request their help to properly fill out the required fields.

In this session, Mentors will discuss prioritizing your go-to market initiatives, evaluating different models for growing your startup, developing marketing messages that resonate with your target customers, and more. Mentors will also provide Founders with feedback on their go-to-market plans and progress. 

Assignments

Below are just a few of the 10-15 assignments you’ll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Marketing Tools - If you have not already, implement standard marketing tools on your site and channels (including analytics, email management, and A/B testing solutions).
4. Test Marketing Messaging - Write at least three separate marketing messages for your solution, and A/B test them using landing pages with at least 100 engagements each. 
5. Customer Acquisition Channels - Identify at least five initial or new major marketing channels to acquire customers that are appropriate for your solution.
6. Conversion Rate - Begin testing at least three of your new customer acquisition channels, pushing as much traffic through them as possible to evaluate their comparative conversion rates. 
7. Unit Economics - Research any data on the standard Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC) and standard Lifetime Value (LTV) for your industry and segment, and compare and analyze against the metrics you have collected thus far. 
8. Growth Goals - Set ambitious customer acquisition goals for both during and after the program, which should include a quantifiable increase in the top of the funnel from the Steps to Revenue, as well as an increase in the bottom of the funnel, which are paying customers.

In this session, Mentors will discuss best practices in product development and team management to release a world-class solution, prototyping your solution, speaking with your target customers and to get feedback, and more. Mentors will also provide Founders with feedback on their product’s development and progress.

Assignments

Below are just a few of the 10-15 assignments you’ll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:

1. 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. 
2. Solution Goals - Evaluate the current state of your solution, and outline the three solution goals that you would like the next product release to solve for your target customers over the next year.
3. Project Team - If you have not already, organize the skills and roles needed to execute on your solution goals, whether using existing team members or supplementing through hiring or outsourcing. 
4. Product Roadmap - Develop a first or updated product roadmap, using our guidelines, in order to meet your solution goals with your project team.
5. Project Plan - Fine tune the schedule of releases in your product roadmap to be as simple as possible to each test one hypothesis of the business, using our guidelines.
6. Development Tools - Research and secure any development tools, technologies, or systems that you will need to create your solution and to manage the process.
7. Next Release Plan - Record the details about your next release, and describe the timing for its completion in a way that can be easily communicated to team members, partners, and other stakeholders in the business. 
8. Hotseat Pitch - Prepare a five minute presentation for the Mentor Progress Review that includes sufficient information to enable Mentors to evaluate your progress and plans.

Similar to the Mentor Idea Review, the Mentor Progress Review is the second major test in the program. In this session, Founders will focus on presenting their progress and traction to a panel of Mentors for a detailed review. Mentors will evaluate Founders based on their progress, their go-to-market plan, the company’s scalability, and more.

Assignments

Below are just a few of the 10-15 assignments you’ll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours: 

1. Investor Pitch Deck - Create an expanded, 12-slide pitch deck incorporating any feedback from the Mentor Progress Review, using our templates. 
2. Growth - Make progress on your growth goals, and examine or adjust how your strategy and the system to keep yourself accountable is performing.
3. Product - Make progress on your next product release, and outline and address any of the setbacks that you have faced with your project team.
4. Hiring Needs - Score the progress of each member of your project team on a 1 to 10 scale, including yourself, and set up plans to improve those that are struggling. 
5. Finalize Advisory Board - Set up your advisory board with startup, industry, technology or marketing advisors, and set up a one hour conference call with all of the them, which will be your first quarterly advisory board meeting.
6. Bookkeeping - Start regular bookkeeping processes if you have not already, and implement tools, accounts, and monthly processes to manage it moving forward.
7. Accountant Interviews - If you don’t have an accountant already, begin interviewing potential organizations using our processes. You will need a startup-friendly accountant to understand your unique needs.
8. Financial Model Update - Review and update your financial model with the work done to date. Adjust the revenue projections based on your growth thus far, and evaluate the need and requirements for external funding. 

In this session, Mentors will discuss how identify the roles needed to build a world-class company, how to develop a strategy to recruit, board and retain the best people for the roles, and more. Founders will also receive feedback from Mentors on their team plans and product progress. 

Assignments

Below are just a few of the 10-15 assignments you’ll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours: 

1. Outsourcing - Identify what roles you should outsource, and use your recent release work, sales, and program work to update or execute your hiring needs.
2. Candidates - Search for candidates to hire (including Co-Founders) by identifying everyone that you know who is appropriate, or leveraging the FI network, to fill the top two or three roles you are not planning to outsource.
3. Hiring Process - Develop a hiring and onboarding process using our guidelines to add team members into your organization, and begin executing on the process.
4. Test Projects - Develop at least one test project for each of your top two or three roles, which should create opportunities for a credible candidate to demonstrate their skills.
5. Advisor Review - Arrange a meeting or phone call with at least one of your advisors to discuss your outsourcing and hiring work. Present everything that you have done, and incorporate their feedback into your planning.
6. Recruiting Outreach - Based on the feedback from your advisors, create a list of events and activities that you will attend or undertake each week for the next three months to identify new candidates for the top two or three roles.
7. Time Allocation - Meticulously outline your “founder’s schedule” by allocating weekly blocks of time to address your core business activities, providing you with uninterrupted time to work on each activity.
8. (Optional) Founding Round Setup - If you don’t have sufficient capital to run the company for the next few months, then follow our guides to start a preparing documentation and research for a “Founding Round”.  

In this session, Mentors will discuss such topics as defining success for your company, the various tactics to grow a business, setting growth goals and milestones, communicating your startup’s growth progress and setbacks with stakeholders and advisors, and more. Mentors will also also provide Founders with feedback on their current growth and growth strategy. 

Assignments

Below are just a few of the 10-15 assignments you’ll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:

1. Growth Plan Update - Review the performance of your growth goals and adjust your growth plan to improve your performance and accountability.
2. Sales - Push yourself for a second week to close new revenue or users, which may be signups, payments, a signed contract, a pre-payment or a signed letter of intent.
3. Growth Tactics - Work with your working group and advisors to brainstorm 15 new ideas to increase the top of your funnel and to accelerate the closing of sales, and provide a bulleted list of these Growth Tactics.
4. 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 Directors to discuss your proposed pivot in the business and do the same with your advisors.
5. Product - Work closely with your project team to make substantial progress on your next release, and work to ensure that each release takes about two weeks to complete.
6. Hiring - Review all of the candidates that have come through the various recruiting outreach channels and other activities, and identify the most effective channels.
7. Post-Program Schedule - Work with your cohort on a monthly meeting schedule where you will continue to meet, provide updates, and share learning on your progress. 
8. (Optional) Founding Round Follow-ups - Build your pipeline of potential “Founding Round” investors, meeting and securing commitments from at least one person. 

In this session, Mentors will cover numerous topics related to fundraising, including different fundraising options, what different types of investors expect to see with respect to progress on team, product and traction, and more. Mentors will also provide Founders with feedback on their startup pitch that they can expect to hear from investors. 

Assignments

Below are just a few of the 10-15 assignments you’ll complete through Working Groups and Office Hours:

1. Minimum Victory Condition - Work with your Directors to set up a “Victory Condition” to achieve before the “Impact Deadline” (three months after graduation), and add it to your business calendar.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Final Investor Pitch Deck - Refine your investor pitch deck, and update it with all of your work to date, including details from your various plans. Test the presentation on peers and Directors and upload it to the FI site for review. 
5. Deal Room - Create a Deal Room for future investors that includes relevant files like 'Company' documents with legal, 'Pitch Deck', 'Team' bios, 'Board Materials,' 'Financials,' 'Sales' information, 'Marketing' materials and 'Intellectual Property.'
6. Target List - Identify local Angel Investors and Seed Accelerators, ignoring Venture Capitalists and Seed Funds. The Target List should include at least 100 local angels, 25 regional and 50 global seed accelerators, using our guidelines.
7. Event List - List upcoming pitch events, including events where angel investors will be attendance that you identified for the target list, and during the events, look to make connections with these angel investors for future use.
8. (Optional) Founding Round Close - Work through your investor pipeline, making sure that each interested party is either “Soft Circled” (verbally committed to invest) or “Hard Circled” (investment has been received). Start filling and closing the Founding Round.

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.

There are no hidden costs, additional contracts or surprise subscription fees: all our post-program support is free and exclusive to FI Alumni companies, for life.