The Founder Institute - A Graduate’s Account
For the last four months I’ve been making a weekly two hour trek down the 5 freeway to join like-minded entrepreneurs plot out a course for tech startup domination.
Tomorrow I graduate from the San Diego chapter of The Founder Institute, an early stage technology incubator.
For two years I’ve been cursed with what Cobb from Inception called “the most resilient parasite.” An idea. It has evolved from its original form, seemingly taken a mind of its own, yet outlasted the multiple attempts to silence it.
I had heard about Founder Institute from a handful of posts on TechCrunch, but it was at Andrew Warner’s recommendation on his show Mixergy that I took action. I applied, took the test, and was ultimately accepted into San Diego’s Season 3.
As with many things in life, the value taken from it is directly related to to the amount of effort you put in.
Four months of lectures, team meetings, homework, weekly “hot seats”, monthly pitch sessions graded by the mentors - the experience was once in a lifetime.
I walked in with an “interesting concept”, a few lines of code, and no real idea on how to make money. I’ll graduate with an actual business, a solid product offering, a board of advisors and investor attention.
In the next couple months I will launch FanFare, a tool combining digital media with social networking. We’re helping online publishers grow their audience virally.
Stay tuned.
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Some random thoughts from my experience at FI:
- Amazing connections. Normal entrepreneurs would kill to be able to schedule a meeting with some of the people I’ve met with. Networking is not a strength of mine, but even in the last two weeks, I’ve surprised myself with some of the names on my calendar. All thanks to the mentors.
- The sounding board that is the other founders. It made it easier being able to interact with people in the same position and with the same struggles.
- Helpful homework. I initially considered the weekly homework “busy work”. But the assignments do help you build your business. It forces you to do the things where you tell yourself “I’ll get to that later” and never get done.
- Pitching is important. I dread public speaking. But being able to clearly and confidently convince a room full of people on the brilliance of your idea and why you are the guy to pull it off, is a skill only learned by doing.
- The Product isn’t as important as you think. I originally had the thought “I wish we spent more time on product and customer development.” But 1) many of the group members are not developers and, like me, have full time jobs and 2) that’s the easy part. Anybody can throw together a mock-up and talk to potential customers. But idea validation, business formation, presentation, publicity, fundraising, etc. these are the things that the structure of FI proves most valuable.
Through Founder Institute I gained the knowledge, experience, and contacts that would have typically cost me tens of thousands of dollars and years of trial and error.
