What to expect from Founder.University?

My co-founder Ignas and I just wrapped up a 12-week Founder.University pre-accelerator programme. Putting this blog post in the books primarily for ourselves, so we could share it out the next time someone asks us “Should I join Founder Uni?”.

Hint: You should!

What is Founder.University?

Founder University (FU for short) will teach you how to start a technology company. It’s a 12-week pre-accelerator for startups that is run by Kelly and Presh, and is part of a larger LAUNCH venture investment firm/accelerator headed by none other than Jason Calacanis himself.

FU operates in a remote-first format, so you can complete it from anywhere in the world. It has a $500 deposit that is fully refunded if you join all the mandatory Monday sessions and, also, offers scholarships for broke founders like yours truly, who sometimes have trouble scrounging up $500 on the spot.

Application process

It literally takes a couple of minutes to apply. The application involves a short form + a one-minute live video recording where you are asked to talk about yourself, your business, or anything else that you are passionate about. If you are accepted, you’ll receive an email with a link to a form to add your credit card details for a $500 deposit.

That’s it. Exactly what I would expect from an early-stage pre-accelerator. No interviews, back and forth discussions, or decision committees. You either make a good first impression or you don’t.

I assume that the selection criteria still depends on the individual case, however, there’s some content online where the LAUNCH team covers what they are looking for in teams for Founder University [Live pitch session on Youtube/-/Twitter Space(starts at 12:42)]:

• Builder founders. No “ideas peoples”. You have the skills to build your product in-house. No outsourcing.
• Teams of 2-3 founders. You were able to make the first and the most important sale – you convinced someone else to join your team.

The above two are the most important ones for sure, however, it might evolve over time as FU gets more traction. The first few cohorts had a 100% acceptance rate, while Cohort 6 had 10%.

It’s a great joy and privilege for me to sit with founders in year zero and jam out on their startups!

2,000+ applications to https://t.co/h7egMLOmjJ this year, excited to work with the top 10% or so—and to fund the top 10% of the accepted founders! https://t.co/wKSc3QdMqE

— @jason (@Jason) August 12, 2023

Cadence

Each week has three regular activities:

• Monday, 6PM PST. Mandatory one hour keynote from a topic matter expert
• Thursday, 6PM PST. Optional one hour workshop
• Weekly update. A short form to report your progress over the week

This cadence is perfect, doesn’t take a lot of time, and doesn’t distract you from what matters the most – building your startup.

Each Monday session has a special topic. Starting with talks about one simple sentence, building in public, landing pages, and later going into pitches, fundraising, and the data rooms.

Thursdays are usually reserved for workshops. Here you’ll have an opportunity to work directly with other founders on the topic that was discussed earlier in the week. So if on Monday there was a presentation about landing pages, then on Thursday expect an opportunity to roast each others landings and get some valuable feedback.

Personally, I found Thursday sessions to be the most valuable part of FU because it’s one thing to get directions from an expert who “made it” and it’s completely another thing to get into the weeds with a fellow founder who is going through the same journey as you. Their experience is still fresh; they are aware of the constraints, pressures and are still going through that messy middle. This is also where you’ll have a chance to make new connections that, in the future, might help you land that new client, investor, or a new hire.

Curriculum

Jason has been in the Silicon Valley arena for the last two decades, has done more than 1800 episodes of the This Week in Startups podcast and has access to the most prominent people in the industry. Self guided courses take all that knowledge, learnings, content and condense everything into several hours of course material that you can take at your own pace. It’s a secret sauce of Founder University that is specifically aimed at early-stage companies.

For example, I always struggled with pitching my startups. Most of the advice on the internet just covers high-level points and it sometimes seems that nobody actually knows what to do. Founder University provided me with a super-detailed checklist and the reasoning behind each item. Our pitch for Fiestos was taken to the next level basically overnight. From a long story that tries to boil the ocean to a short 2-minute movie trailer that has a clear goal. Also, we had a chance to submit a video of our pitch with each Weekly Update and get direct feedback from FU. That’s invaluable.

Final weeks

During the final weeks of Founder University, each company is invited to pitch to the LAUNCH investment team. Each founder has 2 minutes to present their company and answer questions from investors. This can be a great practice run for folks who started their companies at the beginning of the pre-accelerator or an opportunity to move forward and join the LAUNCH accelerator.

Also, Founder University invests $25k in top 20-30 companies in each cohort. For some companies that initial investment might be a massive springboard because not everyone has a rich family member or a friend. That can sometimes make or break a company.

Ready to apply?

Head over to Founder.University and fill out that application.

Also, if the next cohort is still a few weeks away, I really recommend going through The Startup Checklist that was created by the same team. 100 simple questions that will help you decide if you really want to be a startup founder. Both my co-founder and I went through it before joining FU and it helped us a lot!