Now that I’ve been in Silicon Valley for over a year, I’ve been making a concerted effort to get to know more people in the community. While a lot of the events I attended were great, one particular event landed me at a place in Palo Alto called The Founders Institute. I went there without knowing what FI was but quickly became aware that FI was a startup accelerator known for their brutal honesty, high attrition rate, and tangible results. The caliber of professionals at the event motivated me to do more research and I ended up applying for the program late that same night.
I got in! I am now two weeks into the program and it is living up to my expectations. The workload is significant but manageable and it is definitely accelerating the pace of my customer development and need finding. In the process of interviewing potential customers, I even got the CEO of Make Magazine on the phone. I learned a lot.
One part of FI that’s been challenging is refining the one minute pitch. If you’re curious, I posted my first pitch below.
On the next post I’ll share more about the customer development process and what I’m learning about the industry.