Class complete! Check out the video if you missed the live class.
Founder Institute is the world’s largest pre-seed accelerator. Started in 2009 and with over 4,000 companies now as alumni, FI helps build global businesses. Their alumni have raised over $950m in funding and accelerates their founders to quickly scale, fundraise, recruit teams, and transition from employee to entrepreneur. They have chapters in 185 cities on 6 continents including major cities like San Francisco, New York, Tokyo, Sydney, Paris, London, Bangalore, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and many many more.
Mentor and Advisor Network
One strength of Founder Institute are their mentors. They have 20-40 local mentors per cohort. Mentors host weekly sessions and office hours on specific topics where they experts. Mentors are also incentivized to help founders (and their companies) succeed by participating in Founder Institute’s Equity Collective where a small portion of equity in the company goes to all mentors. It’s a win for everyone.
Covid and Virtual Events
With Covid and everything going virtual, FI has taken their events virtual. As an alumni, you can join any of their mentor events.
Master Session - Operations Best Practices
On Friday, May 22, 2020 at 9am Pacific Time, our co-founder and head of product, Adam Spector, is teaching a Master Session focused on Operational Best Practices. If you’re not an FI Alum yet, join FI and come to the next Master Session!
Focus Focus Focus
The secret to business success is simple: focus. Your focus should be on only two things: 1. product, and, 2. customers of that product. The problem, starting a business requires what we call “RTB” or run-the-business distractions. This means things like registering your business, paying your employees, fundraising, figuring out the right bank or credit card, finding an account and so forth. These items add up to a lot of distraction.
Reduce Cognitive Distraction
If focus is your goal then reducing cognitive distraction is the way to succeed. Cognitive load builds up when founders constantly switch contexts – i.e. from product to a customer call to dealing with an employee issue (or other “operation” work). Outsource as much as you can to a trusted third part.
Operations – what is it?
There is no single definition of operations. In our view, it includes: finance, legal, human resources (HR), insurance, and regulatory. In many cases, fundraising, building a sales process, and finding or researching vendors is also included.
Given that most of these tasks are one-off, single items that founders or executives may do only a few times a month, the cognitive load to perform that task is high. This is what makes operations tough.
Want to learn more about how to manage your operations so you can go back to focusing on your business’ success? Join Adam and the FI team at 9am on the 22nd.
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Note: Our content is for general information purposes only. AbstractOps does not provide legal, accounting, or certified expert advice. Consult a lawyer, CPA, or other professional for such services.