| Thanks! Definitely pulling on the same thread as Startup School (though I've never done it myself). Some structural differences might be 1/ this explicitly designed to be a replacement for the application process at Earnest. Over time you build up a profile that contains most of what we need to make an investment decision. We'll still need to chat and do diligence, but we're trying to remove a lot of the uncertainty around what should be in a pitch and when to time the pitch. Basically pitching is not a skillset we optimize for at Earnest (since most of the founders we back not intend to raise continuously more rounds of capital). 2/ This is explicitly opinionated in structure. Everything will intentionally skew towards our "funding for bootstrappers" strategy vs being generic advice. This should help founders decide if they are a fit for working with us long-term. 3/ This is not a "how to build a business" process. It's much closer to "here is a bunch of questions and prompts that we have found valuable to strengthen founders' thinking and strategy + some resources"... we're not here to teach you how to build a business with this. > You mentioned that people get a free trial, but it sounds like someone can sign up for trailhead and stay in it for the long term without ever deciding to raise the earnest. What do you guys do in that case? When does someone get kicked out of their free trial? :) good question. this is subject to experiments/change but the way we're thinking about it now is 1) Founder Summit remains a paid community (we are still a small fund and this allows us to hire an awesome team + pay people for workshops, etc) 2) We want to avoid a "pay to pitch" scenario so Trailhead folks get a 3-month free trial. 3) At the end they can choose: don't apply to Earnest but stay in the community and pay, apply to Earnest (portfolio co's get free access), or decide they've gotten what they need and move on from both. |