Join a cohort of 100 select founders figuring out product development, customer acquisition, building the early team, fundraising, and navigating the emotional journey. All virtual, from the comfort of your home, and entirely free for founders.
Andrew Ofstad
Co-founder, Airtable
Twists, turns, and collaboration on the road to product-market fit
Ruth Zukerman
Co-founder, Flywheel; Co-founder, SoulCycle
On resilience, reinvention, and knowing yourself, while building two iconic brands and communities
Max Levchin
Founder & CEO, Affirm; Co-founder & CTO, PayPal
From PayPal mafia to serial entrepreneur
Nadia Boujarwah
Founder & CEO, Dia&Co
How to build a loved consumer product and find your users
Jessica Chang
Co-Founder & CEO, Weecare
Getting the most out of a small team while building a two-sided marketplace of caregivers & parents
Shoaib Makani
Founder & CEO, KeepTruckin
Acquiring over 100,000 truck fleets as customers for a B2B product
...with more speakers listed below!
How they mastered the startup journey: product, customer acquisition, building a team, fundraising, and navigating the founder's emotional journey.
Founding isn't meant to be a solo journey. Join a cohort of select founders at the same stage to cheer each other on and grow with, during the program and beyond.
Looking for a marquee first customer? Positioning the perfect product marketing message? Hiring an outside sales rep? Stand on the shoulders of this broader network.
Ilya Volodarsky
Cofounder, Segment
Early days of B2B customer acquisition
Alyson Friedensohn
Founder & CEO, Modern Health
Navigating the founder emotional journey
Erica Alioto
Chief People Officer, Opendoor; SVP Sales, Yelp
Getting Yelp off the ground as 1st sales rep and 11 years building a full sales organization
Nnamdi Okike
Co-Founder & Managing Partner, 645 Ventures
Using data analytics from deal sourcing to diligence, tracking, and portfolio company value-add
Harry Stebbings
Founder, Stride.VC; Founder, The Twenty Minute VC
Scaling content to 15M downloads per month on $0 spend
Andrew Chau
Co-founder, Neo Financial; Co-founder, SkipTheDishes
Scaling a food delivery company to 4 million users (in Canada alone) and a $200M acquisition on <$10M funding raised
Aline Lerner
Founder & CEO, interviewing.io
Building the kind of hiring brand that makes hundreds of thousands of engineers come to you, with zero spend
Andrew Lee
Co-founder, Firebase (acq. Google)
Building a delightful B2B product
JD Ross
Company-builder, Atomic; Co-founder, Opendoor
Market and product research process to launch Opendoor and dozens more companies
Sara Mauskopf
Co-founder & CEO, Winnie
Iterating and pivoting to product-market fit with consumers and parents
Osman (Ozzie) Osman
Co-founder, Monarch Money; Co-founder, Parlio (acq. Quora); Author, Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring
Growing software engineering teams effectively and avoiding expensive hiring mistakes
Merci Victoria Grace
Partner, Lightspeed; Director of Product & Growth, Slack
How product, business model, positioning, and first customers define your go-to-market
Umang Dua
Co-founder, Handy
Scaling a direct-to-consumer marketplace from zero to acquisition
Entirely free to founders - no equity and no cost. Our goal is to support more founders early in the journey, as there are so many more teams than we can fund in our portfolio alone.
The program will run six weeks, Tuesday, September 8 - Tuesday, October 20. Each week will feature two to three speaker panels, typically taking place in the morning US Pacific Time to accommodate time zones from the US East Coast to Europe and Asia. Applying for the program gives founders access to every event. In the final week, we'll celebrate the completion of the program with a half-day Summit (open to the wider public).
The program is entirely virtual.
Each week will feature two to three panels on one of the core early-stage company-building components: Product Development, Customer Acquisition, Building the Early Team, Fundraising, and the Founder Emotional Journey. All founders in the cohort are invited and encouraged to attend the panels each week to get a broad overview of the startup journey.
Check out Program Details (from the navigation bar above).
Applications are open Monday August 3rd and close on Sunday, August 16th at 11:59pm PT. We will review applications on a rolling basis and confirm enrollment in the program as applications come in.
Check out the application (from the navigation bar at top right).
All events will take place virtually.
All early-stage founders are invited to apply. We will select a cohort of ~100 teams.
All who apply (even those not selected for this year's cohort) will be invited to attend the half-day Summit on October 20, 2020, featuring guests like Max Levchin (Founder & CEO, Affirm; Co-founder & CTO, PayPal), Afore Capital founders Gaurav Jain and Anamitra Banerji, Alfred Lin (General Partner, Sequoia Capital), Ruth Zukerman (Co-founder, Flywheel and SoulCycle), and more.
At Afore, we say that nothing is too early. Founders who would get the most value out of the program are ones who have their starting team and idea in mind and have begun developing product.
Multiple co-founders from the same team are welcome to attend. Each team need only submit one application. (We'll ask for co-founder names/emails at the end of the application).
Founders spending three to six hours per week attending the speaker series and engaging with the community will likely get the most out of the program. The program is designed to be part-time alongside your day-to-day.
Apply now or check out the full program details.
Reach out if you have questions.
About Afore: Afore Capital is a $124 million fund focused exclusively on Pre-Seed investing. We help founders through the product invention and market discovery process. We invest pre-traction, pre-revenue, pre-product market fit. Pre-anything. Nothing is too early for Afore. Our portfolio includes BetterUp, Modern Health, Overtime, Petal Card, Retain, Flatfile and many more: https://afore.vc/#!/portfolio
