Investing at the earliest stages means we meet a lot of teams at the very beginning of product and traction, often pre-revenue - teams starting with a vision, problem insight, or personal pain point, embarking on the journey to find product-market fit, to go from zero to 1.
We work with our portfolio founders every day on these five core topics: Product, Customer Acquisition, Building the Early Team, Fundraising, and the Founder Emotional Journey. This year, we're excited to host Afore Zero-to-1 (Zt1) and bring this work to a wider group of founders through a six week series, for free, and entirely virtually, taking place Tuesday September 8 - Tuesday Oct 20.
The program will be 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.
Each week will feature 2-3 speaker panels on one of the core company-building components: Product, 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.
In the founder application, we ask for your #1 priority amongst the five Zt1 components. Based on your top focus area, we will place founders in 5-person accountability groups sharing the same focus. While the program is intended to give an overview of the early-stage startup journey, we hope these accountability groups based around your current area of focus will help accelerate progress in that one key area.
We will host the program using Virtually (https://tryvirtually.com/) accompanied by a Slack community.
Past events have brought together speakers like DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, Thumbtack cofounder/CEO Marco Zappacosta, and Benchmark GP Sarah Tavel for a day of founding stories and experience-sharing.
Our stellar roster currently includes Max Levchin (Founder, Affirm; Co-founder, PayPal), Ruth Zukerman (Co-founder, Flywheel; Co-founder, Soulcycle), Andrew Ofstad (Co-founder, Airtable), JD Ross (Co-founder, Opendoor), Andrew Lee (Co-founder, Firebase), Nadia Boujarwah (Co-founder & CEO, Dia & Co), Ilya Volodarsky (Co-founder, Segment), Umang (Co-founder, Handy), Alyson Friedensohn (Founder & CEO, Modern Health), and more.
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
