Introducing Unusual Academy — Applications Open Today

By John Vrionis & Jyoti Bansal

We’re excited to open applications for the very first Unusual Academy today — offering early enterprise entrepreneurs the truly unusual opportunity to learn from the best and extend their runway at the same time. Given all the steep challenges entrepreneurs face at the seed stage, we don’t think finding targeted advice and mentorship should be one of them.

Not only have we fielded instructors like author Adam Grant, Wealthfront CEO Andy Rachleff, Facebook and Pinterest Executive Coach Maggie Hensle, and more, we’re also providing accepted companies with $250,000 to $1 million in capital. Our goal is to bring together a small, remarkable cohort of founders for a rare learning experience that our industry hasn’t made available — until now.

Between October 3 and November 21, Unusual Ventures will host seven, three-hour, in-person Academy sessions in Redwood City, during which founders will learn practical solutions to major challenges from marquee talent. Essentially, we’ve packed a year of learning into 21 hours.

The fact that nothing like this has existed before is one of the reasons we’re so passionate about it. As partners, we bring two perspectives to the table. John has over a decade of experience investing in and working with some of the biggest enterprise wins of the recent past, including AppDynamics and Mulesoft. At the same time, Jyoti led AppDynamics to its $3.7B exit by learning, failing and building through B2B challenges at every scale.

We’ve both had a front row seat to everything enterprise founders grapple with, and how they survive and thrive. To design the Academy, we sat down and made a list of the seven highest-stakes challenges these companies face at the earliest stage. Then we designed courses around them and found the ideal instructor for each one. Then we added in capital to put skin in the game.

We call our instructors master practitioners because their work and experience has set the bar for our entire industry: Adam, for instance, literally wrote the book on creative leadership. Andy, a co-founder of Benchmark Capital, will be teaching his session on the best approach to fundraising. And Jyoti will be sharing how to recruit early customers and devise a strong early sales process — hard-won lessons that built AppDynamics’ success. These are just a few examples — other sessions will go into exactly hiring your best team, building the right culture, messaging and positioning, developing as a leader, and more.

We hand selected each practitioner because we knew they were the best person to address the topic at hand. And they’ll do so in an experiential learning format that we’ve seen work wonders in our previous lives. Each session is three hours, split into three parts:

• One hour walking through a case study and tactical learnings with the master practitioner.
• One hour workshop where founders apply what they just learned to their own ideas or companies.
• One hour where they share with each other what they’re going through and how they plan to overcome challenges so they can get feedback, ideas and support from their cohort and the master practitioner.

Whether you just have an idea sketched on the back of a napkin, or you’ve already raised up to $7 million in seed funding, Unusual Academy is for you. The content is universal to the early-stage experience and designed to transform companies heading into their Series A.

That’s where the investment comes in. We know that one of the biggest needs any early-stage company has is flexible capital that works the way entrepreneurs want it to. That’s why we’re investing between $250K and $1M depending on stage of development and what makes the most sense for founders’ cap tables. And it comes in the form of a standard note so that founders get the money upfront and it converts to equity only when they raise their next round. This will boost their valuations when the right time comes, and give them access to all the other resources Unusual Ventures offers its portfolio — like talent support and early customer development.

Applications for the program are due Tuesday, August 28, and we’ll be interviewing finalists in September. We’re thrilled to leverage everything we’ve learned in our careers so that this new generation of founders can nail the fundamentals and focus on what makes them unique. Between now and then, we’re looking forward to meeting founders from all backgrounds and hearing more about what their working on. Most of all, we’re excited to give those we work with an unusual advantage.

Learn more and apply here today. And if you’re still wondering if Unusual Academy is for you, send us a note at [email protected].