Is this the magic formula for developing start-up founders?

A lot has happened in my two decades immersed in start-ups. In 1996, I cofounded a start-up with Trevor Folsom with $10,000 in capital that we exited a decade later for a 10,000 X return. We named our business Blueprint for a reason – we were seeking the magic formula to start and grow businesses. And despite launching 10 businesses in 10 years a scalable start-up formula remained elusive.

For the best part of the last decade since selling our business we have both continued our passion for fostering entrepreneurship albeit in two very different areas. Trevor became one of the most active (and successful) angel investors in Australia, and I went on a mission as a social entrepreneur to make entrepreneurial education available to kids, the developing world and existing entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs.

Whilst we are now closer to understanding that magic formula we recognised some fundamental issues are preventing the ideal alignment of financial and human capital in the start-up ecosystem. To contribute to solving this Trevor and I have joined forces again to unite these two worlds in a new global startup incubator – www.investible.com.

After a decade in entrepreneurial development I have learnt three unequivocal lessons:

1. The only way to learn entrepreneurship is by launching your own business – it can’t be taught solely in a classroom;

2. The only way to launch a successful business is to iterate with real customer feedback – disregard their needs at your peril; and

3. There is a formula for launching a successful start-up - and it is rarely about mimicking household name Silicon Valley case studies or raising too much capital too quickly.

The vision of Investible is to offer aspiring start-up founders real-life experiential learning, real-time customer validation and a real-world formula for building a successful business fast. And we do it with real people – in fact twelve regular people have just eight weeks to launch a million dollar business from scratch. 

We aren’t about finding the needle in a haystack entrepreneur – that twenty something IT genius with the amazing scalable idea, leadership skills beyond their years and traction in an industry we specialize in that has yet to be discovered. We are about finding raw talent pre-idea, developing that talent and helping this talent ideate a powerful business model. After a comprehensive audition process we sponsor our founders from an enormous variety of backgrounds and experiences but united by one purpose - they want to learn a formula for building a business fast. Individually they might not be the next Mark Zuckerberg but together they cover the key attributes and skills required for building a business.

We commence with a bootcamp I developed for the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship and  have delivered there over the last five years. These challenges split the quarterly intake into four groups of three founders who are challenged with disrupting a B2B sector within an industry of our choosing. This focus ensures they learn from each other and we can harness the best mentors, trainers, research and investors that specialise in that industry.

Our secret ingredient is using Darwinian competition to narrow to the best business model. For example after two weeks working on their business concept we drop a team and these three founders are absorbed into the remaining businesses leaving three businesses of four founders. After another three weeks working on launching their minimum viable product another team is dropped based on customer and investor feedback to form two businesses of six founders. And finally after a further three weeks the teams are judged on their traction and Investibility to determine which business will survive.

Three of the founders receive shares and gain paid positions to raise a minimum of $250,000 seed capital within the next 90 days. With runway secured (including from our Club Investible angel investors) the founders spend the next 12 months in our incubation pad. The remaining nine founders take one of the most challenging and comprehensive entrepreneurial development programs (think 2-year MBA in 2-months) to start-up their own enterprise, join as a co-founder of an existing start-up or use their knowledge to innovate within a larger organisation.

Whilst we don’t profess to have discovered all of the answers to rapid founder development we want to be responsible for dramatically increasing the number and quality of founders entering the start-up ecosystem. Based on the amazing personal growth our founders experience I feel confident this model of educating entrepreneurs and building investible businesses is the future of start-ups in the 21st century. Whilst still very early days the two businesses generated from our initial beta programs have both raised seed capital at a million-dollar valuation – proving it is possible to launch a million-dollar business in just eight weeks.

Watch our pilot or if you know a talented and motivated potential founder let them know about this free and incredibly intensive founder-development program by emailing [email protected] or by visiting www.investible.com to apply.