Hello from Founders Factory

Welcome to your Venture Design course. I’m your lead educator, Alex, one of the venture designers here at Founders Factory. I found my way here after working in startups and digital innovation agencies in and around Europe. Ultimately, I just like making new digital products and finding out how to make them into a business. Over the next six weeks you’ll be learning the fundamental skills you need to come up with and develop your own startup idea. You’ll be putting these skills into practise by creating your very own new venture, which you should be able to pitch to investors by the end. This would involve delving into multiple disciplines, such as market analysis, human centred design, experiment design and much, much more.

This may seem overwhelming, but each week we’ll be breaking these skills down into manageable chunks. But before we start, I’d like you to meet the other educators on this course and learn a little bit about Founder Factory and what we do. Hi, I’m Shona. I’m also a venture design lead at Founders Factory, London. Previously, I worked in innovation coming up with new products and service ideas for big large corporates. Excitingly, at Founders Factory the new ideas we come up with become startups. What really gets me out of bed in the morning is the process of ideation and getting under the skin of the insight.

I’m looking forward to sharing a bit about the way we work together with you on this course. Hi. My name is Blake, and I’m the venture design lead of Founders Factory, New York. I’ve worn many hats in my career from starting my own menswear brand at the peak of the DTC wave to helping launch and grow the New York office of an international brand consultancy and cutting my teeth in the world of venture design at human ventures. I’m excited to walk you through section 2.2, Incumbents Versus Challengers, as well as section 3.11, Creating Differentiation. Welcome to the world of venture design. And finally, I’m David. I’m the director of strategic development here at the factory.

You won’t see me again until week 6 when we’ll be going over everything you need to know about pitching your venture. All of us here are part of a team of 100-plus specialists at Founders Factory were we work with the world’s best founders and corporates to build, fund, and scale ambitious startups worldwide. We run two programmes across London, New York, Paris, and Johannesburg. Our accelerator invests in founders who have product to market and are ready to scale, while our venture studio builds startups from scratch working with founders who can take bold ideas and turn them into venture backed businesses. To date, we have backed and built almost 200 companies.

So we’ve learned a thing or two over the last few years about building startups, and that’s why we’ve created this course. We want to share our learning with anyone who wants to design their own venture and hopefully increase their chances of success. So if you’re ready, let’s begin.