nelsonic
commented
4 years ago Ok, while I still have all the windows open, I'm going to writeup a quick summary of my thoughts. ✍️ 💭
That way I can link directly to it if anyone else asks me this question directly,
and Google's SEO Magic can surface it for people who do not ask me personally but want to know.
Let me start by saying this:
The idea for Founders Institute makes perfect sense and I'm sure that most of the people involved are have the right intentions and are perfectly competent/qualified to advise on entrepreneurship in general. That being said ...
Buckle up, you're in for a bumpy ride: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1tj2zJ2Wvg
Home Page
The home page https://fi.co is a fairly generic landing page that answers the "What?" and "Who?" questions:
What's up with the futuristic image of the London Skyline? Is Founder Institute based in London? Or is this just some generic stock photo the developer found online and decided to use for "Future" ...? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Founder_Institute Based in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, California. 🙄
Keep scrolling ...
They keep mentioning the 4,300 like it's some sort of big number ... in 11 years, it's 390/year.
A single person could spend half a day consulting with each entrepreneur and advise 400 in a year.
If Founders Institute wanted to help more entrepreneurs they could easily have made all their content available online for free. They are clearly trying to run it for a profit not a public service to help people build their ideas.
This is the landing page for the "Overview": https://fi.co/overview has an embedded video above the fold:
The embedded video is: https://youtu.be/IZyfBceGEmA
This informs us that fewer than 15k people have watched the intro video in the last 20 months ...
YouTube counts all views (embedded or on-platform) the same and the video has 14,666 views at the time of writing. Considering it is on the first page people view when they want to find out more about the FI program, we can conclude that engagement is relatively low.
The You Tube channel has 5.55K subscribers which sounds decent on the surface.
But if you view their most recent videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/founderinstitute/videos
They have incredibly low engagement (view count). This either means that their "subscribers" perceive their content as low relevance/quality and thus don't click through when new content is released or that they bought their subs ...
Only one of videos they have released in the last 6 months has more than 200 views and it's the The Founder Institute Methodology: https://youtu.be/0In-F0O_VDw which has 1,868 views and was released on May 28, 2020 (6 weeks ago) and is embedded on the program overview page i.e. the second page of the website:
Comments turned off. Great engagement/community ... afraid someone might ask a question? 💭
e.g: "How can you justify charging $999 for this when all the info is available online for free and their are much better online entrepreneurship courses from more reputable sources ...?"
We will "zoom in" on this "methodology" below. ⬇️
If you sort the videos by most popular: https://www.youtube.com/c/founderinstitute/videos?view=0&sort=p
The total view count for the channel is: 233,210 ...
That's not a lot of views considering how many wannabe entrepreneurs there are out there.
Further down the overview page is an infographic of the curriculum:
How many of these topics needs to be more than a couple of pages in a "founders manual"? Why does it need to take 12 weeks to learn these things? This could be a 200 page book they could give away for free. Ah, but then they wouldn't get their "cut" of the Entrepreneur's "upside" ...
Adeo Ressi
Purpose Driven Entrepreneurship: https://youtu.be/dSD5OgWL5s0 💭 ... rly ...?
This comment might be the reason why they disabled comments on the "methodology" video. 💭
Adeo's explanation of the Founder Institute: https://youtu.be/aBWvqB0Llhg?t=827
- Nominal course fee, based on where you live in the world. (or based on their poor geo-targetting, see below)
- Join the "shared liquidity pool", i.e: you give them a piece of your company for the privilege of being in their program. https://fi.co/liquidity_pool > https://youtu.be/aBWvqB0Llhg?t=1472
Here's the "catch" for being part of the program: in addition to paying them $999,
you have to give away 4% of your company equity to them:
You might ask: "What is 4% when they are giving you so much "value" in return...?"
Well, here's an alternative question: why do they need any percentage of your company?! 🤷♂️
Unltd. https://www.unltd.org.uk gives entrepreneurs funding, support, mentoring and a fantastic network and they don't expect anything in return; just do what you say you're going to do with the money. Surely if Adeo Ressi truly wanted to help purpose-driven entrepreneurs he would have used his contacts (Elon Musk!) to setup a non-profit and get funding for the program without needing to take equity in the companies...?
This is just sounding more and more like a cash/equity grab disguised as a "course" and "network". 😕
Geographic Pricing
When I scroll down past the intro video on the overview page: https://fi.co/overview I see the "join" banner:
That's nice, they know that I'm based in Portugal. 👍 Hold on ... does the fact that I'm based in Portugal, where the currency is Euros mean that I'm paying a different price?
Sure enough, if you use a free VPN to change which country your based in, you get a different price for the same course:
In Finland the program costs €799 (this time in Euros):
Both the minimum and average salary in Finland being more than double that of Portugal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_average_wage
Literally every metric (except maybe sunshine, beaches, golf courses and wine) is better in Finland! See: https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/finland/portugal
But it gets worse if you again use a VPN to change to any country in Africa (where they don't have any local hubs):
I'm using South Africa, the country with the highest average salary on the continent:
DuckDuckGo can identify the "location" based on the IP Address:
But because fi.co doesn't recognise the geolocation, people who earn significantly less compared to northern Europe are forced to pay the "Silicon Valley" price $999:
Why not charge people in Africa a nominal $99 to help foster entrepreneurship on the continent? This doesn't seem "right" to me at all. 😕
The cheapest I found was in Malaysia where the program costs $649:
Note: geographical pricing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_pricing can be a good thing especially where it used to make the price of a product more fair in a lower-income economy. A way of letting the "rich" shoulder the burden of paying for R&D cost for a product and charging less well-off people the marginal cost. For example in the case of live-saving antiretroviral medications for HIV/AIDS. 💊 The drugs cost considerably more in the USA (where they were developed) and generic versions (same formula) sell for pennies per dose in Africa. But in the case of "Founders Institute" they are charging more to people who have less income. 👎
Personality Types
This is more of a horoscope than an evidence-based scientific classification. Fixed outcome personality types are widely debunked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator#Criticism https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-test-meaningless
Ok, that's my brain dump. It probably doesn't make much sense. I could re-write it for clarity ... but I honestly don't think it's worth my time.
Context
A good friend of mine has recently quit their job (before Covid19 was a thing...) and started working on a fintech startup with 2 co-founders. Their background/experience is Technology and Security Consulting but they have worked exclusively with "Enterprise" (Fortune 500 companies) for the past 10 years. They have always been curious about startups, but have never worked in a startup or done any entrepreneurship.
Question
The friend asked for my thoughts on Founder Institute https://fi.co via chat:
I asked them how in-depth they wanted my answer to be, to gauge how much time to invest in writing about it:
They replied:
So this was (short) my answer:
I did a decent amount of "desk research" into Founder Institute (30 mins) and I feel that while it's relevant to my friend who has the funds available and would benefit from a structured program with reasonably well-defined curriculum, it's definitely not for everyone.
$900 is "cheap" for someone who has more than $20k and wants to get a lot of Entrepreneurship/Startup knowledge in a structured way. I think anyone who has less funds available should seriously consider "Free" self-study approach: a) Read all the free online resources e.g:
b) Write Everything Down (preferably online and in
public) so that you can trace your "journey". This makes it much easier to refer back to it when you need to remember why you made a particular decision or took a specific action. c) Start shipping the product even it's "crappy" and "unfinished" and get feedback from real people.There is a FREE course on edX created by MIT: https://www.edx.org/course/becoming-an-entrepreneur
And another from Wharton on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-launching-startup
I could go into a lot more insightful detail about Founder Institute, but I will save that for another time. If anyone reads this in the future and wants more, comment below. 👍