TheFunded to Bring Startup “Training Camp” to San Diego—Eyeing Other Cities From Seattle to Boston to Paris

of 79 entrepreneurs who attend evening sessions several times a month, which enables students to continue working at day jobs. The curriculum, which is led by experienced business mentors, focuses each class on assignments that are intended to directly benefit the early stage businesses that student-founders are working to develop. In addition to CEO mentors, Ressi says the institute also has recruited corporate partners and service providers, such as such as Intuit, Microsoft BizSpark, and the Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati law fim, to provide the founders with needed products and services.

ffi-logoAt a time when entrepreneurs are not getting much help from traditional sources of venture funding, Ressi also has developed an unusual funding model for startups enrolled in the institute, one intended to encourage hesitant investors and share the prospective upside with CEO mentors, partners, and other students in the program. The institute asks participating founders to contribute warrants equivalent to 3.5 percent of each company. The warrants form a pool that is shared among the CEO mentors, partners, students, and other participants in the program. (CEO participants are also asked to pay a course fee, which Currie says will likely be $495.)

Prospective investors are welcome to attend three “investor friendly” sessions in which students make 15-minute presentations, answer questions, and get immediate feedback. Currie, who attended one of the San Francisco investor sessions with Jacobson earlier this week, says, “It was a very collaborative process, something I’ve never seen before.”

The idea is for everyone to get a stake in the outcome. As Ressi puts it, “What we are trying to encourage is an ecosystem within the institute that has the best interest of the entrepreneurs at heart—and that shares the economic interest as well.”

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.