Antler - Day 2

Minor team notes

• Expectation is to find a co-founder within the next two weeks
• There are some pre-formed teams (some of them are looking for a third, some aren't; just be mindful of that)
• Data shows, if you're here, showing up and giving it your all, it'll work out. If something comes up, let us know, but otherwise be here and attend.

Phase 1 Overview

• Week 1-5 are dedicated for team formation and idea generation
• Week 3-9 advisory and build
• Phase 1 Activities:
  • Speaker sessions (like the Kirk Simpson keynote from yesterday)

Week 7 Is where you'll be asked to exit if there's judged to be no shot. Don't take it personally, but have it in mind, and see if you can put something together by then, or at least show the potential to be advised and put something together.

• Once you track out (form a deliberate team and start moving forward), there are specific steps in Antlerhub you need to take in order to formalize this. No worries right now, just keep in mind that there's a process. If you didn't come part of a pre-built team, you can track out as early as day three.

Lessons from Previous Cohorts

• "Go straight at the people I would like to track out with, and tell them clearly: I want to track out with you".
• "Figure out your values and chemistry, as you work on problem ideas"
• Trajectory slide is reiterated. It's normal to work on an idea, then pivot, track out with someone, then track back in, then track out with someone else. You don't have to be moving at anyone elses' cadence.

Snapshot of 10 weeks at Antler (from Ezee Assist)

• Two business co-founders, found their tech founder in week 1, do 500 customer outreaches (~10% response from cold outreach)
• Week 2 they wanted 60 customer calls (40+ brands covered)
• Week 3 they wanted a fully functioning prototype
• Week 4 20+ customer demo calls
• Week 5 6 interested in a pilot
• Week 6 4 pilot committed
• Week 7, 8, 9 secured pre-seed funding

This is an atypical, but possible trajectory. They had the advantage of having done team formation/chemistry exploration and customer outreach before their Antler cohort started.

Antler Expectations and practical tips

Our Expectations

• We're a VC, we're here to invest in the strongest founders
• We're a lean team
• Antler residency is not a school (we aren't here to teach, we just give you a sandbox to help you focus)

Your Expectations

• You're here to build a startup. Be focused on that.
• Actively listen to everyone because you never know where you'll find your co-founder and build your network.
• If you see something, let us know (I think this is interpersonal weird stuff)

Tips

• Be prepared for group sessions, presentations and office hours
• Go at your own pace (again, as noted in the trajectory slide, you're not all going to be running at different schedule)
• Participate, work hard
• You get out what you put in

PSA

IF YOU ARE SICK, STAY HOME

It's not worth the FOMO, connect virtually for what you can. Support each other and maintain your routine.

Maintain your health, and the health of the cohort

Founder Intros Part 2

Abdennour Aissaoui

• Well rounded tech guy
• Financial advisor M&A
• Can get calls with CIBC with high probability

Sia Ghazvinian

• Really intense (bought a house in Kitchener, gutted it to the point that you could see the basement from the second floor, then rebuilt the entire thing himself inside of 9 months. Walls, electrical, hvac, drywall, whole nine)
• Idea "Abby", in the validation phase, end-to-end solution for fraud detection
• Looking for someone with chemistry, that can work with high intensity individuals and potentially help balance him out
• Open to other ideas (can move on if we invalidate this idea)
• into fintech, so focused on that

Roman Lutsiv

• Finance background
• Likes loud music, hiking to wild places and getting lost there
• Open to all ideas

Katrina Sitkovits

• Data scientist in the AI/ML space
• Needs someone who can complement her skillset, ideally a business cofounder

Lisa Mohapatra

• Second startup (previous was fully bootstrapped, with a positive profit and cashflow)
• Fan of Nassim Taleb (focuses on being antifragile)

Alex Ruddock

• Walked sister's dog ("Porkchop") down the aisle (Porkchop was the ringbearer at sister's wedding)
• Product marketer/product manager
• Looking for a technical founder who codes 10x faster/better than me, or a finance/ops co-founder who works like a Navy Seal
• Superpower: can tell you exactly why someone will buy and how much they should pay

Armen Jeddi

• Likes running
• M.Sc. in CS at Waterloo
• Current idea in Fashion/AgeTec
• Looking for someone who has ties to an interesting industry

Alex PQ Zhu

• Addicted to problem solving (careful; don't nerd snipe unnecessarily)
• Current idea: "drive efficiency and automation in any workflows"
• Likes scuba diving and yoga
• Superpower: can transform any idea into something shippable

Chirstabel Kim

• Not afraid of any problems, has experience in B2B space
• Currently pivoting away from a sales/marketing idea
• "I appreciate that someone is going to start the next Instagram. I am not that person"

Shiv Patel

• Did work in the self-driving car industry
• Pivoted away from photo editing, into a generative art market
• Going after the "largest art theft in the world", going after midjourney

Bardia Heshmati

• Likes cave diving (that sounds horrifying to me, but he clearly has grit)
• Background in software engineering/data science

Esteban Valencia

• Looking for a cofounder who wants to be aggressive in growing a business that solves a problem
• Current area: AI agent applications in e-commerce

Vladimir Illinov

• Mission: eliminating bullshit work as quickly as possible so humans can find more meaning in life
• Potentially tracking out today, but open to a third

Ashwin Jain

• Blend of hacker and hustler, channeling his OCD into a startup
• Currently working on sales tech/ voice AI (automating cold calling), but open to other ideas

Karrar Al Khanjar

• Put the same picture of himself twice intentionally
• Technical founder, started his first company in parallel with his PhD (does not recommend this)
• Current idea: combining sensing and communications approach in a unique system

Samira Gadri

• Meditation fan (has a download link to the atomic habit app, has us do a 15 second meditation :p)
• Interned at PagerDuty
• Looking for a cofounder that knows the journey is more important than the destination

Christopher Leung

• Business/aviation at western
• Started in S&T progressively working at smaller companies until he started his own
• Current idea: Buyer journey in the lower level SMB acquisitions space
• Looking for technical co-founder with ML(NLP) experience
• Enjoys watching worse movies than you watch

Brittany Lee

• Has 3 minutes to prove why she's the best
• Problem area/current idea: Bulidings/mobility/energy/community/sustainability
• Competitive overwater marathon swimmer (:impressed_noises:)

Finding your Co-Founder

• Do you need a co-founder?
  • Data-wise, yes. In descending order of founder team-size, the most common unicorns come from 2, 3, 1, 4, 5, 6, 10 person teams.
    • No details on the 10 person team, and I have no idea how you go about getting anything done with a responsibility base that diffuse. Maybe this was like a bunch of sales peeps, and sales is really parallelizable once you have your product set up?
• Antler are advisors, not board members. So if we advise you to zig and you zag, that's fine if it works for you.
• Your initial ~$150k should last you about 8 months
• Why startups fail:
  • No market need (42%)
  • Ran out of money
  • Co-founder blow-ups (Altman says this is the most common fail mode in YC)
• Different ways founders have formed teams at antler:
  • Netnow: founders met at antler, had a new idea together (this is the most common story)
  • Glassbox: Founder with idea recruited for their team at antler
  • Chexy: Pre-formed idea, pre-formed team added a third cofounder outside of antler
  • ProCo (now "Easy Assist"): pre-formed team of two who then matched with third at Antler
• Advice:
  • Give yourself a large luck surface area; talk to and work with everyone (this is a classic explore/exploit tradeoff)
  • Get to know everyone, and remember: communication is really - really! - important
  • Make sure you're transparent with your partners and expect same
  • Talk about your values, talk about your personal values, talk through difficult questions early on (good general principle here; if there's something that frightens you, go face talk about that first.)
  • Trust your gut if it has a strong pointer
• The timeline to track out on average is 3 weeks. Some people track out immediately, some founders get to 7 weeks before tracking out (either planning to go solo, or find another founder)
• Once you've tracked out, you get a coach

FAQ

• What if I don't track out by week 3?
  • Don't get too nervous about it. People sometimes track back in, but also, some of the big success stories end up tracking out in weeks 7 or 8.
• What happens if I track back in?
  • Basically keep going. If you've got time, try again.
• Can I bring in a cofounder from outside the cohort?
  • Yes, and it can work, but it tends not to (and they have a preference for in-cohort founders)
• Will Antler communicate to us if they don't think we are a good fit?
  • Yes. We won't force you to go into any directions, but we will speak with candour if there's something we thing you're obviously missing

Q&A

• Is there any situation where you'd recommend someone bring on a third founder?
  • Yes, we've recommended that to Genuine Taste, because they were a pair of business founders. They didn't do that, and it ended up working for them.

Anyone want to share a breakup story?

• A: We had a startup situation where one of the founders was a professor that ended up wanting 50% of the equity. They weren't contributing anything other than some of the IP, but still wanted a controlling stake. This was a hard breakup because of the respect dynamics and also the IP situation, but they ended up splitting over this.
• B: Co-founder ended up pursuing more career opportunities, which involved her moving away to a country I knew wouldn't let her keep her commitments. And I ended up being right, not too messy a breakup, but I had to have some tough conversations.
• C: Missed this one because I was refreshing my memory on flask, sorry :|
• D: I advise you all to talk to a lawyer, and make sure you know what your shareholder agreement means. Make sure you know what you're getting into. Are you planning to IPO? Are you planning to sell? Are you doing a family business where you're going to build out for 20ish years and then pay yourself dividends?

More Founder Intros

Lohit Talasila

• Current idea: "Proptech", b2b saas AI/ML
• Looking for someone who is empathetic and product driven

Satpreet Singh Aulakh

• Name means "honesty"/"truth", tries to live it
• Likes working in the eCommerce industry SMBs customer

James Davidson

• Worked with a lot of water-related applications (mostly data driven, related to climate tech)
• Still looking to work in that space. Current idea is business reporting automation with an eventual goal of going into climate

Elena Bassiachvili

• Current idea/problem: Likes doing hardware hacking, and looking to build something in cleantech

Eman Ebrahimi

• Working on AI for a while now (unclear whether this means "since the LLM revolution start" or "since Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach")
• No particular idea right now

Zaninab Bokhari

• Professional attire recommendation engine for white collar employees
• Looking for a technical co-founder with a good fashion sense

Prithvi Srinivasan

• Looking for a co-founder with a technical bent, but not necessarily one that can code
• Currently looking for ideas in the space of helping companies meaningfully adopt AI components

Kari Ostevik

• Currently working on an idea relating to the chaos of dying or having a family maker die (yikes), but open to other ideas
• Looking for someone who loves to sell things, and someone who loves to code (not necessarily the same person)

Moaraj Hasan

• Translational scientist
• He's working on a bunch of stuff related to medtech, looking for a technical cofounder who knows how to code

Michael Laccetti

• Had a very nonlinear career, seen some shit
• Completely open idea-wise

Mike Kim

• Superpower: my name is a palindrome
• Cybersecurity for high networth individuals
• Looking for a technical co-founder, GTM strategist/scaler
• Hypergeneralist, big road cyclist (like around 400km per week), likes cars

Henry Chen

• Current idea: advanced AI co-pilot tool designed to automate and enhance key processes

Lindsay Kim Chung

• Current idea: applying AI to the corporate investigations space to help investigators generate reports
• Looking for technical co-founder with startup experience who is an inclusive and strategic business leader
• Has white collar criminal defense background

Anih Jain

• My name is "a knee" (points to own knee)
• Problem area - craigslist for private social groups, but open to other ideas

Stefano Frontini

• From Brazil, has been a sailor for 20 years
• Superpower: 360 vision
• Here until the end of the week? (Then going back to Brazil)
• Looking for problems in the fintec space. Looking for a CTO, tech specialist or product specialist

Sanchit Jain

• Working in the fintech space, no concrete idea yet
• Looking for people he can jive with

Furqan Khan

• Vintage Developer (that is, develops code without an AI)
• Likes Myers-Briggs and wants to evangelize it for cofounder fit :|

Oswaldo "Oz" Alvarez Naranjo

• Current idea is an electronic reseller (SELLIT9.com), not b2c; he's basically a market maker between people who sell their used electronics and resellers/testers
• Looking for a growth marketer and conversion seller (just looking for a sales team basically, it's all up and running)

Anjali Dhaliwal

• Has a pre-formed team and working on Tradeable (nocode marketplace)
• At least a couple points in memelord, which I appreciate

Hui Wang (pronounced "Hway")

• McGill CS grad, current ML engineer
• Looking for a business founder experienced in sales and marketing

Andrew Giacomelli

• Biomedical scientist
• Likes board games
• Has a co-founder here, they're potentially looking for a third

Giorgio Delgado

• Went to Laurier university
• Typescript nerd (also, likes Elm, but that's out-of-band information)
• Superpower is Vim use :p
• Looking for a cofounder with AI/ML background (has one cofounder; looking for a third)
• Current idea, automating the product research journey for Amazon sellers

Epilogue

There was a keynote, but I got burnt out on note taking after the founder intros and just listened this time. I might write up a condensed meditation on it later.

Honestly, the big lessons I ended up remembering after the fact are:

1. Don't care about Antler right now, focus on company growth, do what's best for your company.
2. Don't hire anyone until you absolutely must. In particular, junior coders are no longer worth it given how much productivity CoPilot gives an experienced generalist (note to self; get a CoPilot account, I guess. I've found ChatGPT to be a decent but not game-changing addition to my toolkit, so I don't have high expectations)
3. Validate your market hypotheses. Fucking validate them. Talk to any potential customers immediately, take all of their feedback right now, and don't to-the-hilt an idea unless someone literally throws money at you for it. You should feel a firm and slightly plasticky impact somewhere on your face. The implication was that you should write exactly zero code until you've done this; I'm not convinced, but that's possibly because my rate is high enough that code is pretty cheap for me. YMMV.

It's tempting to dismiss each of them with sophistry, but this is advice from people interacting with the territory. Dismiss at your own peril.