Forget name tags. This kickoff throws you into creative chaos with team challenges, fast thinking, and real collaboration. You’ll break the ice, maybe some egos, and start building ideas that don’t make you cringe later.

Your mum thinks your idea is brilliant. Your mum is not your customer. This session teaches you to run conversations that surface what people actually do instead of what they politely say they’d do, which is the skill the entire program is built on. You’ll leave with an interview guide and ten real names to call this week.

Two years from an idea to 90,000 users, 500 partners and a €600k seed round. Antonio tells the version that isn’t in the press release: the first business that produced the problem, the partners who said no, the nine months between winning a competition and getting a term sheet. No slides, no highlight reel, all questions allowed.

Ten interviews in, you have forty pages of notes and no idea what they mean. Notes nobody turns into a decision are just expensive journaling, so this session pulls the patterns out and forces a call on what to test next. You’ll leave with a one-page synthesis and your next test written down.

You don’t need to build for six months to find out nobody wanted it. Fake doors, landing pages, concierge tests — the cheapest ways to get a real yes or a real no while your product is still a rumour. By the end of the session your demand test is live, not planned.

It’s like Tinder, but for startup wisdom. Sit down with mentors across biz dev, marketing, legal, and more. Ask the real questions, get unfiltered advice, and figure out what part of your idea still needs work – before it costs you. Quick chats, real value, zero small talk.

Everything on your roadmap feels essential. Almost none of it is. This is a ruthless scoping session — what to build, what to fake, what to quietly delete — until only the one thing that creates value survives. You’ll leave with a one-week build plan and a ship date you said out loud in front of witnesses.

No funnel, no growth hacks, no automation, no hiding behind a landing page. Just you, a list of names, and conversations that end in a yes or a useful no. You’ll leave with 20 targets and outreach already sent, because “I’ll do it tomorrow” is how first customers don’t happen.

If it takes three sentences to explain what you do, nobody is listening by sentence two. We sharpen it to one line, then pick the single distribution channel that fits your model — strategy, not tips on buying ads. You’ll leave with a positioning line and one channel experiment to run.

Free isn’t a strategy, it’s a way of avoiding the answer. This session covers how to set a real number, how AI pricing works when your costs go up every time someone uses the thing, and how to say the price out loud without apologizing. You’ll leave with a starting price and a plan to test it.

Your first chance to practice the 3-minute pitch in English. This session is about testing your delivery, getting feedback, and making quick improvements.

Eight years of building, three million copies sold, one exit. Boris co-founded Gamepires, watched SCUM turn into a hit, and sold the studio to Jagex in 2022 — with a parallel career selling enterprise software at SAP and Deutsche Telekom, which is its own kind of education. He’ll talk about the years nobody writes about: the slow start, the deals that died, what changes when an acquirer walks in, and what he’d do differently. All questions allowed.

Nobody starts a company for the paperwork, but the paperwork finds you anyway. Only the essentials: where to incorporate, whether to flip abroad, and the shareholders’-agreement clauses that decide who owns what when things go well. You’ll leave with your incorporation decision flagged and a much shorter, cheaper first meeting with a lawyer.

The EU AI Act is long, dull, and going to apply to some of you whether you’ve read it or not. We cover what actually bites for an early AI product — especially anything that touches health — and what you can safely ignore for now. You’ll leave knowing your risk exposure instead of discovering it during due diligence.

Vanity metrics are great fun right up until someone asks about retention. We cover the two or three numbers that actually matter at your stage, then do the uncomfortable arithmetic on whether your margins survive contact with inference costs. You’ll leave with a dashboard small enough that you’ll actually keep it updated.

A working session to refine your pitch. You’ll practice again, cut what doesn’t work, and make your story clearer and more convincing. No slides, no extras – just your pitch, sharper each time.

Every investor asks the same question: what happens when the model provider ships your feature next Tuesday? “Our prompts are really good” is not an answer. We work out what you genuinely own — data, workflow, distribution, switching costs — and you leave with a one-paragraph defensibility thesis that survives being read out loud.

Far more startups die of co-founder problems than of competitors. This is the honest conversation about equity, vesting, roles, and what happens if someone wants out in year two — plus a candid word on not burning yourself to the ground in the meantime. You’ll leave with an alignment checklist and the conversation you’ve been postponing.

Investors don’t lean in for adjectives. We build the story around what you tested, what you learned and who’s paying — evidence-led, jargon-free, and with no begging at the end. You’ll leave with a pitch outline anchored to things that actually happened.

Bring the deck you have, not the one you’d like to have. It’s a clinic: your slides, in public, with feedback that’s useful rather than kind. You’ll leave with a revised draft and a noticeably shorter deck.

SAFEs, convertibles, term sheets, dilution — the native vocabulary of the person sitting across the table from you. Learn it before the meeting rather than after the signature. You’ll leave with a one-page cheat sheet and a realistic idea of what you’d still own after two rounds.

From running growth at Uber to building the tax infrastructure that companies like Uber run on. Filip co-founded Fonoa in 2019, and this May it closed a $110M Series C and bought a Big Four firm’s tax platform. He’ll tell the unedited version: why a boring problem was the right bet, what scaling fast actually breaks, and what he’d do differently. No slides, no pitch, all questions allowed.

The final rehearsal of Phase 1, held together with the December Checkpoint. By now you’ve cut, rewritten, and practised twice — this is where it should sound like your story, not a script. Same three minutes, same room, just a much better pitch than the one you gave in November.