🚨 Back by popular demand: Character Foundations, our one-day masterclass for founders! Applications are now open for our next event on March 26 in SF. Come spend the day with @jakek, @eliblee, and me! Learn our unique approach to product design, meet other founders, and participate in real conversations about building startups today. Last year, we launched Character Foundations on a simple premise: in the age of AI, product, design, and marketing matter more than ever. Today, that's 10x true. For many teams working in AI, coding and shipping are no longer a significant bottleneck. They can build and launch faster than they ever imagined. But so can every other team. As a result, what matters most today is: 1. Product — Am I building something that meaningfully solves an important problem for customers? 2. Marketing — Can I cut through the noise and stand out in a market where everybody is building and shipping fast? But there's something else important going on in AI... The capability of software has expanded dramatically. Today you can do things with software that you simply could not five years ago: discover drugs, design chemicals, invent materials, analyze research, automate filings, close deals, etc etc. For teams building here — what we call "frontiers of the software-addressable economy" — there is an even greater set of challenges, because there is simply no playbook for how to build a software company like this. - How do you sell software products to a company that doesn't buy software? - How do you build trust in your product, when it's doing a job that's done by experienced human experts? - How do you go full-stack and sell outcomes, not just software? To be clear: We don't have easy answers for these questions. Nobody does. We don't believe in playbooks and cheatsheets that tell founders WHAT to do. Instead — Character Foundations is all about HOW to answer these questions. We've used our Design Sprint and Foundation Sprint to help 300+ teams navigate the intense unknowns of building new products and businesses today. We're on the court with founders every day, using these methods to give our portfolio companies at @CharacterVC the greatest possible chance of success. We want to share the Design Sprint and Foundation Sprint with more founders. So, for the first time ever, we created an opportunity for founders to sprint with us without raising money from Character. Character Foundations is free and equity-free: There are no fees to attend, and we take 0% of your company. You just need to apply. We love doing this work with founders. And Character Foundations has become one of the truly peak moments of our work together at Character. You can read more and apply at character.vc/foundations — and if you have questions, please reply and I'll drop in to answer it. Thanks!!
