Founder Institute

An interview with Arthur Gusev and Vladimir Pletyukhin.

How to P-I-T-C-H-C-O-M-P-L-E-X tech ideas S-I-M-P-L-Y-I spoke with Arthur Gusev and Vladimir Pletyukhin, co-founders of LaunchDeck, mentors at Founder Institute, and venture scouts for Flashpoint VC.

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She also came to us from the University of Toronto with a Master of Financial Economics and UBC, University of British Columbia, with a BA, Honors in Economics.

She is a mentor at the Founder Institute, and I'm delighted that she'll be the first person to give us comments.

Sitting next to Elisa is Mr. Varun Kanotrap, and Varun is the managing partner of Techgrind Venture Capital.

And he's a co-founder of Techgrind, which is an early stage VC fund focusing on building tech unicorns in Southeast Asia.

Yep.

So I told him what I'm working on and he said, you should join Founders Institute.

It's starting here in a couple of days.

We'll see if we can get you in.

And I said, okay, sounds good.

I didn't know what Founders Institute was, but I was like, I'm game.

Sure.

I got nothing else going on right now.

He is also the author of "The New Startup" and has been featured in outlets including Good Morning America, Forbes, The New York Times, Huntington Post, and Business Insider.

He also mentors early-stage founders through the Founder Institute.

Dave, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Heather.

An information barrier covenant at the firm level can tie vesting to compliance.

The Founder Institute released the Fast Agreement publicly in two thousand eleven and has since issued a second version.

It standardizes advisor equity by company stage and engagement level with a three-month cliff investing over a stated period, and a startup can add a termination for cause right that stops vesting on breach.

The public description of Fast reviewed for this report does not address its confidentiality or conflict terms, so the startup should read the form text against this list.

So their team creates software products, different products for startups.

And he's a member at the Forbes Technology Council, the Founders Institute, and Band of Angels.

And he's advised over 3,000 startup founders.

So Alexi, thank you so much for being on.

in a lean approach, so to speak, not like, you know, enterprise thing where like things take years, et cetera.

And that's how Dev Team Space started.

Essentially, just a few folks who've been my advisors in Silicon Valley, where I lived for seven years, they introduced me to a bunch of startups from 500 startups uh some yc wine cabinator startups and we did quite a lot of projects for them and i was like well okay that brings money and then um end up being connected to Founders Institute, they invited me to become the mentor.

And I started mentoring startups, and it just accumulated into like a bigger story, so to speak the snowballing effect, right.

Eric Ries, who I'm sure you know of, he did "Lean Startup" and now he's written "Incorruptible." I heard him speak.

I was a speaker at Founder X, Founder Institute's annual conference, and I spoke on leadership in the age of AI, and then he was in a fireside chat with Adeo Ressi, the founder of Founder Institute, and his new book is called "Incorruptible." So how that connects what I would say to that room of CEOs is, "Look, Eric's onto something." And his main point is the CFOs of organizations, of startups already, have always done what's right for Wall Street rather than the business.

Forget even customers and employees, but literally squashed new products because their careers were at stake.

Mm-hmm.

The more quickly you can do that, the more quickly you can start actually bringing those wires in.

Far better than just a verbal commitment or an email is to get this commitment in writing.

Founder Institutes put together a document called a pact, and once an investor has put their name and amount on a sheet of paper on an agreement, even though it's non-binding and you can't force them to write that check, the odds of them coming through at the end of the day improved substantially.

Keep in mind where you stand at each phase of this investment process.

Put in appropriate amounts of effort based on the odds of this person closing.