An Entrepreneur Who Manufactures Entrepreneurs
Adeo Ressi is an entrepreneur who founded the Founder Institute that trains prospective entrepreneurs so that they can be successful in startups. He believes that there is high failure rate for new entrepreneurs because they do not receive right training. His program selects applicants through a personality test. Those accepted learn to develop their ideas and run their business through a mixture of workshops or in other words entrepreneurship immersions. Founder Institute takes a 3.5% stake in the start-ups in turn. Ressi successfully reduced the failure rate form 90% to 10%.
Founder Institute’s entrepreneurship immersion program is what I believe an advocate of Lean Startups. For an entrepreneur to be successful he or she must be willing to take risks and get out of comfort zones to test hypothesis. Although a solid, step-by-step plan can be helpful, but more importantly, entrepreneurs should learn to be experimenters. These workshops serve as a tool that helps entrepreneurs to change their traditional ways of thinking and physically test assumptions to reach goals. Business-hypothesis-driven experimentation can allow the time frame needed for start-ups and product development to be significantly shortened. This time-efficiency can work hand in hand with the physical training to improve the success rate amongst new start-ups.
