Antler India’s Inaugural Founders Program
As we launch the second Founders Program in India, we cannot help but think back to the excitement, keen anticipation and joy that the inaugural Antler India Founders Program brought. The rush of applications (2,000 total), the weeks of continuous interviews throughout the day (covered by a 5-person team), the high-quality debates during our brainstorming sessions (nail-biting), and the countless hours we spent to figure out how to create the best Founders Program for the Indian ecosystem.
In this post, we would like to share some of our learnings for the broader Indian startup ecosystem as well as showcase the Founders Program experience we are building at Antler India.
What the Founders say about it
One common piece of advice we give to almost all our startups: showing is more powerful than telling. Before we dive into our learnings, hear directly from some of our startups founders on their experience during the Antler India Founders Program:
Founders Program: Key Ingredients and What Went Right
We are super proud of what we have been able to achieve at Antler in the past 100 days with our first program. A snapshot of some key stats below.
A few critical program design choices, plus the concerted effort of our team, allowed us to deliver on a few key parameters that defined our inaugural Founders Program.
Here is what we think went right.
Redefining founder centric
Almost all the feedback from our startups touched upon the “founder friendliness” of the experience and how founder centric it was. Founder-friendliness starts from one central instinct: deep empathy for the work that founders do. At Antler India, our entire core team has gone through founder journeys of our own. We understand how difficult and alienating this journey can be, and how founders require a “safe space” for actionable advice maximizing time and impact.
Some examples of what founder-friendliness looks like for us:
- Creating a program cadence that maximizes the impact of synchronous sessions to respect founder time, while creating many asynchronous spaces for deeper connections. We left plenty of time for building, and baked in adequate flexibility so that founders could manage their bandwidth and always keep company building as their #1 priority.
- Being authentic in all our interactions. While we all drew from our respective functional backgrounds and founder journeys, we worked hard to strike a balance between voicing our real opinions or actionable feedback while ensuring entrepreneurs themselves mediate that opinion with their own priorities and perspective. As one founder said, “The authenticity of the Antler team — that’s what drove this program! Every discussion was replete with past experiences.” We even took (significant) time to give thought-out feedback to teams that did not make it to the program:
- Being accessible as a flat organization. All founders had equal access to “book time” with our team, often based around the problem they were working on (e.g. storytelling with Cathy, customer journeys with Nandini, product with Rajiv), treating each of us as “brainstorm” partners.
- Going the extra mile for founders as people, not just company-builders. We mixed in sessions where we witnessed some of our founders’ awesome talents and stories beyond work, offered dedicated mental health workshops, and put weight behind extra coaching and help when Covid’s second wave strained resources across all teams.
Delivering on the microscope and telescope
In one of our first sessions, Nitin (Partner, Antler India) provided the mental model of the microscope and telescope: long-game versus short-term, vision versus tactics. Helping founders create a structured way of gaining value from Antler India on both the microscope and telescope helped push not only execution, but long-term strategic clarity.
As one founder said, “Coaching Hours and Partner Office hours kept us focused on the big picture *and* the day-to-day.”
Some examples of what microscope/telescope looked like for us:
- A week-long vision-setting exercise with Rajiv (Partner, Antler India).
- Dedicated strategy office hours for 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year goals and clarity.
- Mentor office hours held 1:1 between founders and specific functional experts to go deep in detailed tactics spanning design, engineering, hiring, marketing / brand, and growth.
- Dedicated 2-week storytelling exercise where strategic clarity is translated into a powerful narrative for founders to leverage — not just for investors, but for all stakeholders where vision-communication is key.
Strategic clarity can give founders the confidence boost to get out and execute to their best. As one founder stated, “the last six weeks I have seen tremendous growth — in the way I work, strategize, think about certain things, and communicate, even so much that a few friends over the phone could notice that something has positively changed in me. As a team (and personally), we have a lot more confidence and clarity.”
Leveraging the power of cohorts and community
The power of cohorts is now well-known: shared accountability, peer-group community, all delivered through multiple modalities can be a truly powerful learning experience. At Antler India, our unit of a “pod” builds on top of the power of the cohort.
Some examples of what leveraging cohort looked like for us:
- Weekly “pod” meetings within a certain sector or stage, for shared goal-setting and brainstorming. One founder called pod sessions “community on steroids” — his own personal weekly advisory board! Another founder commented that pods “created a good competitive spirit by seeing others progress… it pushes you further to do things greater than your potential.”
- Serendipitous 1:1s, leveraging tools built within the Antler cohort itself (stay tuned!) to connect founders on a relevant basis for 1:1 conversations.
Getting the best of the ecosystem involved
We could not be doing what we are doing at Antler India without the support of so many talented leaders and operators across the Indian startup ecosystem.
As one of our founders said, “The workshops & sessions were from people who had gone through the building journey & hence I could gather plenty of tactics.” There is nothing better than learning from doers. A huge thank you to our session leaders, mentors, and so many more who have dedicated their time and mind-space to the success of our founders at Antler India. You can learn more about our facilitators and partners here.
Founders Program: Where We Are Iterating
Like any startup, we see our work at Antler India as iterative: start with an initial assumption, execute, gather data, rinse and repeat. We believe that each cohort experience should be a marked improvement against the last, building up to a 10x, best-in-class experience, and we are so grateful to our inaugural cohort’s incredible feedback. The close bonds we built and the candid frankness of our first cohort allowed us to understand what we can do better for founders.
A few areas to highlight:
- Rethinking pods. While pods were central to the first Founders Program experience, they also limited cohort interactions beyond pods. Pod experiences could be better standardized and meaningful. All in all, we are going back to the drawing board to see how we can fundamentally 10x the pod experience to retain the best of it, while enabling more structured spaces for cross-cohort deep-dives.
- Building playbooks for the earliest stage. We had startups from the idea stage, to MVP, to 6 months post product launch. Many of the tactics and playbooks were clear post-launch, but we aim to focus on building out our resources for pre-product founders, creating dedicated content and sessions for ideation, positioning, brand, bringing a product to market and more. As our goal is to be a startup’s first institutional partners, we aim to admit more pre-product companies in our cohorts of the future.
- Enabling personalization at scale. One of the best things we were able to achieve in a (small) way in our inaugural program was enabling *some* degree of personalization on programming content, functional mentor office hours, etc based on a startup’s unique needs. Continuing to deepen our “needs diagnosis” and personalized program mapping for each startup can only make each experience that much stronger.
- Highest possible transparency on investment criteria. We have a unique structure whereby founders undergo the 6-week program and then undergo an Investment Committee (IC), where Antler India partners along with other key individuals from the global team and Indian VC ecosystem take funding decisions. We can do a better job in flagging our major concerns early on, to work through these with founders more deeply before IC.
Next Up: Better, Faster, Stronger
What is up next for us at Antler India? Our internal rallying call of “better, faster, stronger” (a charitable and slight reworking of the Olympic motto) probably describes it best. We have tens, hundreds (hopefully!) of Founders Programs to come. We have a massive dream to become the #1 destination for earliest stage founders seeking a global, pre-seed partner.
We could not be prouder of our first cohort of founders, but we need to be better (in delivering a personalized, best-in-class cohort experience at scale for India’s earliest stage founders), faster (in decisions we make and the timelines we keep), stronger (in our community, culture, and all that we do).
Onto the next!
This article was written by Nandini Vishwanath, Program Director at Antler, and Cathy Guo, Manager, Investments and Portfolio at Antler.
Applications are open for our second cohort at Antler India. Be part of our journey, apply here.
If you are interested in joining our team, check out open roles here.
If you would like to write to us about this piece, feel free to shoot us a mail at india@antler.co.
