The Founders Program “Guild Model” for Collaboration
As many of you already know, the STATION F Founders Program is our in-house program for early-stage companies from all sectors and all countries. The program was built during the past year and based entirely on the feedback of hundreds of entrepreneurs — literally.
“No demo days and no mandatory mentors.”
We learned a ton by talking to these startups — for example, we discovered that they were not really big fans of “demo days” and that they rarely had successful experiences with mandatory mentoring models. Go figure. So when it came to creating the core philosophy and the concrete organization of the program, we crossed their feedback with our own beliefs and references.
The “guild” model.
Every single startup we spoke to agreed that the most important resource was to be able to learn from other entrepreneurs. But how do we make sure that the 200 startups in the Founders Program know and help each other in an efficient way?
The short answer: Guilds. Yes, guilds. Some of you may already be familiar with the concept of guilds as it originates from video games (yes, many gamers know that term — to put it differently, Founders are pretty much the anti-Leeroy Jenkins). For those of you less familiar with the concept, it essentially enables gamers to play together in order to avoid immediate death. Well, we found this to be highly relevant for our entrepreneurs as well.
How do guilds work?
The Founder’s Program uses the guild model to encourage entrepreneurs to work together and share their knowledge and resources. We’ve taken all 200 startups in the program and divided them into guilds or teams of approximately 10 startups.
The objective of each guild is to be as diverse as possible — therefore we group together entrepreneurs with very different backgrounds working on very different projects. For one thing, this reduces competition as startups within the same guild are never direct competitors. Also, entrepreneurs from different stages of development, different industries, different countries, etc. have a lot of knowledge to share and we find the these differences give rise to natural collaboration.
A typical guild has, among other things:
- one startup that has raised more than €500k — €1M,
- one international startup
- one startup from the Fighters Program etc.
All of the startups in the STATION F Founders Program sit with their guilds daily. All guilds have also collectively chosen a name (examples include “Fenix”, “First Class”, and “SFx”). Once per month, startup co-founders meet with their guilds in order to discuss their progress, their learnings, their difficulties and more: dealing with VCs and investors, managing their product roadmaps, recruitment and team management, how to navigate BPI and public funding, going international, sharing how they track their KPIs, crowdfunding and that’s just to name a few topics among the dozens discussed each month.
Guilds are independently run by the startups — therefore the startups are the ones to guide the topics they discuss. They share tips and tricks, keep track of each other’s progress and can invite guests and experts. On the menu for some of next month’s Guild Meetings: how to automate your business, learning how to deal with your failures and lessons learned, how to retain your sellers, how to recruit an iOS dev and more
When you launch your company, it’s best to surround yourself with brilliant people that are willing to help. Well, that’s what the guild model does. In a nutshell, sharing, learning and cooperating with each other is what is defining the Founders Program’s mantra.
But in addition to simply helping each other with work, we also find our different guilds becoming insanely good friends.
If you are an early-stage startup interested in applying for the Founders Program, please apply online here by April 2, 2018. Selected startups will be able to join the Program in July 2018. For more information on the Founders Program and why you should apply, please read here.
