Cha, what incredibly long and short at the same time the past couple of months in the Antler program were!
It all started in August 2023 when we met for the kick off with the other founders for the very first time.
As a person living and working quite literaly in their basement only to be let out for feeding time this was somewhat of a challange.
The cohort was in-person Stockhoml based, however the Oslo’s and Copenhagen’s cohorts ran at the same time and all the online activity was shared between the three locations. This fact turn out to be crucial for my outcome, but I am getting in front of myself.
Speed dating
First month or so was basically speed dating all through. I got serious flashbacks from when I was reading The Game back in Uni and had no idea how to approach a girl (I still don’t).
Well actually let me rewind a bit. Many of the founders took initiative and reached out BEFORE the program. So I have actually e-met lik 15 out of ~80 founders before it all started. The benefit of these calls was that I was less anxious the first days. The getting to know each other part was way more intense and therefore more valuable in person though.
On paper the founder profiles were split to 3 thirds – Domain experts, business folks and technical.
Here comes th first realization the third technical folks were quite diverse in skill set, and in most cases startups end up needed kinda person that can set-up relational database while changing margin on button on the website. So having this jack of all trades (master of none) profile is actually really really good!
Study
The three months does include a lot of knowledge about how to start run and exit startup. As well as bunch of founders talking about their experience going through the same thing.
Don’t get me wrong these are valuable learnings, but I was in the situation where I listened to three different business podcast, read books about sales and dreamt about putting that CTO title for years now. I felt ready. Also I went through the Antler Academy courses which are good subsitute for the real thing in terms of hard facts.
Industry Sprints
Now if the study part was something I cared the least about the sprints were super cool. Basically you somehow end up a team of founders trying to solve a real world issue companies like Bring, if or OBOS come in to talk about…
Although this was way more geared towards the business people in the team, the main benefit of it is that I got to experience working with the founders in real time preassure in the wild.
And wild it was! AI was beind every corner and people started to hustle a ton. At the end of day or two we had to some up with the idea we pitched it to the industry representatives and got a ton of feedback along the way.
On the picturu there are the dudes who formed the first sprint team I have done. Mark, Felix and JP are exceptional guys.
What we endup building for the first sprint/challange was this MVP in Glide no-code tool. Doing something click-able in such a short time was not only benefit during the sprints, but also in business. I appriciated that lesson a lot.
Where Do We Go from Here
Alright, at this point I want to document all the startup ideas I have joined or was tmpted to join. How they ended up and well what happened to me 🙂
This text is way long though so let’s do that in a seperate post.