Classes worth showing up for

Live classes from founders and operators who've been in the room you're in now.

How do you learn to start a company?

Not the technology part. The actual part - deciding if an idea is worth your next five years. Finding collaborators. Building a product. Telling your story. Raising money. Attracting the people who'll make it work.

You have options.

• Go to business school. Learning from a professor who studied founders rather than being one, using frameworks built for times that existed before AI changed everything. The concepts aren't worthless. They're just not calibrated for the situation you're actually in. Did we mention it's expensive?
• Listen to founder podcasts. Pop on the headphones and fire up long-form conversations with people who made it, edited for entertainment and optimized for the 90-second clip. The hard parts get compressed into a lesson. Their luck gets attributed to judgment and brilliance. You'll finish each episode feeling motivated ... but no clearer on what to do Monday.
• Attend panel events. Sit rapturously in a room celebrating the tiny fraction of founders who had a splashy outcome, usually hosted by the investors and lawyers who helped them get there. Inspiring if you like those odds. Less useful if you're trying to figure out your next move.

Or you could attend classes at The Founders Guild.

What they are

Live, focused sessions taught by practitioners - founders and operators who've worked through the specific problems on the agenda, recently enough to remember what it actually felt like.

Topics are chosen because they're hard: product-market fit, storytelling, technical decisions, fundraising, building a team, managing a product. Not inspiring topics. Useful ones.

What you might leave with: a framework you can use this week, a decision that's been stuck coming unstuck, language for something you couldn't quite articulate, or simply the confidence that comes from knowing someone else has been here and found a way through.

How they work

Sessions are live, not recorded lectures. Instructors teach from experience, not curriculum - which means they'll tell you what they got wrong as readily as what worked.

Each class is standalone. No sequence to follow, no cohort to commit to. Come to the ones that are relevant now. Skip the ones that aren't.

What to expect in each session:

• A focused agenda built around a specific question
• Real examples, not sanitized case studies
• Time to ask the questions you actually have
• Something you can act on now

No technical prerequisites. No prior startup experience assumed. Just a room full of people working on hard things, taught by people who've worked on them too.