01
Elite Entrepreneur
You can sell. You can build with AI. You can read a P&L. You can run a validation loop in a week. By year end you've launched products, contacted hundreds of potential customers, and generated revenue from a venture you own.
Freshman Year
The Foundation
To Become a Millionaire.
In year one you'll become an entrepreneur who reads widely, thinks deeply, builds with AI, and runs a real business. The start of the path to $1 million.
The Year At A Glance
Forty Weeks.
Everything At Once.
40
Weeks. Five sessions: Sell → Build → Validate → Grow → Scale.
$50K+
Revenue target from one validated venture in Year 1.
1:10
Student to entrepreneur guide ratio.
20+
Fireside chats with elite founders, investors, and thinkers.
20
Books read — tactical and philosophical.
40
Long-form essays — reviewed, edited, and published.
1400+
SAT. 1 AP. Top 1% on standardized tests.
$1M
By senior year — or full tuition refund.
Who We Develop
Philosopher Builders.
Not Just Hustlers.
The question isn't “can you make money.” It's “who are you becoming while you make it?” We develop three things at once — and none of them are optional.
02
Deep Thinker
One book every two weeks, alternating between tactical and philosophical. 40 long-form essays you've written, gotten reviewed, and published. Real discussion about ethics, technology, and the shape of the world you're building in.
03
AI Expert
You treat AI as a co-founder, not a novelty. You ship products in days, deploy agents and automations, and use AI across every function — research, writing, sales ops, operations. By graduation, AI has fundamentally changed how you think and work.
No compromise on academics. You hit 1400+ on the SAT, score a 5 on at least one AP, and stay in the top 1% of high schoolers on standardized tests. Academic completion unlocks your afternoon build time, and if you fall behind, your business work stops.
Coaching & Mentors
An Entrepreneur In Your Corner.
A Network Behind You.
You're paired with an experienced entrepreneur who works with you every day — plus elite founders, thinkers, and investors dropping in every other week, and specialists we pull from when your situation calls for expertise the team can't cover in-house.
Your entrepreneur
A Working Operator — Every Day
Not a lecturer. Not a teacher who read some books. An experienced entrepreneur who has built, sold, and scaled businesses, now pair-working with you every afternoon. They sit in on your sales calls, review your P&L line by line, and push your thinking.
Your entrepreneur
Coaching Tuned To Your Business
Your entrepreneur knows your product, your customer, your numbers. Feedback is specific — "you dropped your price in 4 of 6 calls today" — not generic. The first question on every pricing conversation: "Why not higher?"
Your network
Elite Founders, Thinkers & Investors
Every other week someone is in the room who has already built what you want to build. Founders, investors, and thinkers drop in for workshops, roundtables, and unstructured time. The names change; the caliber doesn't.
Your network
A Specialist Bench To Pull From
Legal question in a weird corner of FTC compliance? A supply chain snarl on a physical product? A paid acquisition channel no one in the room has run? We have a deeper network of experts we bring in when your situation calls for expertise the current team can't cover.
The Philosopher Builder
Read Widely.
Write Rigorously.
One book every two weeks. A weekly publication habit. You're thinking about ethics, technology, and the world you're building in — not just the business.
Session 1 · Sell
- · Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
- · Turning Pro — Steven Pressfield
- · Never Split the Difference — Chris Voss
- · Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son — George Horace Lorimer
Session 2 · Build
- · Zero to One — Peter Thiel
- · The Fountainhead — Ayn Rand
- · Thinking in Bets — Annie Duke
- · Shoe Dog — Phil Knight
Session 3 · Validate
- · The Goal — Eliyahu Goldratt
- · Antifragile — Nassim Taleb
- · Bastiat + Read + Hayek essay unit
- · The Richest Man in Babylon — George S. Clason
Session 4 · Grow
- · Free to Choose — Milton Friedman
- · Energy and Civilization — Vaclav Smil
- · Book of Elon — Eric Jorgenson
- · Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl
Session 5 · Scale
- · The Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch
- · The Prince — Niccolò Machiavelli
- · Finite and Infinite Games — James Carse
- · Franklin's Autobiography — Benjamin Franklin
Plus weekly: one podcast and one article curated by the entrepreneurs and tied to what's live in the business world.
The Schedule
Year. Week. Day.
How It All Fits.
Zoom in from the full year to a sample week to a single day. Structure tightens and loosens by session — but the rhythm stays constant.
Full year — five sessions + breaks
Session 1
Sep 1 — Oct 24
Sell: Learn to confidently sell anything.
Break
Oct 25 — Oct 31
Rest
Session 2
Nov 3 — Dec 19
Build: Learn to build, market, and evaluate a product.
Winter
Dec 20 — Jan 4
Extended break
Session 3
Jan 5 — Feb 27
Validate: Learn to compress the testing cycle to find the best opportunity in days.
Break
Feb 28 — Mar 6
Rest
Session 4
Mar 9 — May 1
Grow: Learn how to turn your experiment into a revenue-generating business.
Break
May 2 — May 8
Rest
Session 5
May 11 — Jun 27
Scale: Learn how to break past the limits of what you can do on your own.
Summer
Jun 28 — Aug 15
School open. Remote support. Business keeps moving.
The Core Loop
Expertise. Audience.
Product.
Founders School students are domain experts who build an audience around their thinking and ship products that their audience wants. Year One is built around this loop, and you run it in miniature every week.
01
Expertise
Pick a domain you actually care about and go deep. 25–50 experts you follow daily. 30–60 minutes of research. Rabbit holes encouraged. By year end you know your chosen field better than most adults — and that's the unfair advantage everything else compounds on.
02
Audience
Publish daily across two streams — what you're learning in your domain, and what you're building. The audience you grow around your expertise is the distribution your future products will ride on. You're not optimizing for followers, you're building a moat.
03
Product
Build with AI. Ship in days. Validate fast. Your products come out of the expertise you've built and reach the audience you've earned. Feedback from shipping feeds back into your expertise — and the loop tightens every cycle.
The Skill Stack
Fifteen Skills.
Developed All Year.
Three pillars — Life, Entrepreneurship, AI. Every session develops a specific subset. By year end, all fifteen are stronger than the day you walked in.
Life Skills
- 01Integrity & Humility
- 02Courage & Discipline
- 03Agency & Ambition
- 04Communication & Intellect
- 05Leadership & Social IQ
Entrepreneurship
- 01Building
- 02Selling
- 03Rapid Iteration
- 04Financial Thinking
- 05Domain Expertise
AI
- 01AI as Thinking Partner
- 02AI-Augmented Building
- 03AI Tool Literacy
- 04AI Automation & Agents
- 05AI Ethics & Judgment
Assessment scale
1
Orienting
Just starting — aware of the skill, beginning to attempt it.
2
Practicing
Developing — applying with support, making progress.
3
Proficient
Independent — consistent results without hand-holding.
4
Advanced
Could teach it — producing exceptional results, coaching others.
The Year In Detail
Sell. Build. Validate.
Grow. Scale.
Five 8-week sessions, each with a clear focus and exit standard. Click any session to dive into its principle, week-by-week breakdown, parent-facing capstone, and the observable skills you'll demonstrate by the end.
End Of Year
By The End Of Year One,
You Are A Founder.
You've launched a business, sold it to strangers, and built something the market wants. You've read, written, and pitched like someone who's running a company — because you are.
What you walk away with
$50K+
Revenue from one validated venture
200+
Posts published across two content streams
40
Long-form essays reviewed and published
40
Weeks of real P&L data
100+
Sales touchpoints per week in Session 1
5
Capstone presentations your parents attend
How you advance to sophomore year
Objective Measures
$10K minimum from your own venture (Session 2+ business, not Session 1 activities). Input completion across all 5 sessions. Pass your end-of-year defense. The target is $50K — $10K is the floor.
Peer Evaluation
Every freshman votes on every classmate. "Would you be excited to learn from this person next year?" and "Does this person contribute positively to the cohort?" Your reputation in the cohort matters — a lesson that compounds across your entire career.
Discretionary Review
Final interview with your EIR and the team. Catches edge cases — the genuine setback you pushed through with character, or the trajectory worth a closer look despite the numbers.