Eigenspace is growing for the next cohort
Cohort 3 will be bigger and include a new program for students!
Our ambition at Eigenspace is to work with many more than just 5-10 companies a year. Starting with cohort #3 we are going to expand the number of founders that can enter the program from 5 to 20 and also offer a student specific program that will start with University of Waterloo students.
Eigenspace is an experiment to prove a thesis about supporting and connecting founders and investing in their companies. Scaling a company still requires capital. Understanding how investors make money and why growth is required needs to be baked into the targets and milestones early on for the founders, employees, and investors to find success. Those decisions you make early have a massive impact later.
We see the power of a highly engaged, connected, and passionate ecosystem of founders, investors and more to drive adoption, growth, and ultimate success of the people, their companies which makes for a healthy ecosystem. We believe for Canada to have a sustainable and vibrant startup community, we need more founders succeeding and building wealth engines. And we get there through connections, community, education and capital.
Startup school and accelerator programming
Based on a lot of experience and a fantastic group of founders in our first two cohorts, we know that our programming provides a lot of value to founders even if we decide not to invest in them. This is why we decided to allow more founders into the program and continue to be flexible with our funding so that we can match with where the founder is right now.
We also broke our programming into what we see as a 4-week long startup school that is then followed by an accelerator program (more intense) once we have provided some value and established our credibility with founders.
What we have observed is that the founders interested in Eigenspace offer a load of value to one another and we want to give more founders access to that, early.
Our intention is to offer some programming in person and online. We are optimistic that we will be able to get people together this spring and are planning on offering the startup school in Waterloo, in person as well as online.
The Dropout Fund for students
As the ecosystem has evolved in Canada, students have had a growing number of options to gain access to the startup ecosystem. This is fantastic. Our University of Waterloo co-op student, Melissa, expressed interest in creating an opportunity for students to get themselves familiarized with Eigenspace at a pace that is designed specifically for them.
The Dropout Fund is not enough money to actually drop out (and we don’t want you to) but we understand there are lots of students that have a passion to build something and not the financial means or access to a network to start.
We are looking for ambitious founders that want to take a risk on their business and hopefully build something we would invest in.
The students that are enrolled in The Dropout Fund will attend the startup school alongside other founders but with a few more perks (office hours) so that at week 4 we focus on the top 5. We plan on offering most of this program in person in Waterloo.
First info session is Monday February 21st at 7pm ET
We will host our first info session on Discord on February 21st.
Alternatively, join our Discord channel and ask us some questions now (we reply at various times/speed).
We are excited about Eigenspace and the founders we have worked with so far. Looking forward to meeting new founders and helping you find your path to success!