I'm an accelerator, a founder house, a program. The name doesn't matter, here is what I am: 8 weeks in San Francisco to build the foundations of a generational company - non-US based founders - pre-idea, pre-team - 40 spots - $250k investment for the best teams what I cover: flights / housing / food / visa support / co-founder matching / personalised support / network access by Entrepreneurs First backed by Patrick & John Collison, Demis Hassabis, Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt & others alumni have built: Cleo, Aztec Network, Gensyn, PolyAI, Neptune Robotics, Magdrive Comment your edge ! Our next cohort is open now

This little guy is building the consumer product I've used the most this month. I met @Nlacombe_ at a café in Paris last year while interviewing founders for @jointhebridge 's Spring cohort. He was a lawyer from the South of France with no obvious consumer background, telling me he wanted to build the next big social app. On paper, very little about it made sense. I’m familiar with oddballs, but this one felt special. The skepticism I walked in with very quickly turned into: I’m all in, how do we help him? The best and the strongest founder signal that just gave a spark were: despite having no technical background, Nicolas had built something people absolutely loved and was making €15K/month with 3000 paying customers. All built from instinct. And strangely, that product might never have existed if Nicolas hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer at 24, something he didn’t mention in our first meeting. So I sat down with him again, this time to understand how all of those pieces became Promethee. I wrote the whole story here: juliadenoly.substack.com/p/h…

we often talk about the overlap between gamers and founders. @Nlacombe_ (Spring26) story puts it in a different light after a few tough years, he went back to the one place where he’d always been able to focus for hours: games so he turned studying for the bar exam into one: points, progress bars, and a community watching him work he passed, then the thing he’d built to help himself took on a life of its own @juliadenoly tells the full story behind promethee here: juliadenoly.substack.com/p/h…

if you want to achieve great things but you think it’s too hard, you’re not gonna make it, you’re too far, you don’t have enough time, just read this

every great founder was once a gamer

❄️ 1 day until apps close for W27! - $250K first check (+ < $5M in follow) - $600K in credits to move at warp speed - 50 founders (global 0.001%) - 8 weeks - 1 house - San Francisco - covering visa, flights, stay w/private chef lfg 🛸

The Bridge + EF founders at Greylock’s SF office. Hearing from partners Corinne Riley and Jason Risch on fundraising, company building, and what founders should know before they raise.

The founders behind the fastest companies come from everywhere. This is basically why The Bridge exists. Talent is global. The Bridge brings it together in SF.

How Legora clawed their way into top law firms in the early days: - Legora started with 3 technical founders and zero legal knowledge. - They scraped law-firm websites for lawyers’ emails. - Then cold-DMed lawyers on LinkedIn asking them to lunch. - The ask: teach us how your work actually works. In return, we offer to pay the lawyer’s normal hourly rate. - Max spoke to ~100 lawyers this way. Many refused the money too. - They got so close to customers that they eventually worked from inside a law firm’s office. - Those conversations helped them break into firms like Mannheimer Swartling.

> Harvey cold messaged lawyers asking for demos, pulled their own court fillings before each and had their product find holes in their arguments and the lawyers suddenly started paying attention. 
> Legora cold-messaged lawyers and offered to pay their normal hourly rate just to sit down and learn how their work actually worked. > Corgi started selling insurance policies themselves, bought a fax machine just to deal with carriers, then realized the real problem was the insurance product itself. > Granola targeted VCs as its earliest users because they spent all day in meetings and knew everyone, turning them into the perfect word-of-mouth distribution channel. None of them started with a network. They just found a way into the room.

Cursor’s approach to hiring their founding team was basically: “Do anything possible to get the most talented people.” In one case, that meant flying across the world after a rejection, getting another no, then trying again 6 months later. That person eventually became one of the best people on the team. Early hiring gets very different when one person can change the trajectory of the company.

Hans Tung (Partner at Notable Capital) has backed Airbnb, Coinbase, and Anthropic. He also invested in Wispr Flow early, and one of the reasons he wanted to take the bet was Tanay and Sahaj's cofounder chemistry. @tankots and @SahajGarg6 met at Stanford and spent 3 yrs together. One good cofounder signal they had was: "We both gave each other imposter syndrome for all of this time." And before they even committed to building Wispr Flow, they spent 6 months talking through how they'd navigate hard situations. Especially one particular question: "If we got X dollars of an acquisition offer, what matters to us really?" Finally, they landed on an answer -> Life is short. They could build a business, get acquired, and make money. "But that doesn't feel exciting enough when the alternative is: you have your 20s and 30s to do the biggest and best things in your life." Wispr grew 7x in 6 months, and today, it's valued at $2B and used across 10,000+ enterprises.

“Why we put founders in coffins to increase productivity" A glimpse inside @jointhebridge’s founder residency in SF 😂 @thankyoulennart for the write-up!

Today, we are launching an experiment. What if you could have watched the very early days of Tesla? Apple? or IBM? What if our customers, our partners, and our employees (current and future) could know us from the very beginning of our story? What if they could share in the struggles, the wins, the hardships, and the product decisions that will ultimately shape the product and the company we are building? That is what we are attempting: putting everyone with a stake in Marv Labs inside the room, while we build it. We want our industry to know us and understand us. And we want to know and understand our industry just as deeply. The task ahead is enormous. We need everyone involved. We are not building a company. We are building a movement. Episode 1 of The Build is live on YouTube: one week cold-walking into dealerships across Los Angeles and meeting dealer group owners face to face. Full video in the first comment.

Notes on finding a cofounder and figuring out if they’re the right one: What to look for: - Don't look for a copy of yourself, they should be able to bring skills, knowledge or instincts you fundamentally lack. - You should both privately feel like the other person is out of your league. - The right cofounder shouldn't just split the workload. They should change what you're capable of building 10x. -Look for aligned motivation, not just ambition. Wanting to build something huge can mean very different things to different people such as money, status, impact etc. where to look for: How to test: - Stop talking about working together and actually work together. Pick a problem and give yourselves 24–48 hours. - Productivity is traction for a founding team. Are you learning, deciding and shipping noticeably faster together? - Test one pairing properly, working casually with three potential cofounders at once gives you very little signal on any of them. - Set your non-negotiables upfront and have the uncomfortable conversations about roles, ambition, money, location, and conflict before you commit. - more importantly spend time together outside work. You’re choosing someone for a 10+ year relationship; if you don’t genuinely enjoy being around them, work gets depressing fast. ------ common traps/never do this: - Don't choose someone because you both love the same idea. Ideas aren't going to be the same forever. - Don't confuse chemistry with compatibility. Getting along is nice; being unusually productive together is better. - Don't ignore small problems because you're making progress. Pressure usually makes them bigger. - Don't stay together because breaking up feels like failure. Finding out quickly that it doesn't work is a successful test. - Don’t let small problems go unspoken. Ask each other regularly: "How happy are you in this team, 1–10?"

Luana Lopes Lara co-founded Kalshi, arguably the most controversial startup in America right now. The company is fighting legal battles across 19 states, has faced cease-and-desist orders in at least 11, and has even been hit with criminal wagering charges. And yet, in eleven months, Kalshi went from a $2B valuation to $22B. In August, Kalshi traded roughly 5x Polymarket’s volume, commanding more than 80% of the combined market. With a marketing team of just 15 people, it outdid(!!) Nike at the World Cup and turned @RealChalamet into the face of the tournament’s #1-performing ad. Building a company like Kalshi requires an extreme tolerance for pain and a degree of conviction that can look like delusion. Or, as @mansourtarek_ puts it: you need to have the dawg in you. @luanalopeslara has it. No sane founder spends two years fighting for a company’s right to exist, only to turn around and sue the regulator that finally granted it. Without Luana pushing Kalshi through that fight, it might have remained a licensed experiment without the capital, liquidity, or market power to pursue its real ambition: becoming the exchange where anything about the future can be traded. I spent months researching Luana alongside @Anastasia_ELW, an early-stage investor building @jointhebridge: speaking with people who worked with and backed her, poring over every recorded interview and written account I could find, and tracing the CFTC’s paper trail. Ana and I wanted to understand how Luana keeps pulling off things that look impossible from the outside. Where did her appetite for impossible bets come from? Why does she keep choosing the steeper mountain? And why have the people around her learned not to bet against her? This is the person behind one of America’s most audacious companies. SideDoors presents Luana Lopes Lara: the founder behind Kalshi’s most impossible bets. sidedoors.co/p/luana-lopes-l…

where it starts.