An Entrepreneur Who Manufactures Entrepreneurs
By IAN MOUNT
Published: November 13, 2013
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ReprintsConventional wisdom holds that some 90 percent of start-ups fail. After years of observation, Adeo Ressi — a serial entrepreneur who founded TheFunded.com, an online community where entrepreneurs rate investors; Methodfive, a website developer; and Total New York, which became AOL Digital Cities — concluded that the high failure rate was the result of the wrong people starting businesses and not getting the right training.
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Peter DaSilva for The New York TimesAdeo Ressi, who started the Founder Institute, says 90 percent of the companies it has created are still alive.
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Is This the Way to Teach Entrepreneurship?The Founder Institute claims to have flipped the failure rate of the start-ups it works with to 10 percent, from 90 percent generally.
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In 2009, Mr. Ressi started the Founder Institute to teach the basics. Unlike other incubators, the Founder Institute doesn’t take students who already have a company. Instead, applicants are chosen through a personality test. Those accepted learn the process and develop their ideas through a mixture of workshops and what might be called entrepreneurial immersion. The program has opened in 60 cities around the world and charges a sliding scale, from nothing at a Johannesburg scholarship program to about $1,000 in the United States. It also takes a 3.5 percent stake in the companies started by its students.
In a conversation that has been condensed and edited, Mr. Ressi, 41, said that more than 1,000 companies had come out of the program, which he said had flipped the failure rate to 10 percent from 90 percent and created 10,000 jobs. His goal is to create 20,000 jobs a year by 2020 and to “globalize Silicon Valley.”