In the age of AI, anyone can build anything—fast. But how do you design products that really work for customers? How can you be sure that people will trust, love, and want what you make?
Join us for an exclusive event where you will:
Character Foundations is free for founders. Applications are due August 4.
About Us: Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Eli Blee-Goldman are the founders of Character Capital. We help the world’s most successful startups build and launch products with our Design Sprint and Foundation Sprint methods. Over the past 20 years, we have worked with 300+ teams, including those at Slack, Uber, YouTube, Phaidra, Fathom, Flatiron Health, Gusto, and Google.
At this event in San Francisco, you’ll work directly with Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, creators of the Design Sprint and Foundation Sprint, bestselling authors of Sprint and Click, and former design partners at Google Ventures; and Eli Blee-Goldman, our co-founder and general partner leading all investments at Character Capital.
We’ll personally lead you through sprint activities we use with our portfolio companies, and we’ll also be available for 1:1 meetings and small group coaching.
Every new product is just a hypothesis until you test it. The world’s best founders identify a crisp and opinionated hypothesis for their new product or company, then rapidly test it with realistic prototypes and real customers.
Our Design Sprint and Foundation Sprint are the “missing manual” for how to do this at your company. It’s a proven system for founders, based on our work with the world’s most successful startups.
At Character Foundations, we’ll help you apply this system to your company or product, and answer your questions about how to get the most out of our methods.
To learn more about our approach, and see behind the scenes of Character Labs, check out our interview on Lenny’s podcast:
Our book Sprint introduced the world to our Design Sprint method and became a New York Times bestseller. It is available in more than 20 languages and has been taught at Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, and other elite universities.
Our new book Click introduces the Foundation Sprint, our two-day method for starting big projects the right way. Click includes key lessons from hundreds of projects and stories from Nike, Google, Slack, and startups at the frontiers of artificial intelligence.
You will receive a copy of both books with your registration.
Fifteen years ago we created the Design Sprint at Google. Since then, we’ve led hundreds of sprints with teams like Gmail, Chrome, Slack, Uber, and Flatiron Health, and the Design Sprint has been adopted by Airbnb, Amazon, LEGO, MIT, Mercedes-Benz, OpenAI, Harvard Business School, the University of Oxford, and many other organizations.
Five years ago we founded Character Capital, a new type of seed fund supporting founders with capital and sprints. Building on our experience at Google Ventures, we began working exclusively with founders in the early days of building new products and companies. And we found that the most successful teams at this stage had a clear and opinionated hypothesis for their new project.
Based on these experiences, and our work with 300+ teams over the past 20 years, we created the Foundation Sprint: a new two-day method that improves the odds for founders by helping them identify and clarify the problem they are solving, their unique advantages, and how they will radically differentiate in the market.
We know these methods work — they help founders find product-market fit sooner — and we use them with every startup in the Character Capital portfolio.
We want to share the Design Sprint and Foundation Sprint with more founders. For the first time ever, we’ve created an opportunity for founders to sprint with us without raising money from Character.
Character Foundations is free and equity-free for founders: There are no fees to attend, and we take 0% of your company.
All day August 27 in San Francisco. We'll share the agenda and event details after you register.
The Design Sprint is our five-day process for solving big problems and testing new ideas. It accelerates progress toward product-market fit by helping founders:
You can read more about the Design Sprint at thesprintbook.com
The Foundation Sprint is our two-day process for starting big projects. It increases the success rate for new products and companies by helping founders:
You can read more about the Foundation Sprint at Lenny’s Newsletter.
Character Labs is our four-week sprint program for AI founders.
It’s the only startup accelerator that’s 100% focused on product-market fit. We combined our biggest lessons and techniques from 300+ companies—including the Design Sprint and Foundation Sprint—into a program that helps founders stand out from the crowd and build a differentiated product with AI.
In Character Labs, we help founders build a prototype and test it with real customers every week. Through a sequence of back-to-back sprints, you can find out whether you’re on the right track in four weeks—not the four months or more it can take to build and ship a proper MVP. You can read more about Character Labs here.
Many founders choose to apply for Character Labs following Character Foundations. However, it is not required or expected!
We designed Character Foundations for startup founders and early (first ~5) startup employees who want to learn how to navigate the noise and uncertainty of building new products in the age of AI.
Yes. When you apply, you can tell us about co-founders or other team members you'd like to invite.
We’ll review your application and get back to you by August 11.
No. This is a live, in-person event designed for real-time collaboration and transparent discussion. We may capture photos and videos for marketing purposes, but we will not record any of the content.
At Character, trust and integrity are foundational (pun intended) for us. Protecting your IP and holding your secrets in confidence are of the utmost importance. Venture capital is a reputation business, and if we got a reputation for playing fast and loose with trust, we’d be sunk.
This event is a high-trust environment. We’ll explicitly and implicitly remind all participants to prioritize confidentiality. Practically speaking, you’ll have the ability to participate without oversharing what you’re doing—we can’t promise that nobody in the room will know anything about your idea, but you also won’t be expected to share everything.
No. But if you have a specific challenge or question, bring it! We’ll have time for live coaching and discussion.
Please email ops@character.vc and we’ll be happy to help.
Character Foundations is free for founders and early (first ~5) startup employees.
Applications are due August 4 for the next Character Foundations, August 27 in San Francisco.
