Work directly with our team
At this event in San Francisco, you’ll work directly with our team: Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, creators of the Design Sprint and Foundation Sprint, bestselling authors of Sprint and Click, and former partners at Google Ventures; and Eli Blee-Goldman, our co-founder and general partner leading all investments at Character Capital.
As investors and designers, we have worked with 300+ teams, including those at Slack, Uber, YouTube, Phaidra, Fathom, Flatiron Health, Gusto, and Google.
We’ll personally lead you through sprint activities we use with our portfolio companies, and be with you all day to answer questions and provide feedback.
Proven system for products that click
Every new product is just a hypothesis until you test it. The world’s best founders identify an opinionated hypothesis for their product or company, then rapidly build and test it with real customers.
With our Design Sprint and Foundation Sprint, we’ve created practical methods for doing 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, check out our interview on Lenny’s podcast — and hear why he calls our sprints “the missing manual for founders.”
Based on our bestselling books
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.
Free and equity-free for founders
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.
