FDS Course

Two intense days on designing your startup’s finances deliberately. Most startup professionals can only be away from work for two days, so FDS is built to fit exactly that — and both days run to a full eight hours.

Day one — the journey and the foundation. The phases of a startup’s journey and the challenge of each one, the particular conditions of the Swedish ecosystem, and best practice in venture development. Most startups skip the homework and never build a plan for success — and without that foundation your financial options narrow, because you do not yet know enough to understand them. We work with the Venture Docs methodology, developed over a decade at the Chalmers School of Entrepreneurship and tested on dozens of startups beginning with nothing but an idea.

Day two — the financing. The players and the funding sources; funding strategy phase by phase, up to and including the exit game; the strategies investors use, and how to counter them where you need to. Exits in depth: the process, preparing for it, and prospering afterwards. The most common reasons startups fail and how to avoid them. How to formulate an Owner’s Agenda that keeps the founding team aligned. Finally, negotiation — the theory, how to use it in practice, and how to keep improving. We close with an open Q&A.

The agenda is crammed, which is why we call it an intense course. Expect to be tired, and expect your head to ache from the sheer volume. The content matures and settles over the following weeks.

How it was built. FDS was tested by GU Ventures and affiliated incubators over a six-month trial. The content was chosen by asking one question: what are the most important things to know about startup financing that can be fitted into two days? Seventy per cent of the original material did not fit and was cut. As a university course it would have run for a semester.