Founder Finds Future will back three founders this year. Each one gets one million dollars and twelve months of direct mentorship from me. I want to be specific about who I'm looking for, because every minute I spend reading the wrong applications is a minute I'm not giving to the right ones.
When I was deciding what FFF should look like, I made a list of every founder I had watched succeed and every founder I had watched stall. There were patterns. Specific things the successful ones had that the others didn't, regardless of category, capital, background, or stage. I built the application around those patterns.
I am not looking for the smartest founder in the application pile. I am not looking for the most experienced one either. I am looking for the founder who is going to convert capital and mentorship into compounding outcomes faster than anyone else in the room.
Here is what that actually looks like.
You're already moving. You have a business. People pay you. You have taken at least one real swing in the market and you have data from it. Not a deck. Not an idea. A business. Pre revenue applications will not move forward. That's not a snobbery thing. It's that the work I'm best at is helping founders compound momentum they already have, not helping founders get the first sale. If you're pre revenue, get to revenue and apply next round.
You see your numbers clearly. When I ask you what your gross margin is, your customer acquisition cost, your retention curve, your runway, you don't hesitate. You don't have to be a finance person. You just have to know your business well enough that the numbers live in your head. Founders who can't tell me their numbers without checking a spreadsheet are founders who don't actually know their business yet, even if revenue is real. The cheque doesn't fix that. It only buys you more time to keep not knowing.
You take feedback like a weapon, not a wound. The founders who turn a million dollars into ten million are the ones who hear a hard truth and immediately ask "how do I action that". The ones who explain why the feedback doesn't apply to them are the ones who will be in the same position next year, with the same problems, blaming the market. I don't care if you push back. Push back is good. I do care whether the push back is in service of getting to the right answer, or in service of protecting your ego from a hard truth.
You're already obsessed. Not interested. Obsessed. The thing you're building is the thing you would be building whether you got the cheque or not. The cheque just lets you run faster. The founders who treat FFF as a lottery ticket are the ones who will spend the capital on the wrong things and then quietly fade. The founders who treat FFF as fuel for a fire they were already going to light are the ones who turn it into something real.
You're coachable but not deferential. The best mentees push back. They take what's useful and they argue with the rest. Founders who agree with everything I say are founders who will fail expensively, because I am not always right, and a mentee who can't tell me when I'm wrong is a mentee whose business will collapse the first time my read on it is off. I want the kind of working relationship where you trust me enough to listen and respect yourself enough to disagree.
Here's what I'm not looking for.
A founder with a perfect deck and no traction. A founder who is "exploring opportunities" rather than executing on one. A founder whose plan for a million dollars is "hire a team and figure it out". A founder who treats FFF as a competition to win, rather than capital to deploy. A founder who is more excited about the announcement than the work that comes after the announcement.
If you're reading this and you're wondering whether you qualify, here's the test. Read the five things again. If three of them describe you, apply. If only two of them describe you, the application is still useful, because writing it will force you to think about which of the other three you're missing and why. If only one describes you, work on the others and apply in the next round.
The application takes five minutes. There's no fee. We read every one personally. If you make the shortlist, you'll hear from us within fourteen days. If you make the final twelve, we cover your flight and accommodation to Australia and you'll pitch me face to face.
The thing I want you to take from this is that I am not looking for perfect founders. There is no such thing. I am looking for the right founders for what this program is built to do, which is take a real business with real momentum and a real founder behind it, and pour twelve months of capital and mentorship into the compounding curve so the next twelve months don't have to be as hard as the last twelve.
If that's you, the form is at the end of this site. The only outcome neither of us can recover from is the one where you don't apply at all.
Applications open soon. Drop your email into the expression of interest box to be the first to know.