Transform your idea or invention to impact through Venture Founder.
Venture Founder supports you, a UBC-affiliated entrepreneur (students, staff, faculty members or alumni who've graduated within 5 years), when you’re ready to take your venture opportunity to the next level with an approach that recognizes that the venture building journey is unique for each venture team. The Venture Founder goal is to help you to validate the foundation of your startup and begin to build traction in your venture’s industry ecosystem.
Our methodology embodies venture-centric thinking in order that we meet venture teams where they are at in their journey. At the heart of venture-centric thinking is our made at entrepreneurship@UBC, for entrepreneurship@UBC ventures 4 T’s Venture Playbook, which provides you, your venture team members, and our advisory community with an objective, goal-based framework, ensuring that accountability, equity, diversity and inclusion are at the heart of our engagement with you.
How it works
In Venture Founder you will be paired with experienced startup entrepreneurs and experts in our expansive entrepreneurship@UBC Mentor Network comprising over 250 members, who encourage you to push the boundaries of your thinking and help level-up your understanding and validation of your venture foundation, culminating in operationalizing your venture and building traction in your beachhead market segment. In this stage, you will have the opportunity to build up your leadership, management and business skills.
As a Venture Founder you and your mentor (or mentors) work to define and validate your venture opportunity through 16 weeks of transformational experiential weekly workshops covering foundational and operational topics such as:
- Defining the venture business model and crafting a compelling elevator intro
- Defining and validated customer value propositions, the customer buying process and beachhead market(s)
- Completing top-down and bottom-up market sizing; developing and practicing effective hypothesis testing techniques
- Financial literacy
- Team building, branding and marketing, and storytelling basics
The 4 T’s Venture Playbook
The 4 T's Venture Playbook focuses venture founders on building and developing critical elements into a successful startup: Team, Technology, Traction and Treasury. Each venture journey is unique and the 4T’s Playbook is designed to help Venture Founders and entrepreneurship@UBC map their unique venture journey, supporting founders with a wealth of knowledge, experts and networks. With the 4T’s Playbook, entrepreneurship@UBC’s goal is to help Venture Founders evolve as entrepreneurial leaders and grow transformative, impactful and sustainable companies.
Streams and Studios
Venture Founder is delivered through two streams, Venture Founder: CORE, for entrepreneurs developing ideas based in technology and disruption and Venture Founder: Lab2Launch, for researchers and scientists looking to commercialize their innovation through venture creation.
In addition, entrepreneurship@UBC has developed three Venture Studios for entrepreneurs in our community solving problems in human health, climate change and social impact. The studios add an additional layer of programming, resources and community building to help teams in these areas navigate the nuances of their respective industries. Membership in a Venture Studio is conferred when an applicant is invited to join Venture Founder. There is no separate entrance process to participate in our studios.
Learn more about our streams and studios below.
