Day 1 · Pitch for the second date: Founder first, idea second: the opening day on naming your fears, thinking exponentially without a map, the five ingredients of a pitch, a mentor feedback checklist, and building your pitch backwards so the first…
Day 2 · Validate the problem before the product: How to find out what is actually true about your market: Vishnu Chundi on pain × frequency × consequence, past-facing questions and the pre-mortem, then a panel with Srinivas Kollipara, Rathnakar Samavedam and G.…
Day 3 · How to make people believe: How to make people believe in something that barely exists yet: Sharath Chandra's full founder storytelling playbook (IMPACT, three audiences, a five-part content engine, 70-20-10), Mohnish Yerra's investor lens,…
Day 4 · Clear every floor before you build: Praveen Dorna's lean-validation method for any founder: clear every floor (you, customer, problem, because, pitch, product), sell the promise before the product and read PMF as repeatability, then what one customer…
Day 5 · Distribution is the moat: Peer demos, a civil servant on selling to government, a health-AI advisor on why products are no longer moats, and an investor who said the real question is not "where can I fail?" but "what can I do first?"
Day 6 · Designing for a busy expert's eyes: A late-night co-founder working session turned into a playbook for designing a first product and demo for a busy professional: separate buyer from user, build for their own practice, send signals into existing systems,…
Day 7 · People, plumbing and pilots that tell the truth: A long Sunday of founder lessons: hiring without money or brand, making the first yes cheap, surviving a vanished investor, setting up a US entity the right way on day one, and designing pilots that show whether users…
Day 8 · Real behaviour, clean paperwork, the market that pays: Four rooms, one lesson: design for how people actually behave. Vivek Verma on building around real daily routines, what an innovation ecosystem gives a hardware founder, Priya Darisini Sukumar on ESOPs, cap tables and…
Day 9 · Make your message stick, then say it in a minute: A founder's guide to messaging from Day 9: Archana Purohit's full "Say it so it sticks" masterclass (four hurdles, STICK, one core for many audiences, investors, hires, institutions, websites), then Aaliyah from Draper…
Day 10 · Sharpen the pitch, protect what you own: The day before Demo Day as a founder's playbook: partners over direct sales in slow B2B, Aaliyah's rules for ordering a four-minute pitch, the case for a memorised script, and Aditya Saha's workshop on what a startup…
Day 11 · How to survive a Demo Day: A founder's guide to Demo Day and investor Q&A, built from a live panel: last-hour rules from the wings, the questions investors really asked, what each one was testing, how to answer under pressure, and a worksheet…
Day 12 · Getting the most from an accelerator: The program's closing session as a founder's guide: what accelerators actually measure, why you are the cake and everything else is icing, how to ask for introductions without burning social capital, how venture funds…
Draper Founder Program #2: a founder's field guide: Twelve days at Draper University India, Hyderabad, written up as a field guide for founders and future founders: how to validate a problem, pitch, sell, stay clean on paperwork, and get the most from an accelerator.
Draper Founder Program #2: the people: Who taught, who ran the house and who built alongside us in Cohort 2: every mentor and speaker by day, with what they taught and where to read more.