Better Input = Better Outcomes: How Founders School Prepares the Founders Worth Backing

I’ve worked with enough founders and lived the start-up experience to see a clear pattern: your outcomes are only as strong as your inputs. The quality of the founders you bring into your portfolio or your program—their preparation, clarity, and readiness—determines how far your capital, mentorship, and network will go.

The hard truth is that too many promising founders, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, never get the chance to be “strong inputs.” They’re solving meaningful problems and working on breakthrough technologies, but they enter investor meetings or accelerators without the preparation that investors expect.

That’s exactly why we built Founders School—a 12-month pre-accelerator that turns promising deep-tech founders into fundable, accelerator-ready entrepreneurs.

At MassVentures, we’ve all sat across from founders who have an inspiring vision and exciting technology but no clear picture of their first customer. Their regulatory pathway is an educated guess. The IP situation is fuzzy. The financial model is a set of big numbers that look good in a pitch deck but aren’t tied to milestones. And they can’t translate their technical expertise for a mainstream investor audience.

In deep tech, those gaps aren’t minor—they can stall progress for months, scare off investors, or even sink a company before it gets out of the lab. This isn’t a matter of intelligence or ambition. It’s a matter of preparation, and preparation takes resources, guidance, and time—things that are not equally available to all founders.

At Founders School, we give founders that preparation. Over the course of a year, they map their technical milestones and identify exactly what evidence will reduce investor risk. They run customer discovery that goes beyond casual conversations to real segmentation and value proposition testing. They scope their regulatory pathway with realistic costs and timelines. They get their IP, cap table, and governance practices in order so diligence is smooth, not a scramble.

By the time they reach an investor’s desk or the first day of an accelerator, they’re operating at a different level. This is what our work so far has proven to us.

For venture firms, this translates directly into value. Diligence is faster because the data room is organized and complete. They can assess capital efficiency with more accuracy because the founder knows how far the next dollar will go toward hitting real, value-creating milestones. Post-investment, the company’s governance and reporting cadence are already established, which means fewer surprises and more productive board conversations.

For accelerators, it’s a similar advantage. Founders who arrive from Founders School start at full speed. They’re ready to engage mentors on strategy and scaling instead of circling back to foundational work. They can make better use of program resources, hit milestones faster, and raise the bar for the entire cohort.

The timing for this work is critical. We’re in a tougher funding climate where capital is harder to secure, customers are more cautious, and investors are asking tougher questions earlier. Well-connected founders see this as a headwind. Founders without those networks often experience it as a wall.

If we want the next generation of deep-tech breakthroughs to reflect the diversity of the world they aim to serve, we can’t wait for these founders to “figure it out” on their own. We need to ensure they’re prepared the moment they get the chance to be in the room. For founders, it means the skills, resources, and confidence to build companies that last. And for the broader innovation economy, it means more solutions, from more perspectives, reaching the market.

That’s the multiplier effect we see every day at Founders School. And it’s why I believe the right kind of preparation isn’t just good for founders—it’s good for every investor and stakeholder in the deep tech space.