Work directly with our team
In Character Labs, you’ll work directly with our team: Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, creators of the Design Sprint and Foundation Sprint, bestselling authors of Sprint and Click, and former partners at Google Ventures; and Eli Blee-Goldman, our co-founder and general partner leading all investments at Character Capital.
As investors and designers, we have worked closely with more than 300 startups, including Flatiron Health, Gusto, YouTube, Phaidra, Fathom, Miro, and Slack, through pivotal moments in their growth.
We’ll be there the whole time, personally leading you through hands-on sprints.
The missing manual for founders
Through a sequence of back-to-back sprints, you’ll make rapid progress toward product-market fit:
- First, a Foundation Sprint — identify and capture the opinionated hypothesis behind your product or company. What needs to be true for this to work?
- Next, a Sales Sprint — craft the essential words and demos you need to start selling uncomfortably fast. Can you get a customer to commit in the first week?
- Then, a Marketing Sprint — focus on your website and marketing channels. Can you scale from one-to-one sales to one-to-many marketing?
- Continue with Design Sprints — build and test with real customers, take what you learn, iterate and improve sprint after sprint.
- Finally, the Pitch Sprint — our simple method for creating a pitch deck and narrative that works.
Character Labs combines everything we’ve learned from working with 300+ startups. It expands on the proven method from our books Sprint and Click with new techniques that we haven’t shared publicly.
For a behind-the-scenes look, check out our interview on Lenny’s podcast — and hear why he calls Character Labs “the missing manual for founders."
Get $150k for 5% equity
Every startup in Character Labs gets a $150,000 investment from Character in exchange for 5% equity. We make our investment on the day of acceptance. It‘s not contingent on any milestones, and there are no fees to participate.
We’ve carefully designed this offer. Because of the hands-on work we do alongside you and your team, we believe it’s a better value than other accelerators, and it’s small enough to sit alongside capital from other sources with minimal dilution.
Small, selective groups
We accept a maximum of 15 companies into each Character Labs group. You’ll work directly with the founding partners of our firm. This is an elite, hands-on, high-quality experience for exceptional founders — not a startup factory.
Build for customers, not investors
Like any good investor, we’ll help you with customer introductions, hiring, and fundraising when the time is right. We know how valuable that support can be when you’re building something new.
But we also know none of it matters if you don’t get the product and go-to-market right.
That’s why Character Labs is 100% focused on helping you find product-market fit, and why it’s all about doing — not talking.
