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Athena will be your "cofounder" for 6 months. Work directly with Rob every week on refining your business idea and customer validation.
Our 15 person product team can help you design and build your MVP. We’ll meet with you weekly and workshop, and help you fund raise in the last 3 months.
$20,000 - $50,000 USD funding for 7% equity on a post money SAFE. The funding is designed to match your salary so you can work full time on your startup for 6 months without any loss in income.
You do not need a cofounder, or a business idea
We don't work with later stage founders who already have traction and can raise a seed round. e.g if you can raise 500k from YC, Athena is not a fit. If you can raise 5m from Sequoia then YC is not a fit.
We try to play a shadow co-founder role for solo founders. Instead of finding a business cofounder and giving up 50% equity. We'll fund you as a solo founder without a business idea, work with you to validate and test ideas, raise funds and hire in a business person later on, where you'll give away much less equity.
You could compare Athena to venture studios like HVF Labs or Idea Lab except they take much more equity (25% - 50%)
What we look for
You can code or you are technical in another field like engineering, biotech, science, medicine, hardware, manufacturing, agriculture, textiles.
You've read at least 10+ books or courses last year.
You write clearly
If you don’t meet the above criteria. No worries: learn to code first, read 10+ books, and learn to write well, and apply when you’re ready.
Research project
If you are shortlisted, we message you on WhatsApp and start with a 1-2 week research project to see if the program is a mutual fit: study 10+ companies in your industry, talk to 10 users, talk to 1 industry expert. Write up what you learnt and how you plan to build a 10x better product in a massive industry. We'll give you feedback and you can test out if we can be helpful or not. The residency is just a scaled up version of the research, e.g: study 100+ companies, talk to 100+ users and 20+ industry experts.