Kickstart’s Fellowship

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Kickstart is a zero-equity fellowship with a 10+ year track record and a ~0.1% acceptance rate. The founders we back go on to raise from Y Combinator, Morgan Stanley, Sequoia Capital, Antler, and the Google Black Founders Fund. We take 0% equity from every one of them, unconditionally.

The question every application is trying to answer is simple: is this person one of the rare few that will draw a line in history?

Here is exactly what that means.

The three traits

We run selection on three traits. All three must be present - no real credentials.

Slope over y-intercept

We don't look at where a founder is. We look at how fast they're moving.

At 19 or 21, no one has a meaningful track record. No one has traction that proves anything. The only signal that compounds at this stage is rate of improvement. For us this is the speed of learning, building, and iteration.

The test: show us what you built 12 months ago, 6 months ago, last week. The gap between those three things is the signal.

A high-slope founder has demonstrably better thinking or product at each interval and their past work embarrasses them slightly because they've grown past it. They've changed their approach multiple times, each change clearly informed by learning.

A low-slope founder shows the same pitch repackaged. They have explanations for why things haven't moved.

We back the former, regardless of where they started.

"Hire for slope, not Y-intercept. This is actually my number one piece of life advice."

— Sam Altman

Obsession over passion

Passion is what someone says about themselves. Obsession is what they do when nobody is watching.

The test: what did you do last Saturday afternoon?

An obsessed founder was building. Debugging something that annoyed them. Reading papers nobody asked them to read. Prototyping something with no programme, no deadline, no audience. An obsessed founder cannot stop.