ODF
From idea to conviction.

A program that sells you a week, not a check

By the YesPress Desk

Here is a small, slightly subversive idea about how companies get made: the hardest part is not the idea. Ideas are cheap and plentiful and mostly wrong. The hardest part is finding the one other person who will spend the next decade being wrong alongside you, and then deciding - actually deciding - to do it. ODF, which stands for On Deck Founders, is a fellowship built almost entirely around that second problem. It takes place over one intense week in San Francisco, it is deliberately small, and it does something that most programs of its kind refuse to do: it takes no equity.

That last detail is worth sitting with, because it reorganizes the incentives. An accelerator that takes 7% of your company is, in a structural sense, betting on your cap table. It wants you to raise, to grow, to exit. ODF, by taking nothing, is betting on something softer and harder to price - the relationships you carry out of the room. Over half of the companies that come out of ODF started when two strangers met in the same cohort. The program's whole theory is that if you assemble the right eighty or hundred people, point them at each other, and get out of the way, some non-trivial fraction of them will walk out as co-founders.

On Deck itself was founded in 2016 by a group that included Erik Torenberg, and grew, for a while, into a sprawling thing. There was a fellowship for founders and one for angel investors and one for engineers and one for what felt like everyone. In 2021 it raised a $20 million Series A led by Founders Fund at a roughly $250 million valuation, and for a moment On Deck looked like it might become the community layer for the entire startup economy. Then 2022 happened - the market turned, On Deck cut about a quarter of its staff and scaled back its accelerator, and the company did the thing that is easy to say and hard to do. It decided to do less, better.

What survived that contraction is the part that always worked: the founder fellowship. Stripped of the ambition to be everything, ODF is now a fairly legible product. Eighty to a hundred vetted builders, more than half of them technical, spend a week together in San Francisco. They meet potential collaborators. They interrogate their ideas out loud, in front of people who will tell them the truth. And they leave with a decision and a network of roughly three thousand members that keeps answering their messages years later. There is, along the way, a package of perks - somewhere north of $800,000 in credits from partners like Mercury, AWS, and Stripe Atlas - but nobody joins ODF for the AWS credits. They join for the room.

Why it works when it works

The temptation with a program like ODF is to grade it on curriculum, and by that measure it would be unremarkable. There is no secret syllabus. Ask an alum what they got and they almost never describe a lesson; they describe a person - the co-founder they met, the peer who took the 2 a.m. call, the introduction that turned into a seed round. That is the product. The lego-block logo, half of it lit, is a reasonable metaphor: ODF is interested in the moment a company is still coming together, before it has a name or a deck.

And the alumni list does the quiet arguing that marketing cannot. Levels. Cal.com. Partiful. Settle. Finch. Traba. atob. Grow Therapy. These are companies that raised from Sequoia, a16z, Khosla, and Founders Fund, and collectively the On Deck alumni base has raised more than $2 billion. You can be appropriately skeptical of attribution here - great founders find each other with or without a program - and ODF's own honest framing is not that it manufactures talent but that it manufactures the serendipity. It puts the right people in a room on purpose. Whether that is worth a week of your life is a bet, but it is a legible bet, and a lot of people have taken it.