Scenes from SR007 Kickoff Week

The speedrun team is hiring! We're looking for a marketer to help grow our brand + founder applications. If you're an early-stage marketer who's worked with founders and startups, we'd love to meet you! Learn more from Rose Johnson’s post about the role and apply on our website.

Over 30,000 teams applied to join the latest class of a16z speedrun, and just over 80 startups were ultimately selected.

This week, the founders of the class of SR007 gathered together for the first time in Los Angeles. The rest of the program runs in San Francisco, but we wanted kickoff week to feel like a retreat before the real work began.

“It’s always special to gather somewhere that isn’t home base for most people,” says Joan DeGennaro, who runs community and events for speedrun. “I think it’s really important to step outside your normal routine and use a kickoff like this as a marker of a new beginning for founders to be fully immersed in it.”

This kickoff week had a more laid-back vibe than SR006’s, a result of some recent tweaks made to the program. After every cohort we dig into founder feedback to see how we might make the speedrun better. The biggest note, by far from the class of SR006 was that founders want more unstructured time with each other.

Samira Behrouzan, Marketing and Ops Partner on speedrun, explains: “Founders value getting to know their cohort above almost everything else, and we’ve seen it over and over that when founders connect early, their whole program experience is better.”

So we cut the programming down. Three packed days became two and a half. The team left more room to breathe in the calendar, with longer lunch blocks so founders could actually sit down and get a meal together (or take a sales call).

And then, instead of two or three fireside chats with different guests, we kept it to just one memorable chat and Q&A with a very special guest.

Marc Andreessen came by for an in-person conversation about how AI is changing the world. He spent most of the session doing Q&A with founders.

“Most founders have seen Marc’s content on YouTube or read nearly everything he’s written,” Joan DeGennaro says. “So was cool to get Marc chatting with the founders about the questions on their minds.”

The extra breathing room did what it was supposed to do.

The social event on night two had an official end time, but many founders lingered well past, swapping stories and intel over drinks and games of Jenga.

Founder introductions are always a highlight. Each company sent one representative to introduce themselves on-stage, in a sort of early, soft-preview of “Demo Day.”

Samira Behrouzan says that what stuck out the most was the variety: “We have founders building satellites that send real-time intelligence from space, using sensors to predict engine failures on cargo ships, and working on missile defense,” she says. “We even have a team turning industrial wastewater into ultrapure water for datacenters.”

On day three, founders wrapped after morning cohort breakouts and got back to building. That’s the mantra for the next 12 weeks: heads down, with regular office hours with cohort leads, and tactical sessions with our operating team.

The next big milestone is week six’s Progress Day: the midpoint of the program and a major milestone, where founders present their companies in a structured format.

The goal for the weeks in between is to help them refine every aspect of their thinking and approach, give them enough reps to pressure test their vision, and help them build meaningful traction along the way.

There will also, of course, be more surprise guests (next up: OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger).

And that’s a wrap on week one. We’ll bring you more inside looks between now and Demo Day.

That’s it for this week! For more weekly dives into the world of early stage startups, subscribe below.

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