Founder-in-Residence: Health & Wellness

The M13 Launchpad is excited to announce a new Founder-in-Residence (FIR) program, with sponsorship from PepsiCo! We are seeking a select group of FIRs to join us in our first cohort as we ideate and build new Health & Wellness concepts targeted towards democratizing access to wellness.

We believe every new company requires four key ingredients to succeed, and have designed our FIR program to bring each to life to both accelerate and increase the likelihood and magnitude of success for our founders:

Access to ideas
Access to talent
A systematic approach to testing and validating
A community of support

The FIR program provides a unique, accessible pathway into founding your next venture, as we work alongside FIRs on a 3-month journey to develop new concepts and validate propositions in-market as part of our broad ecosystem of support. Founders will be equipped with the resources and talent needed to both strategize and execute on new concept development – with the ultimate strategy and approach to company building resting in the hands of the founders themselves.

As an incoming FIR, you are passionate about health and wellness, and our mission to democratize access to wellness solutions. You’ve developed deep expertise, and have thrived in fast-paced, limited resource environments. A successful cohort will require breadth and depth of expertise across marketing, product design and development, data analytics, operations, finance, and more. We are seeking collaborative founders who will take full advantage of Launchpad’s ecosystem and co-founding teams to build scalable solutions with the potential to have a meaningful impact on consumers’ lives.

The Opportunity – let’s build this together, The M13 Launchpad was designed to launch companies faster and with less risk. We do this by identifying key sectors where whitespace exists, finding partners that bring unique advantages, engineering high potential founding teams, and surrounding them with resources needed to scale successfully and efficiently. Our first strategic partnership was with P&G Ventures, an internal startup studio within Procter & Gamble. By leveraging expertise in P&GV’s consumer-inspired innovation and concepts and M13’s robust DTC expertise, incubation capabilities, and funding, we successfully launched three high growth consumer businesses this past year.

The Founder-in-Residence program builds on our success in launching impactful, consumer-facing brands that solve real consumer pain points. As a Founder-in-Residence, you will be involved at the NewCo’s inception, helping to identify high-potential concepts while forming your co-founding team to work through a 3-month program to validate new propositions. Upon reaching product validation milestones that we will identify together, FIRs will graduate and receive seed funding to scale further. This is an exciting opportunity to be involved in the earliest stages of a NewCo build, while receiving material hands-on support from both M13 (and its community) and our program sponsor, PepsiCo

Who you are

Passionate about emerging trends in Health & Wellness
A builder at heart, with a proven ability to operate with tenacity and agility, moving easily to address new challenges and opportunities with limited structure and budget
A “Founder” – comfortable wearing many hats and working in the details as you build our your team; and ready to create a compelling vision to inspire others to join you on your journey
A deep curiosity combined with a learning mindset
A creative drive and big-picture thinking and can both ideate on strategy and execute against it
A relentless focus on consumer needs and experienceExperience leading a direct to consumer businesses and/or the health and wellness sector (strongly preferred)

What you’ll be doing

As a Founder-in-Residence (FiR), you will be working to develop new concepts and reach market validation during a 3-month program, while forming a co-founding team that will then set the foundation for everything this brand will become:
Developing and validating new solutions Creating and validating a new brand
Designing the GTM strategy and strategic roadmap
Aligning the operating budget and owning the P&L
Scaling the business towards the next funding round and beyond

What you get (during the 3-month program):

A structured process involving all 12 FiRs and M13 program leads to develop promising new business concepts within the defined white spaces and to build the right teams for each new concept
Daily operational and strategic guidance as part of a 3-month Founder-in-Residence program
Access to M13’s Launchpad & Propulsion programs including a large network of world-class advisors and partners
$10,000 monthly stipend

What you get (upon successful graduation)

Transition from “founder-in-residence” to “co-founder”
Seed Funding and resources provided by M13
Founder’s equity in NewCo
Base compensation & benefits provided by funding