Playground · The Coffee Shop Cohort · Now forming

No building.
No badge.
No demo day.

Five to ten founders. One table. One full year. We're putting together a small cohort of people building something real, and running founder development the way we think it should be run — with our own money, our own coaching, and no programme calendar telling anyone when to be finished.

Register your interest →
Why this exists

The programme ends in twelve weeks. The company doesn't.

What usually happens

You get in. There's a kickoff, a curriculum, a mentor list and a countdown. You spend three months producing the artefacts the programme needs — the deck, the metrics slide, the demo day rehearsal — and you get good at presenting a company rather than building one. Then it ends, everyone claps, and you're back where you started with a better pitch.

What we do

We take five to ten founders and stay with them. No cohort calendar, no graduation. The work is play-based and the stakes are deliberately low, because that's the only condition under which people try things that might not work. Then we help with the parts that actually decide the outcome: raising, and finding the exit.

We're not trying to run a bigger programme than anyone else. We're trying to get one or two companies somewhere real.

The shape of it

Small, on purpose.

Five to ten founders. Not a batch. A table you can remember everyone at.

Play-based. The same methods we run for incubators and universities, except you get them forever instead of an afternoon.

Low stakes, real skills. Creative insight is a muscle. Nothing in your education was designed to build it. This is.

We stay for the raise. Fundraising and exit are the two things every programme wishes you well on and then leaves you to. They're the two we're in for.

No demo day. Nothing here is built to be presented at.

A coffee shop, because we'd rather spend the money on the founders than on a floor of an office nobody needs.

Fit

You've started. That's the bar.

You've built something. Not a deck — a thing, however rough, that exists outside your head.

You're past the idea stage and into the part where it's harder than you expected.

You're willing to be coached, which mostly means being willing to be wrong in front of people.

You can get to a coffee shop and sit in it.

If you're earlier than that, come to an open session instead — we run those too.

We run play-based experiences and coaching for incubators, universities and companies across Pakistan — most recently for WISE Lab, the national incubation programme for women founders.

Register your interest

Put your hand up.

We're still forming this. Tell us what you're building and we'll come back to you as places and dates firm up — and if it's a fit, we'll talk properly.

Received
We'll be in touch as this takes shape.

Meanwhile: whatever you wrote in that last box — go and talk to someone about it this week.

No application form, no pitch deck. We'll read every one.

Ready to play?

Everything we're doing and thinking is on LinkedIn. Write-ups from our sessions, what's working, what isn't. Follow OpenSoch →

Collaborating. Universities, incubators and companies building founder programmes of their own — we're open to it, and we've got opinions. hello@opensoch.org.