Stop polishing the pitch. Start improving the company.
Investors don't fund better pitches. They fund performance. Performance is a discipline. We install it.
For founders who want to be worth funding.
- Test
- Calibrate
- Qualify
Built by someone who has done it from both sides.
Most accelerator curricula come from people who have either built companies or studied them. Dr. Tom Duening has spent forty years doing both at once.
- 40Years building ventures
- 10Ventures founded
- 4Entrepreneurship centers built
- 17Books published
As a founder
- Founded ten ventures since 1984, with two exits
- Co-founded ansrsource in Bangalore, twenty-three years and running
As a builder of ecosystems
- Co-founded the center now ranked the nation's top undergraduate entrepreneurship program
- Founded Arizona's most active angel group, still operating twenty years on
The Proving Grounds is four decades of that work distilled into a system. Scored on evidence, not enthusiasm.
Eight weeks. One performance system.
Three stages, scored against your own baseline.
Test
Baseline your venture across market, economic, and capital readiness. You find out where you actually stand before anyone coaches you.
Calibrate
Six weeks of weekly performance reviews with an experienced entrepreneur. You commit to specific results, upload evidence, and your scores move.
Qualify
Final review against your week-one baseline. Ventures that clear it earn the ICAN Performance Ready™ designation.
A live readiness score your team and your investors can both read.
The performance dashboard, under construction.
One readiness score
Market, economic, and capital readiness roll up into a single live number for the venture.
Every KPI, with its evidence
Eighteen KPIs, each backed by what the team uploaded, so the score is never a matter of opinion.
Readable by investors too
The same view your team works from is the view an investor reads. No separate deck to maintain.
Why Should I Invest?
Dr. Tom Duening asks the founders of high-potential Campus-Born Ventures the questions investors want answered.
About the podcast
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