The Proving Grounds is an eight-week immersive experience. It builds a performance system into your venture across three dimensions, so you can measure, improve, and sustain how it performs over time.
Applications close December 15 · 12 founding seats
the system Dr. D built from forty years
of building ventures
You leave a more capable founder, leading a stronger venture than the one you brought in.
Illustrative venture
Overall readiness
9/36
In progress · Week 1
18 KPIs
3 in progress · 3 ready to start
3 in progress · 3 ready to start
3 in progress · 3 ready to start
WHERE FOUNDERS GET STUCK
Count how many of these describe your venture right now.
Your calendar is full every week. Revenue, retention, and margin look the same as they did in January.
Nobody has shown you what a strong venture looks like on evidence, so you can't measure the distance.
You have twenty encouraging conversations and a waitlist, and no proof yet that anyone will pay.
Someone asks for CAC or break-even and you open a spreadsheet you haven't touched in months.
Every big call lands on you, and nobody who has been there checks your thinking before you make it.
You set goals Monday. By Friday, customer fires ate the week and nobody asked what happened.
Your mentors give you opinions that conflict, and none of them can show you whether your company improved.
you need to see where you're heading, and what to fix next.
WHY A PERFORMANCE SYSTEM?
You get better through disciplined engagement with customers, markets, and teammates. Every customer interview changes you. The Proving Grounds helps you find what your venture lacks, puts real work in front of you each week, and has you review the results with your Performance Engineer.
WHY WE CALL IT THE PROVING GROUNDS
A Formula One team takes the car to the track and runs it under stress. The engineers read the data, take the car back to the shop and the wind tunnel, and work on what the data showed. Then the car goes out again. The car is never finished. The team always knows its baseline.
Week 1 puts your venture under load and records a baseline on all 18 KPIs.
Weeks 2 to 7, you work one dimension at a time. Your Performance Engineer reads the evidence with you, the way a race engineer reads telemetry with a driver.
Week 8 is your qualifying lap. You put your week 1 and week 8 dashboards side by side and see where the venture stands.
HOW WE MEASURE
You work on all three, and the venture gets stronger along with you.
Do customers recognize what you create and pay for it?
Can you deliver that value at a profit and at scale?
Do you know what capital your venture needs, and how you would put it to work?
PART 1 · TEST
Take your baseline score on all 18 KPIs, meet your Performance Cluster, and commit to the Key Results you'll chase first.
PART 2 · CALIBRATE
Prove customers want what you sell and will pay for it, with interviews, pilots, LOIs, and sales that back the claim.
PART 2 · CALIBRATE
Build the financial model, pin down unit economics, and show you know why your margins are what they are.
PART 2 · CALIBRATE
Build your capital strategy, decide what your venture needs, and organize the records behind it.
EVERY WEEK
Upload evidence to your Logbook before 10 PM Central Monday. Your dashboard updates, and your Cluster reviews the change with you.
PART 3 · QUALIFY
Compare your week 1 and week 8 dashboards side by side and see how far your venture moved.
INSIDE THE PROVING GROUNDS
Eight weeks of disciplined work changes how you think, decide, and lead. You keep that capability after the cohort ends.
Every claim about your venture rests on contracts, interviews, pilots, and models you document in your Logbook.
An experienced entrepreneur reviews your evidence each week and pressure-tests every score change.
Each KPI offers a menu of Key Results, so a pre-revenue team and a revenue-stage team both find work that fits.
Four ventures per Cluster and one session every week. You share your progress at each one.
Your Logbook holds the documents behind your score, week by week, so you can trace how your venture changed.
A NOTE FROM DR. D
I'm a value creator. Over forty years, I've founded more than ten ventures and invested in others. I co-founded ansrsource, which has brought in about $30 million a year for twenty years, and invested in HomePride, which has generated nearly $100 million. Together my ventures have generated over $500 million in revenue and created hundreds of jobs around the world. I've established four university-based entrepreneurship centers and ecosystems, assisted more than a thousand entrepreneurs, and written seventeen books on entrepreneurship. At Arizona State University, I founded the nonprofit angel group now known as Arizona Tech Investors. It has become one of the state's most prominent, investing more than $24 million in over 90 companies.
The founders I've watched succeed got there through repeated work with customers, markets, and teammates. That work reshaped them. It changed how they think, decide, and lead.
I designed the Proving Grounds around that idea. You get eight weeks of structure, a Performance Engineer and a digital version of me who won't let you coast, and founders beside you to learn from.
WHO IT'S FOR
If you're building something real and want an honest measure of where it stands, this is for you. Expect real work, and expect your assumptions tested every week.
EVERYTHING YOU GET
FOUNDING COHORT · 12 SEATS
$3,995
one payment · eight weeks
Apply to the Proving GroundsApplications close December 15 · 12 founding seats
You pay only after we accept you.
APPLY FIRST, PAY AFTER
Applying costs nothing. We read every application ourselves and tell you if we don't think we can move your company. If we accept you, we email the terms and a payment link, and you decide whether to begin an immersive experience built to develop the discipline to grow.
Dr. D
reads every application with the team
PROVING GROUNDS FAQS
You work on the Key Results you chose and upload the evidence to your Logbook before Monday at 10 PM Central. Your dashboard updates. Later that week you meet your Cluster and your Performance Engineer, walk through what changed, and commit to the next Key Results.
The work is work your company needs anyway: customer interviews, a real financial model, a capital strategy. You get a deadline and a reviewer for it. Plan on one Cluster session of 2 to 3 hours a week, plus the time to produce your evidence.
At first, yes. Week 1 sets your starting line, and every week after it is improvement. Each KPI offers Key Results sized to your stage.
It reflects all 18 KPIs, calibrated by your Performance Engineer. Every point traces back to a document in your Logbook.
Your Logbook belongs to you. Only you, your Performance Engineer, and the ICAN team can open it. Dr. D, our AI assistant, draws on forty years of Tom Duening's teaching, writing, and venture work. Every founder gets their own Dr. D, and yours works only with your venture. If another founder asks it about your company, it has nothing to show them. We never sell your data, and the AI models we use don't train on your files. Your files live in ICAN's own Amazon Web Services account, and we scan every upload for malware before anyone opens it. When the cohort ends, you can ask us to delete everything. Our Privacy Policy has the full details.
Each Performance Engineer works with four ventures, so they know your numbers in detail and give you their full attention every week. We run three Clusters, and when the seats fill, applications close until the next cohort.
A FINAL THOUGHT
After forty years in this work, I no longer believe anyone can be taught entrepreneurship. People become entrepreneurs by engaging with the real thing: customers, teammates, competitors, and the hard calls in between.
Every customer interview changes you. So does every pricing experiment and every hard conversation with a partner. The change can be small, or it can reorganize how you see the whole opportunity. My job is to build an environment where that change happens faster, and where you can see which way you're heading.
You come here to build capability, and a stronger company follows from it. If you want to find out what your venture is capable of, I'd be glad to have you in the Proving Grounds.
Dr. D
Twelve seats. The Founding Cohort starts January 18, 2027, and you pay only after we accept you.
Apply for $3,995Applications close December 15 · 12 founding seats
