AFC Webinars

Strategy for EntrepreneursFrom initial traction to durable advantage.

A live series for founders and early-growth-stage operators. The commitments that shape your company's trajectory often form long before product-market fit is settled. This series helps entrepreneurial leaders build the discipline to make their strategic commitments visible, test the assumptions behind them, and decide what to lock in now versus what to keep open.

6 webinars, two pathwaysLive · 90 minutesRecordings shared with registrants
Register your interestSee the sessions

Why this matters now

Early momentum can lock strategy prematurely.

Too often, early-stage companies defer strategy until after product-market fit. But the first years are when many of the most consequential commitments are made: which customers receive priority, which use cases shape the roadmap, which capabilities get funded, and how decisions get made. The strongest founders make those commitments visible and testable early. The rest often discover later that momentum has already narrowed their room to move.

The sessions

Six sessions, sequenced around the strategic choices that matter most as your company grows.

Each session runs 90 minutes and stands on its own. Follow a pathway in order, or join the sessions that match where your company is now. Sessions run as working groups: founders from different companies, one discipline, each applying it to their own position.

Founding strategy

The core question: What position is your firm trying to earn, and what must be true for it to hold?

01
What Strategy Means at the Founding Stage
This session helps founders make the strategic choices behind early-stage activity visible: who to serve first, which problems to prioritize, where scarce resources should go, and what assumptions still need to be tested. The goal is to create enough strategic clarity to guide action without pretending the answers are final.
Live · 90 min · Thu 13 Aug or Thu 24 Sep 2026, 12:00 ET · limited seatsReserve your seat →
02
From Activity to Position: Making Your Strategy Explicit
This session helps leaders distinguish activity from position. Using practical examples, we examine how companies often operate from an implied strategy, even when it has not been clearly named. Participants learn how to test whether a strategic position is specific enough, internally consistent enough, and evidence-based enough to guide real choices.
Live · 90 minRegister interest →
03
Where to Play: From Attractive Options to Strategic Focus
This session helps leaders make sharper where-to-play choices. Using a practical test across customer need, competitive intensity, emerging advantage, and capability requirements, participants learn how to assess where their company should concentrate, and how to distinguish real strategic focus from a longer list of attractive opportunities.
Live · 90 minRegister interest →

Early Growth strategy

The core question: Is early success building a defensible position, or creating a growth pattern others can easily replicate?

04
Building Entrepreneurial Advantage
This session helps leaders distinguish emerging advantage from less defensible growth. Through practical examples and guided prompts, participants learn how to identify a company’s basis of advantage, the activities that reinforce it, and the assumptions that need to hold. They then apply a simple but demanding test: if a well-resourced competitor entered tomorrow, what would still be difficult to copy?
Live · 90 min · Thu 27 Aug or Thu 8 Oct 2026, 12:00 ET · limited seatsReserve your seat →
05
Escaping The Traction Trap: Converting Growth into Positioning
This session helps leaders avoid mistaking traction for strategic position. Participants learn how to distinguish evidence that customers value a product from evidence that growth is creating a deliberate position in the market. The session focuses on where growth-stage choices about customers, channels, use cases, capabilities, and resources may be quietly narrowing future options before leaders have consciously chosen what to lock in.
Live · 90 minRegister interest →
06
Foundational Human Systems: Leadership and Governance as Strategic Choices
This session helps leaders examine how the human systems around an entrepreneurial effort must evolve as the company grows. Participants learn how founder roles, decision rights, hiring profiles, leadership routines, and governance rhythms shape the company’s ability to execute strategy. The focus is on making those choices deliberate early, before informal patterns become harder to change.
Live · 90 minRegister interest →

What you leave able to do

Know what you're building, why it wins, and what to do next.

01
A sharper way to state your position hypothesis.Clear enough to test, use in your decisions, and separate confirmed evidence from live assumptions.
02
A way to see where your logic holds and where it is exposed.What is supported, what is still speculative, and what evidence to gather before your next commitment.
03
A clearer view of your how-to-win logic.Your emerging basis of advantage, precise enough to challenge, to share with investors, and to apply to hiring and capital decisions.
04
A sharper sense of your founding priorities.The decisions most consequential over your next twelve to twenty-four months.

Who this is for

Built for founders with real market evidence and unresolved choices.

Designed for

Founders ready to make the strategy question explicit.

  • →Founders and growth-stage operators with real market evidence to reason from: customers, early revenue, or product validation
  • →A strategic choice still open: the position to earn, where to play, or how to win
  • →A decision on the horizon that will harden the trajectory: a raise, a pivot, a first senior hire, or an expansion
Not for

Pre-product teams, or firms already in execution mode.

  • ×Pre-product teams still validating that a customer need exists; the sessions benefit from real market evidence to reason from
  • ×Teams that have recently completed a rigorous strategy process and are now executing it
  • ×Large, established organisations, better served by Strategy for Enterprise Leaders

New to the series? See how a single webinar leads into deeper work on the webinars hub.

Join us and strengthen the early-stage choices shaping your future.

Register your interest