Adeo Ressi

Ressi says he was born in 1972 and grew up in New York City. Starting at age 14, he spent his summers living in Arcosanti, an experimental community in Arizona, helping to build a “city of the future” and doing construction, carpentry, welding, and metal casting.⁠[1][1]

He first studied architecture at Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It grew out of the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded with funding from Andrew Carnegie in 1900, which were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and took the present name after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967. The university is known for computer science, robotics, engineering, and the arts, and has campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Rwanda. As of September 2025, it enrolled 16,582 students. Its current president is Farnam Jahanian. On September 30, 2026, the university announced a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin and plans to build a new campus in Miami.Open the full entry, then dropped out to ride freight trains, studied abroad in Vienna, and eventually transferred to the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry. At Penn he created his own “Revolution” major, which the university did not support, launched Green Times, an environmental newspaper with a circulation of 30,000, and led the campus environmental group.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In 1992, Ressi and Elon Musk, both transfer students, became roommates at the University of Pennsylvania; he recalls that the two started a nightclub in order to escape the dorms.⁠[1]

After leaving school, Ressi founded his first company in 1994, initially to publish one of his books of poetry over Gopher and FTP; when HTTP arrived, it pivoted to release a commercial website, creating the online newspaper Total New York, which later became part of AOLAOLAOL is an American internet brand offering a news portal, email, and membership services. Its history dates to an online-services company founded in 1985.Open the full entry’s Digital Cities. He then founded a services company to take major media brands online, which became a key part of a digital media roll-up that went public through a reverse merger as Xceed; his early résumé also includes the web development firm methodfive.⁠[1][1][1][1][2]

Starting in 2000, Ressi helped venture capitalists rescue portfolio companies hit by the dot-com crash, and briefly joined Idealab as a portfolio CEO. Around the same time, he and Musk began talking about space while driving on the Long Island Expressway; both had sold companies and were weighing what to do with their lives, and they conceived Life to Mars, a project aimed at inspiring humanity to inhabit Mars. Ressi recalls that after trouble securing launch vehicles, Musk went on to found SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry, while he joined the board of the X PRIZE Foundation, helping to fund the first private space exploration purse.⁠[1][1][3][1][3][1]

In 2002, Ressi founded the casual gaming company Game Trust, believing that artificial intelligence would first appear in games; the company developed many concepts later known as “gamification” and was ultimately sold after a board struggle for control.⁠[1][1][1][1]

Ressi says that some of Game Trust’s investors were “very bad actors,” which led him to launch TheFunded in 2006 as a weekend project allowing CEOs to rate venture capitalists; the Founder Institute’s timeline places TheFunded in 2007, saying he and Jonathan Greechan had been mistreated by investors at a previous startup and so launched the site for anonymously rating investors. Ressi says this made him relatively well known among entrepreneurs, but also regularly villainized by some venture capitalists.⁠[1][4][1]

In 2009, Ressi founded the Founder Institute (originally called the “TheFunded Founder Institute”) to improve entrepreneurship and the funding landscape, prompted in part by the fact that most membership applications to TheFunded came from entrepreneurs nowhere near ready to raise money. By 2010 it had expanded to a dozen cities and mandated founder-friendly investment terms; it assesses applicants’ entrepreneurial potential with a predictive admissions test, and by early 2015 more than 1,300 startups had graduated from its four-month, part-time program.⁠[1][4][1][2][2]

In September 2011, the Founder Institute, together with the law firm Orrick and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, released the free “Founder Advisor Standard Template” (FAST), providing a simple legal framework for equity compensation between founders and advisors. Ressi said that TheFunded saw at least one post per week about advisor compensation.⁠[5][5][5]

In August 2012, TheFunded and the Founder Institute, together with the law firm Wilson SonsiniWilson Sonsini Goodrich & RosatiWilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (known as Wilson Sonsini) is a law firm headquartered in Palo Alto, California, founded in 1961 and known for serving technology, life sciences, and other growth companies and their investors; it served as counsel on the initial public offerings of companies including Apple, Netscape, Google, and Tesla. As of December 2025 the firm had more than 1,000 lawyers, and its 2025 revenue was $1.4 billion.Open the full entry, introduced Convertible Equity, a seed-financing vehicle intended to replace convertible debt notes: it keeps the most popular features of convertible debt but removes the repayment-at-maturity and interest provisions so startups are not saddled with debt. Ressi estimated that convertible notes then accounted for more than half of all angel and early-stage deals, and noted that most angel investors are not licensed lenders. He later listed the SAFE note and the FAST agreement among the startup legal concepts he helped create through the Founder Institute.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][1]

As of April 2017, Ressi said the Founder Institute was operating programs in 173 cities worldwide and expected 100,000 people to attend its free events that year. As of October 2026, the Founder Institute says it has launched more than 9,000 companies since 2009.⁠[1][7]

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Founder Institute moved all its programs online, and Ressi said the business grew by up to five times across many metrics. In the same period it launched VC Lab, a free venture capital training program aiming to launch 1,000 new venture capital firms worldwide by 2025 to address the way venture capital excluded opportunities by geography, gender, age, and race; every participating general partner must sign an ethical pledge, the Mensarius Oath.⁠[4][8][8][8][8][9]

In October 2021, VC Lab released Cornerstone, a free package of fund formation documents including a term sheet, a subscription agreement, and a limited partnership agreement; co-founder Ressi estimated the documents could cut legal costs in half or more.⁠[10][10]

In 2022, VC Lab was formally spun out of the Founder Institute as an independent company, operated by the venture capital infrastructure platform Decile Group. As of October 2026, VC Lab says it has helped launch 1,003 firms in more than 100 countries; Ressi is chief executive officer of Decile Group and VC Lab, as well as chairman and co-founder of the Founder Institute.⁠[4][11][7][4]

Ressi republishes on his personal website articles he wrote for Forbes and LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry. In 2015 he wrote that successful entrepreneurship is a combination of genetics, circumstance, and perseverance, noting that the Founder Institute had social-science tested more than twenty thousand prospective entrepreneurs over six years; in 2016 he argued that the media romanticizes entrepreneurship, whose real story is one of constant rejection and frayed relationships; and in 2018 he cited Facebook in arguing that Silicon Valley was going through an “existential crisis.”⁠[12][12][13][13][14]

He co-hosts the Mindstorm Podcast with Josh Whiton, founder of MakeSoil.org, on how entrepreneurs can align personal growth with business growth. In 2021 he said he had launched a role-playing card game called Save the World, and he has promoted the ideas of “For Progress” companies and a “Regenerative Economy.”⁠[15][15][8][8]

Personal website: https://www.adeoressi.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[16]

Founder Institute: Official website: https://fi.co/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

Decile Group: Official website: https://decilegroup.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17][7]

VC Lab: Official website: https://govclab.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

X: Public account: https://x.com/adeoressi (opens in a new window)⁠[16]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adeoressi/ (opens in a new window)⁠[16]