Off Season

Off Season is Founders, Inc.'s six-week summer program for college students, recent graduates, and dropouts, held at the firm's Fort Mason campus in San Francisco.¹ The first cohort, Off Season I, ran from June 23 to August 1, 2025, with 48 teams selected to work on-site across software, hardware, and robotics.³² F.inc stated its goal was to invest $2,500,000 in students through the program.⁶ Off Season sits in Founders, Inc.'s annual program calendar as the summer entry point, between Canopy (spring) and Blueprint (fall).⁵

Origins

Off Season was the second formal cohort program that Founders, Inc. ran, following Ship It (February 24 to March 21, 2025), a four-week sprint for 60+ builders at Fort Mason.¹⁵ Where Ship It was open to founders at any stage, Off Season targeted a narrower demographic: people at the beginning of their careers.¹³ The LinkedIn announcement described the audience as "the most ambitious uni students, new grads and drops out" and specified that the program accepted both software and hardware projects in f.inc's 40,000-square-foot founder lab.³

The program's promotional video, produced by Aiden Blumenstein, opened by recounting Steve Jobs selling his 1967 Volkswagen Microbus in the summer of 1976 to fund parts for the first 50 Apple computers — then inviting viewers to spend their own summer building instead of vacationing.⁴ The name "Off Season" frames the summer break from school as an opportunity rather than downtime.¹

Off Season I (Summer 2025)

Selection

Applications were accepted on a rolling basis after the June 2025 LinkedIn announcement.³ Forty-eight spots were available.⁴ By early June, f.inc reported that 24 of the 48 spots were filled, with the first round of acceptances going out the next day.⁶ The program described its offering as "6 weeks at our San Francisco campus to lock-in," with "ruthless feedback + on-demand help from our team," free food, and access to the hardware lab with 3D printers and laser cutters.⁶

Structure

Off Season I ran from June 23 to August 1, 2025 at Fort Mason.³ Participants had access to the full campus: open workspaces for 80 founders, a hardware lab with CNC machines, 3D printers, soldering stations, and Raspberry Pis, a media studio, a gym, and a gaming room.⁸ The weekly rhythm followed the same pattern as other f.inc programs: weekly Ship-it sessions every Friday where participants demoed what they built that week, office hours with the f.inc team, and daily communal lunches.⁸⁷

F.inc also used the program as a test of a vlog format, documenting the building process alongside the cohort over the six weeks.⁹ The YouTube description stated: "We're inviting 48 college students, recent grads & dropouts to build their ideas, get funded, & ultimately make something awesome."⁹

Teams

The 48 teams in Off Season I spanned robotics, AI, consumer software, hardware, biotech, and media.² The full roster included:²

• 3E8 Robotics — autonomous multi-floor delivery robots
• Budbreak — robots to detect diseases in vineyards
• Stratus — airport intelligence systems
• Parse — web scraping infrastructure ("10x faster Browserbase")
• Ato — modern tech for seniors
• Axial Composites Industries — robotic factories for advanced composite manufacturing
• Neuronav — operating system for intelligent robot vision
• Nila — flying robot for homes
• SyncTown — multiplayer social platform for music production
• Orthomind — AI orthodontist for treatment planning
• FloweAI — automation agent for emails and presentations
• Agrinota — smart environmental monitoring and wildfire risk detection
• Bohr Systems — navigation for drones in GPS-denied environments
• Carmel Labs — restoring trust in remote environments
• Solderable — vibe-printed circuit boards
• Ovi — Wall-E reimagined for cleaning industrial waste
• LensAI — smart safety glasses for field engineers
• Cyrano Systems — autonomous drones for lot security
• Remote Chess — a robotic chessboard that brings online chess to a physical board
• SAM — robot caretaker for the elderly
• Axium — robotic arm that detects and discards defective objects for manufacturers

The mix also included consumer and creative projects: Ruma (skip-the-agent home buying), Zanzi (a wellness tracker "if Cartier made it"), Luminote (a lamp that captures thoughts), StoryOwl (personalized children's stories from photos), School of Cinematics (Hollywood films from a phone), and studio k. (a Roblox game studio).²

Demo Day and outcomes

Off Season I ended with a Demo Day on August 1, 2025 at Fort Mason.³ The program page describes the outcomes: "teams got funding, builders found their co-founders, got their first angel checks or got into other accelerators like YC and Speedrun."¹

Several Off Season I teams went on to join the f.inc portfolio. 3E8 Robotics, Budbreak, Stratus, Parse, Neuronav, and Axial Composites Industries all appear on f.inc's current portfolio page.¹⁴ Crunchbase records a pre-seed investment by Founders, Inc. in Parse.¹⁶

Michael Goldstein

The youngest participant at the Off Season I demo day was Michael Goldstein, a 13-year-old from Toronto who had built an AI agent called Flowe AI.¹⁰¹¹ Goldstein had applied to Y Combinator (rejected), ODF, and Founders, Inc. (accepted); after his Flowe AI launch video garnered over 200,000 views and 1,000 likes, f.inc co-founder Ruslan reached out via direct message, and Hubert Thieblot called him.¹⁰

Goldstein joined the Off Season program after pausing for summer camp.¹⁰ He later wrote on X: "I'm 13. Last month I spent a week in San Francisco for Founders Inc's off-season. In 7 days I: was the youngest at demo day, visited a16z & Cluely HQ, met founders I'd only seen online, went viral cold-emailing 75 OpenAI engineers and ended up in Sam Altman's office."¹²

The San Francisco Standard profiled Goldstein in October 2025, reporting that he cold-emailed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's assistant to say he would be pitching at the Founders Inc. Demo Day at Fort Mason on August 1.¹¹ Altman's assistant invited him to visit OpenAI headquarters, where he received a tour and spoke with Altman in his office.¹¹ Goldstein asked Altman when he should quit a startup; Altman responded, "When you don't want to work on it anymore."¹¹ Goldstein also asked about fundraising, and Altman told him "to ask a16z for a $100,000 investment."¹¹ In September 2025, Goldstein pivoted from Flowe AI to found Kodo, an AI-powered design platform.¹⁰

Off Season II (Summer 2026)

Hubert Thieblot confirmed in March 2026 that Off Season would return for the summer of 2026 as part of a four-program annual calendar: Artifact (beginning of the year), Canopy (spring), Off Season (summer), and Blueprint (fall).⁵ The Off Season page states that Off Season II will end with a demo day where top teams can receive up to $250,000 in funding and $500,000 in partner credits.¹ The Canopy page also advertises a notification signup for Off Season II.¹³

The second cohort appears to be expanding beyond the 48-team format of Off Season I. The f.inc X post advertising the program described the campus as hosting "100 other founders" alongside the applicant, and Thieblot's March 2026 post listed Off Season as a "6-week program for students, recent grads, and dropouts" without specifying a cap.⁶⁵

Place in the f.inc program calendar

Off Season is one of four named cohort programs that Founders, Inc. runs each year, alongside a rolling sprint residency called Wild Card.⁵ The programs share the same weekly structure — Monday kickoffs, midweek events, Friday Ship-its — and the same campus at Fort Mason, but each targets a different audience and season:⁵⁸

• Artifact — beginning of the year (January), five weeks, in person, open to all stages.⁵
• Canopy — spring (April–May), five weeks, in person and online, software/hardware/media.¹³
• Off Season — summer, six weeks, in person, students and early-career builders.¹
• Blueprint — fall, six weeks, in person, hardware and physical-AI teams only.⁵

Off Season is the only f.inc program explicitly limited to students, recent graduates, and dropouts.³⁵ The program description positions the summer break as the differentiator: participants choose building over internships, vacations, or courses.¹ F.inc's about page describes its programs collectively as designed to get builders "from -1 to 0," with the expectation that some will be ready for a first check by the end.⁷