Ship-its

Ship-its are the weekly Friday demo sessions held at the Fort Mason campus of Founders, Inc., where builders present what they shipped that week to the rest of the community. ¹ The format requires working product, not slides: founders show code running, hardware moving, or users signing up. ¹¹ The campus page lists "Ship-its every Friday" alongside demo days, founder talks, and office hours as the recurring events that structure life at Fort Mason. ¹

Format

The f.inc Program Lead job description lists Friday Ship-Its as one of three anchors in the weekly campus schedule, alongside Monday kickoffs and midweek events. ⁶ The Program Lead is responsible for "owning the weekly schedule and making sure it actually happens," including managing the logistics, reminders, and follow-ups that keep Ship-Its running. ⁶

The format is demos, not decks. Hubert Thieblot, General Partner at f.inc, has described the organization's stance directly: "We absolutely hate pitch decks. We never like making them as founders because building a company is about doing, not making a polished presentation." ⁹ Ship-its enforce that principle on a weekly cadence — founders present their progress by showing what they built, not by narrating what they plan to build. ¹¹ One summary of the campus culture notes that builders construct "autonomous submarines and home robots — not presentation materials." ¹¹

Adrianna Lakatos, who works on investments and ecosystem at f.inc, describes the campus offering as "daily lunches, weekly ship-it sessions, a community of the most ambitious founders." ⁸ Her SF Founder Cheat Sheet positions the campus as "one of the most concentrated builder environments in the city," with Ship-its as a core part of what makes it work. ⁷

Role in programs

Ship-its are not just a campus tradition — they are built into the structure of every f.inc program. Each of the organization's cohort-based programs uses Friday Ship-Its as the weekly accountability checkpoint. ⁶

[Ship It] — the program named after the ritual

In February 2025, f.inc formalized the concept into a standalone program called [Ship It], a four-week sprint running February 24 to March 21, 2025. ⁵ The program selected 50 teams and brought 60+ builders from around the world to the Fort Mason campus. ³⁴ The announcement described the weekly rhythm: "At the end of each week, you'll present your progress in front of the whole batch to keep you accountable." ⁴

The [Ship It] program gave participants full access to the SF lab alongside 100+ existing portfolio founders, plus office hours with f.inc's team of exited founders. ⁴ Founders, Inc. allocated $1 million for investments in standout companies from the cohort, with the chance for a first check of $100,000 or more on demo day. ⁵⁴

The [Ship It] Demo Day Directory lists the 60+ teams that participated. ³ The cohort included RESA AI (Jerry Wu and Tanmay Kejriwal, a call/sales platform), Vaidya Surgical (Meer Patel and Aydin Turkay, surgical robots), Cheforge (Sangam Chapagain, cooking robots), AgentX (Iris Qu, no-code AI agent builder), and Zuko AI (Akshay Prabhakar, appointment scheduling). ³ The mix of software agents and physical robotics in the same demo session is characteristic of f.inc's cross-domain approach. ³

Canopy

Canopy, f.inc's main five-week program, structures its entire weekly cadence around the Friday Ship-It. ¹⁵ Canopy Spring 2026, running April 15 through May 22, includes 100 on-campus teams and 400 online teams — the first time the program opened a remote track. ¹⁴ The weekly rhythm follows a fixed pattern: portfolio speaker sessions on Tuesdays at 2 PM PT, guest speakers on Thursdays at 2 PM PT, and Ship It on Fridays. ¹⁵ Founders define a clear goal at the start of each week and ship publicly by Friday. ¹⁵

Top Canopy teams may receive $50K–$250K in funding from f.inc for 4–7% equity, with $50K in credits available to all participants. ¹⁴¹⁶ Top online performers are flown to the San Francisco campus for the final showcase. ¹⁴

Off Season

Off Season, the six-week summer program targeting university students, recent graduates, and dropouts, runs the same pattern at the Fort Mason campus with approximately 100 builders. ¹²¹³ The first Off Season ran June 23 to August 1, with top teams receiving up to $250K in funding plus $500K in credits on demo day. ¹³ Previous Off Season participants went on to gain admission to Y Combinator and other accelerators. ¹²

During summer 2025, Michael Goldstein, then a high schooler who had built an AI agent called Flowe AI, participated in Off Season and was the youngest attendee at the demo day. ²³

Blueprint

Blueprint, the hardware-only program, runs for 38 days (five weeks) and occupies the Garage with its 3D printers, CNC mills, laser cutters, and soldering stations. ¹⁷ The fall 2025 Blueprint cohort brought 50 hardware builders to campus; their weekly Ship-Its culminated in the Blueprint Festival on November 7, 2025 — billed as "a music festival, but for hardware" with "food trucks, music, and the smell of burning PLA in the air." ¹⁹ The cohort produced humanoid robots (Pluto, targeting a $1,000 price point), robotic hands (Marius Machines), autonomous drones (Emissare), EEG headsets (NeuroMorph), and missile detection systems (HyperWatch), among 50 projects total. ¹⁸

How Ship-its differ from demo days

Ship-its and demo days serve different functions in the f.inc ecosystem. Ship-its are internal, weekly, and low-stakes — every founder in the building shows what they did that week, whether it is a new feature, a failed experiment, or a hardware prototype that caught fire. ¹⁶ Demo days are the public-facing culmination events at the end of each program, where founders present to investors, the broader community, and sometimes thousands of attendees. ¹⁰

Thieblot has described the demo day as a "festival where thousands of builders and investors come to see your work." ¹⁰ One demo day was livestreamed on YouTube and showed founders presenting at demo tables where attendees could "engage one-on-one, explore products, and have deeper" conversations with the builders. ²⁴²⁶ This table-based format distinguishes f.inc demo days from the stage-presentation model used by Y Combinator and most traditional accelerators. ²⁶

The weekly Ship-it, by contrast, is for the people in the building. It is the mechanism that converts the campus from a coworking space into a community with shared rhythm and mutual accountability. ⁶⁷

Campus context

Ship-its take place inside the f.inc campus at Fort Mason, a 42,000 sq ft facility in the Marina district of San Francisco that the organization has occupied since 2022. ²¹²² The campus includes open workspaces for approximately 120–200 resident founders, a hardware lab, a media studio, a gym, and a gaming room. ¹⁷ By 2025, f.inc had expanded to three San Francisco locations totaling 45,000 sq ft: the Fort Mason hub, the Garage (a four-floor hardware facility for 30 teams), and a third space for portfolio companies. ⁹

The campus operates Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM. ²⁵ Daily communal lunches are served on weekdays. ²⁸ The campus is not open to the public or available through paid membership — access is limited to portfolio founders and program participants. ¹

In 2025, f.inc funded 55 startups, produced its first unicorn, and ran 1,000 founders through its programs. ⁹ Half of the 2025 investments were in hardware companies. ⁹

The name

The term "Ship-its" follows from the broader startup usage of "ship" to mean releasing a product or feature to users, as distinct from merely building or presenting it. At f.inc the phrase carries a specific emphasis: the question is not "what did you work on?" but "what did you ship?" ⁴ The standalone [Ship It] program, launched in 2025, elevated the term from a weekly event name to a program brand, complete with its own application portal (shipit.f.inc), demo day directory, and a $1 million funding allocation. ⁵³

The next scheduled public Ship It event, listed on the f.inc Luma calendar, is June 12, 2026, 2:00–4:00 PM at Fort Mason, organized by Adrianna Lakatos. ²⁰ Admission is free. ²⁰