Post by EWOR

The most recent professional athlete to join EWOR received a term sheet on €270M+ valuation, half a year into the fellowship. Many EWOR Fellows who’ve come from a professional sports background have gone on to raise millions. Several had no technical background or cap table experience. Some don’t even have a university degree to this day. The skills that take someone to the top of a sport are similar to the ones that build companies nobody thought possible. Not talent; talent is common. The rarer thing is knowing how to lose, reset, and show up again thousands of times before anyone is watching. Athletes know something most founders learn too late: the hard part is never the result. It's the grey Tuesday morning in November when nothing is working and nobody cares yet. The moment you realise your original idea was wrong and you have to tell your team. The year you spend building something before a single person outside the room believes in it. They've been in that room before. They just called it training. Dila, Turkey’s former national fencing champion, recently raised $1M+ to fix the trillion-dollar pre-construction problem with Arctis AI. Sundar, India’s former Top 3 tennis player, just raised a $6M seed from Balderton to change music creation as we know it with Mozart AI. Alfons, a former professional handball player, invented a purely mechanical street power plant that is 200X more efficient than existing solutions at REPS GmbH. Nicolas, a former amateur boxer, recently raised $4.1M from Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri to 10x AI-native mobile development at minitap. R.J., an ultramarathon runner and repeat founder ($15M+ raised), is now building Ghost, an AI-powered Hollywood talent agency. Each of these athletes knew what they were capable of long before anyone else did. That is exactly the kind of founder we look for at EWOR. If any of this sounds familiar, you already know what to do: https://lnkd.in/d2yCbKXf #EWOR #entrepreneurship #professionalsports #startups #founders