Eight founders, two days, one room in Prague.
withSeismic is one person and a room. I run five weekends a year, eight seats each, for founders with a business already taking money. You bring your numbers. We spend two days on what they say.
Doug Silkstone.
British, full-stack, three exits. I have been the person writing the migration at two in the morning and the person signing the sale agreement, which is why the weekend covers both ends.
I started building for money at nineteen and have not really stopped. Three companies have been sold: an agency, a data product and a marketplace. None of them were unicorns. All three were profitable before they were bought, which is the only part of that record I think transfers.
I moved to Prague in 2019 and run everything from here. The work is split between my own products and a small number of founders I go deep with. The weekends came out of the second half: the same six problems kept turning up on calls, and eight people in a room solve them faster than eight separate hours on Zoom.
I still write the code. Every session in a build block is me in your repository or your analytics, not a facilitator with a whiteboard. If your problem is a broken checkout, we fix the checkout that afternoon.
- BasedPrague, Czech Republic
- ExitsThree, 2013 to 2022
- WeekendsFour a year, eight seats each
- Written byMe. All of it, including this page.
What actually happens, hour by hour.
Saturday nine to six, Sunday nine-thirty to five. Meals and the cohort dinner are in the price. The timings below are the real ones and they have not changed in two years.
Saturday
- 09:00Numbers on the wallEveryone reads out revenue, runway and the one metric they are lying to themselves about. Twenty minutes each, no slides.
- 11:00Positioning teardownThree businesses on the board. We rewrite the sentence that says who it is for until someone in the room would buy it.
- 13:00Lunch, and the awkward question roundNinety minutes. The rule is that you have to ask the thing you would not ask on a call.
- 14:30Build blockI sit with each of you for forty minutes on the actual codebase, funnel or pricing page. Screens shared, changes shipped.
- 18:30Dinner in KarlínIncluded. It runs long. This is where most of the introductions that matter get made.
Sunday
- 09:30Growth engineeringAcquisition maths per business — channel, CAC, payback. We kill at least one channel per founder.
- 11:30Your session, recordedForty-five minutes on your specific problem in front of the room. You leave with the recording.
- 14:00The ninety-day planOne page each, written in the room, read out loud, torn apart by seven other people who now know your numbers.
- 16:30CloseOut by five so the Sunday flights work. Follow-up call with me at day thirty.
Six reasons not to book.
I turn down roughly a third of applications. Reading this section and recognising yourself saves us both a scoping call.
- 01You have not launchedThe weekend works on live numbers. If nobody has paid you yet, there is nothing to take apart and you will spend two days listening to other people's problems.
- 02You want a keynoteThere is no stage, no deck and no photographer. If the reason to come is the content, buy a book — it is cheaper and the content is better.
- 03You are past about £5m a yearAt that size your constraints are hiring and org design, and I am not the right person for either. I will say so on the scoping call and refund you.
- 04You cannot show the room your numbersEverything runs on real figures. If your revenue is commercially sensitive, or you would rather round it up, the format does not work for you.
- 05You are looking for investmentNobody in the room is writing cheques and I am not making introductions to people who do. Founders who arrive to raise leave disappointed.
- 06You want it remoteThere is no stream and no recording of the whole weekend, only of your own session. Two days in Prague is the product.