Kinda - we use “integrity based pricing.” In other words, try it for a bit, then pay what you can. Pre-revenue members often ask for a 99% discount, established members find $199/mo to be a “ridiculous ROI.”

If you are looking for transactions like a new lead, new vendor, introduction to employees or investors, then probably not.

If you are looking to be part of a transformational space that will help you answer,

• “How do I become a better leader?”

• “Why is it so hard to clearly communicate my vision?”

• “Why am I lonely when surrounded by success”

• “Why do little defeats seem so big behind my eyeballs and so little on the P&L?”

…then YES, this is the place for you.

In the end, your company’s growth will always be limited by the capacity of the leadership team (ahem: you) and this is where to go to work on that.

Membership is simple. Hit me up here on LinkedIn or email me: Brad@deltaawesome.com. We do a screening call with everyone to get to know each other first. I’ve helped literally hundreds of Founder|CEOs. If you make the effort to meet with me, I’ll be present and as helpful as I can be. If there is a fit, everyone wins. If not, we both walk away knowing a bit more about each other.

DFA Communities is an independent space, which we believe is healthy for the ecosystem.

Not all communities are created equal. Our lived and anecdotal experience tells us that accelerators and VCs typically (not always) want their portfolio companies to help each other out, but too often, the community is either dead or self-serving (helps them not you). Some of this is a structural problem because they want to maximize portfolio ROI and you want to maximize ROI + Vision + not-fail.

For instance, what if you find yourself in this position: “My investor/board member wants me to replace my CTO with someone who I don’t believe in, what do I do?” It’s hard to have that discussion when you’re in a community that’s part of your investor’s portfolio.

Having a safe, objective space to share in hard dialogue with other Founder/CEOs is priceless.

Nor do we, that’s why DFA Communities is the place where you grow your capacity as a Founder/CEO.

It is not a nice-to-have to grow your capacity. If you do not grow, you will stall, fail and/or be replaced as a leader. This is essential work. The nice thing is that with an authentic community we find that a little perspective from similar people goes a long way.

I believe that a strong community of founders and CEOs experience less headwind, more tailwind, and an easier experience of manifesting their visions for the world when they are in safe, shared space more so than when they’re left to their own devices cobbling together a network of vendors, investors, and occasionally wise counsel.

In the decade or so I’ve been supporting startups and companies, CEOs and founders are more alike than they are to the rest of their company or industry.

Many times, we have experienced positive results from strange alchemy by doing things like putting the CEO of a growing bank in the south + a tech founder in Boulder + a graphic designer/CEO in Toronto in the same space and watched how they gained more from each other’s help on their “big problems” than if they had attended a convening with professionals in their field.

Yes! The Delta Awesome ‘Why Statement’ that governs this (and all) our work is:

“Business leaders and entrepreneurs have the power to change the world for the better, we exist to help them do that.”

Founder/CEO is a power role. It carries more weight than “Venture Capitalist”, “Celebrity Board Member”, “Scaling Guru”, “$$$$ Exit Person” or any other name, role, or title that exists within the community of growing a company.

Founders and CEOs are the rate limiting step on companies succeeding, yet they are often treated like a commodity or “lesser” than others. I want to change that. In order to do this, we need to have a more powerful network and node effects than other communities.

Our first vision is to assemble 150 active members and allow our strange alchemy to become autocatalytic.

With 150 active members, we can launch the following (for fee or free … whatever):

1. Raising capital from each other, to have founders on our cap table

2. Becoming board members for each other

3. Better strategic plans by crowdsourcing thoughts aligned by founder mentality

4. Help ethically shut down businesses faster, and be hired by each other for soft landing

5. Fewer mistakes because of context-appropriate advice

6. Greater network for quality vendors, employees, customers

7. Camaraderie allowing for group success

8. Cohort capital sharing, allowing for alignment of groups with advice, support, and capital.

In the beginning my ‘why’ statement was to defeat VC math because the externalities of this math causes too many problems. Specifically who can get invested in and why (mostly white dudes with potential unicorn opportunities, which is a very limited number). Since 2012 my thinking has expanded to simply allowing business leaders to change the world.