Three weeks ago we had a residential entrepreneurship program. In-person. Cohorts living together, eating together, pitching in front of each other in the same room. Six weeks of that per cohort, fifteen cohorts since the program started.
Then COVID.
We had a cohort in progress and two more scheduled for the year. The decision to go fully online was made quickly once it was clear that in-person was not going to be possible. The question immediately became: what of the in-person program can actually be moved online, and what needs to be rebuilt from scratch.
What we tried to move directly
The session formats. Workshops, speaker talks, pitch sessions. These map to video calls with some modifications. The pitch sessions needed the most rethinking. An in-person pitch is a full-room experience: you read the room, you see where attention is going, you adjust. A Zoom pitch is a grid of faces where you can't tell who's engaged. We built a structured feedback protocol that tries to replicate some of what you lose. It's not equivalent. It's workable.
The speaker talks translated better than expected. Several speakers were more willing to participate once travel was removed. A speaker who wouldn't fly to San Mateo for a one-hour session would take a Zoom call. The reach of the program expanded even as the format contracted.
What couldn't move
The ambient environment. Most of what happens at a residential program happens between sessions: the conversation at dinner, the whiteboard session at 11pm, the pitch feedback from the person down the hall who has been in the room for all of your previous attempts. None of that survives translation to digital. The scheduled sessions moved online. The unscheduled interactions largely didn't.
We tried structured social time. Breakout rooms for dinner hours, optional social calls, cohort chat groups. The participation rate dropped off quickly. Forcing what was previously spontaneous doesn't work well. People attended the scheduled sessions and logged off for everything else.
This is the most significant loss and I'm not sure it's fully recoverable by design. The residential format generates connection through proximity and shared experience. The distributed format generates connection through shared work, which is weaker.
What the forced pivot revealed
The curriculum was less dependent on the physical format than we assumed. Most of the workshops and content sessions worked online with modification. The things that required proximity (hands-on exercises, group physical activities, the kind of rapid fire peer feedback that happens in person) either needed redesign or removal.
The redesign was faster than expected because the constraints were clear. When you know that everyone is on a video call, you stop designing sessions that require physical presence and start designing sessions that work within the constraints of video calls. The constraint forced decisions we should have made earlier about what was actually load-bearing in each session.
Three weeks was not enough time
We shipped. The cohort experienced something useful. We also shipped with things broken: the feedback mechanisms, the peer connection infrastructure, the technical platform for managing content across time zones. We're rebuilding those now while running the program simultaneously.
This is startup mode applied to a program that usually runs on more institutional time. The pressure is useful and the margin for error is thin. We've made decisions in the last three weeks that would have taken six months to approve in normal conditions. Some of them were correct. We'll know which ones in about two months.
With gusto, Fatih.