Every great generation of companies starts with the same ingredient: a handful of remarkable people in the same place at the same time. The PayPal mafia. The early YC houses. What looks like a portfolio in retrospect was just a group of people who made each other better by proximity. No institution has ever reliably manufactured that environment before the decision to build has been made — before the idea is locked, before the path is chosen. That's the gap that Nick Linck and Peter D'Ambrosio set out to close.
Today, we're excited to invest in the residency as they build the defining talent infrastructure for early-stage founders. Nick filed 6 patents and published 4 AI research papers at IBM before the category went mainstream. Peter is a Babson-trained operator who has bought and sold companies, taught entrepreneurship abroad, and is the kind of person who duct-tapes his shin to finish a marathon (without any training). Together, they have built something in two years that most programs spend a decade trying to earn.
The Opportunity
US business applications have nearly doubled since 2019, hitting a record 5.5 million in 2023 — the number of people willing to bet on themselves has structurally shifted upward.
The cost of querying a frontier AI model dropped 280x between 2022 and 2024. The bottleneck to company creation is no longer capital or technical ability. It's environment, community, and conviction.
Traditional accelerators take 7% equity and arrive after the hardest decisions are already made. the residency takes 2% and catches founders before the leap.
What the residency Actually Builds
Think of the residency as an operating system for the most formative months of a founder's life: live-in cohorts where residents set measurable goals on Day 1, a subtraction model that eliminates every logistical distraction, such as laundry, meals, and social events, and a curated Demo Day where investors get early access built from months of living alongside founders.
In two years, bootstrapped and profitable, the residency has hosted 340 founders across 13 global locations, produced 70 companies valued at over $3B in aggregate, and seen applications double every cohort with a 3% acceptance rate. NY Magazine put them on the front page. Sam Altman visits the houses. Entrepreneurs First and 500 Global came to the residency to learn how they built it.
The model is working. We believe the window to back the market leader is now. We’re proud to welcome the residency to the Redbud ecosystem.
