This serial entrepreneur is offering free classes to early-stage startup founders

A serial entrepreneur in Williamsburg, Andrew Weinreich, wants to build a business out of teaching the core skills of entrepreneurship in the tech economy.
His program is called Andrew’s Roadmaps. For Weinreich, it’s about identifying a subset of course participants that could be worth investing in later on. That’s why he’s not charging for the program, but attendees have to apply for admittance.
“The No. 1 factor I’ve seen in companies that have been successful is they have stayed alive long enough to benefit from waves that they have no control over,” Weinreich said.
To that end, he believes that an entrepreneur should have what he calls a “macro thesis.” That is, they should see some sector of the economy that’s going to be big (such as online video, back before we thought the internet could quickly deliver lots of video) that their business fits into. The macro vision should be bigger than the business.
The program spans one intensive weekend, where Weinreich touches on about thirty topics in lectures lasting about a half-hour apiece. It’s intentionally fast paced, and each topic comes with templates that entrepreneurs can take home and work from.
Apply for the March 14-15 session by Feb. 25
Weinreich built one of the very first social networks that connected people by their relationships, SixDegrees.com, which had a $125 million exit in 1999. Since then, he’s built several other companies. His latest is a data analytics company called Indicative.
Weinreich intends to scale up the roadmaps program to the point where 100 entrepreneurs are accepted into each session and it reaches somewhere between 1,000 to 2,000 per year. After that, he intends to distribute the content digitally. Income from the model currently comes from sponsors that want to reach entrepreneurs with their services.
When Weinreich started, the thinking was that smart people should pursue work in financial services. Since then, he said, many of his peers that followed that model have been left out in the cold. “It could be that entrepreneurship is a more certain path than a job at a big bank,” he added.