Madeline & Co. and Excelsior Edge Ventures Launch 11-11, a Live NYC Venture-Building Sprint
After a year of founder workshops with 130+ startups, 11-11 launches as a strategy-first public sprint for aspiring and early founders, challenging the old startup and venture studio playbook.
New York City, April 15, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Madeline & Co. and Excelsior Edge Ventures today announced the launch of 11-11, a live venture-building sprint in New York City that will select 11 aspiring and early founders and work with one founder per day across 11 intensive build sprints from April 22 through May 4, 2026.
Madeline & Co. and Excelsior Edge Ventures Launch 11-11, a Live NYC Venture-Building Sprint for Aspiring and Early Founders
11-11 is designed for people who know a world deeply, sense that something in it is broken, and are ready to build what it is missing. That includes domain experts, operators, executives, specialists, and aspiring founders with real proximity to a broken system, whether they are at idea stage, pre-idea, or still forming the concept.
The campaign is built around a different premise than both the usual startup playbook and the traditional venture studio model. Where much of early-stage venture still overweights short-term go-to-market tactics and surface-level prototyping, 11-11 starts further upstream with business innovation strategy, business design, brand strategy, founder-market-fit discipline, and community-building logic. The aim is to help participants shape stronger companies from the start, while challenging a slower, more extractive venture studio model that often takes more equity, takes more time, and begins too late in the company-building process.
Selected participants may receive support across areas including innovation strategy, business design, brand strategy, narrative, brand design, website creation and, where relevant, a lightweight MVP foundation, along with a launch roadmap and next-step execution plan.
In April 2025, the team originally planned to prove the model by building 11 startups itself, but paused the experiment to invest in the community first. Over the following year, with support from active ecosystem partners and brands, the team ran seven in-person workshops and worked with 130+ startups, pressure-testing the system across industries before bringing it to market publicly.
11-11 is launching with support from seven other established communities across New York City’s founder, investor, and creative ecosystem, along with campaign supporters including Concentrate AI, Tapestry AI, and The Lew Law Firm.
“11-11 was built to challenge the upstream failure points in early-stage venture,” said Prince Rumi, founder of Madeline & Co. and Excelsior Edge Ventures. “Too many companies are rushed into existence without enough strategic clarity, founder-market-fit discipline, or narrative strength. The point here is not to outsource judgment to AI. It’s to combine strategy and design thinking frameworks with a disciplined operating system, especially in the age of AI, so the right people can move from raw insight to real company shape much faster and with far more rigor than the old playbook allows.”
Applications are now open. Apply here. For more information, visit the 11-11 website. Daily founder recaps and campaign updates will be published publicly at 11:11 AM throughout the sprint, from April 22 through May 4, 2026. The campaign will culminate in a final event and demo in New York City on May 14, 2026.
About Madeline & Co.
Madeline & Co. is an AI-native strategy and execution platform built to help teams move from strategic clarity to seamless execution and monitoring. The platform is powered by Madeline-s1, a domain-adapted reasoning model trained to support work across strategy, design, systems thinking, and storytelling.
About Excelsior Edge Ventures
Excelsior Edge Ventures is a venture-building platform, community, and emerging venture studio focused on helping founders turn high-signal insight into distinct, strategically grounded companies with speed, rigor, and taste.
The first strategy & execution platform powered by Madeline-s1
Press Inquiries
Izzy Church
Communications Director
ideas [at] theagency.work
(646) 212-8435
https://www.theagency.work
New York, NY
Legal Disclaimer:
EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.
