Introducing Serval Start: A New Path for Aspiring Founders

Through May 24, we're accepting applications for our inaugural Serval Start cohort: a two-year program for exceptional builders who want to develop the skills, relationships, and judgment to start a company. 

Maybe your last company didn't work out and you want to get back to building, or take a beat and do it inside a hypergrowth startup first. We're looking for highly technical people who are seriously thinking about starting a company someday and want to do the kind of work that actually prepares them for it.

What is Serval Start

Most programs for aspiring founders keep you on the outside looking in. An accelerator assumes you already have a company and a residency puts you adjacent to real work but not inside it. Serval Start is different; you're doing the actual work, with real stakes.

What we've learned building Serval is that the hardest part of deploying AI is the implementation – the change management, the stakeholders, the approvals, and all the other things that have to happen before anything actually works. The people who can navigate that are the same people who could be starting companies, because they foster relationships, sell, and build products all at the same time. That combination is rare.

With Serval Start, you’ll join our Agent Deployment team, where you’ll have first-hand exposure to our Fortune 500 and other clients. Cohort members will work in two roles: 

• Deployed Software Engineers act as technical leads, writing production code, finding feature gaps, and building around them inside real enterprise deployments
• Deployment Strategists own the customer roadmap and lifecycle from implementation through expansion.

We’re hiring across a wide range of experience, from new grads to people with 20 years in enterprise, but the bar is high on the technical side: you should have a CS degree or previously worked as a software engineer. What matters most, beyond any of that, is intelligence and the fact that starting a company is something you're seriously weighing.

If that’s you, this is the place to get that experience. You'll go through the same motions our founders, Jake and Alex, did when they started Serval, alongside people serious enough about building that you might eventually start something with them.

What you'll get

Alongside the day-to-day work, participants receive:

• Accelerated equity vesting with a six-month cliff and early exercise rights
• Direct access to Serval's founders and investors, including Bill Trenchard (First Round), Pat Grady and Anas Biad (Sequoia), and Patrick Chase and Alex Bard (Redpoint)
• Workshops on product-market fit, fundraising, recruiting, and startup ideation — hosted at Serval HQ in San Francisco, investor offices, and on offsites in New York and London
• A small cohort of ambitious builders who could become your future co-founders

“Actually learning what great looks like takes time. And the best people will want to make a huge difference, wherever they are." - Bill Trenchard of First Round and Serval investor

Spencer Lang joined Serval as an FDE last October after co-founding a startup that didn't work out. When Serval Start launched, he applied to join the inaugural cohort because he knew he wanted to start another company, and saw the program as the right environment to find the people and problems worth building around. 

“I can think of five people here that I would start a company with, and have extremely high confidence.” - Spencer Lang, Serval Start cohort member

Why Serval built this

Before joining Serval, I spent five years as an investor at Greylock, where I met a lot of ambitious people who knew they wanted to build something but didn't have an idea yet or anywhere to go. The programs that do exist for aspiring founders start once you already have an idea or a team: Y Combinator, Speedrun, HF0, and South Park Commons.

Meanwhile, Jake and Tatiana, Serval's CEO and COO, both tried building companies before Serval, but neither worked out. What changed was the years they spent inside companies that had found product-market fit and were scaling fast. Jake went to Verkada, where he met his co-founder Alex, and Tatiana went to Rippling. That experience became the foundation for Serval.

"This is the program I wish existed then." - Jake Stauch, CEO & Co-Founder, Serval

Serval Start is a deliberate attempt to make that path accessible. The two-year structure, the investor access, and the twice-yearly cohort are all designed to give exceptional builders the experience, relationships, and judgment they need to start something worth building. 

If you want to found your own company, but want to gain valuable experience first, apply to Serval Start now: https://www.serval.com/serval-start