Outtake: 
Adeo Ressi, founder of the Founder Institute startup incubator, recently told me that FI has hit a big milestone — more than 1,000 (1,003 at the time of our conversation) companies have graduated from the program.
A mind-boggling number of incubators and accelerators have launched in the past few years. That’s seems doubly true when you remember how few there were when the Founder Institute launched four years ago. By Ressi’s count, FI was one of the first three, following Y Combinator and Tech Stars.
And it has a pretty different model. Instead of targeting twentysomething programmers who have already started working on new companies, Ressi said his team created “a structured process” that would allow people who were working at big companies and “daydreaming” about their own startups to learn about the business and to figure out whether it really made sense to pursue their ideas.
Another distinguishing feature (and a factor in the relative speed with which 1,000 companies have emerged from the program) is the Founder Institute’s approach to geographic expansion — Ressi said it has chapters in 55 cities across 30 countries and six continents, with more to come. He...