We launched Free Agency Season Three this week and with it are making a few deliberate updates:
Idea selection: Deepening emphasis on the specialness of idea selection.
In-person: Eight weeks in our New York office.
Anti-accelerator: a bias toward slowness in a moment is overly focused on speed.
We started Free Agency as an experiment last year. It has worked really well. It’s led to several of our earliest investments at Terrain. If you care about metrics, there are plenty: acceptance rates on par with elite colleges, applicants from top companies, early companies now raising meaningful follow-on capital, closing enterprise deals, and finding traction faster than we expected.
Those signals are encouraging. But they are not the point. At this stage, they are incomplete. You don’t win a game in the first quarter. The work we care about happens earlier, before any of that is visible.
Free Agency is built around the idea that choosing what to build (and why) is the most important and most under-supported part of starting a company. Rather than optimizing for speed or momentum, the program is designed to create space for reflection, iteration, and honest evaluation. There is plenty of time later to move quickly. This is a period to be more considered, not rushed through with poorly considered vibe prototypes and slop decks.
The name draws from the period in sports when an athlete pauses between seasons to evaluate their options and decide where they have the best chance to succeed. It is a moment defined not by activity, but by judgment.
We’re extending that metaphor into the construct of a residency. Free Agency is an Ideas Residency, a protected period of structured time and space set aside to do the hard thinking that ordinary circumstances won’t allow. Writers take them. Artists take them. They exist because the world optimizes for movement, not for the kind of slow, honest investigation that produces something worth making.
This feels particularly relevant now. As AI continues to lower the cost and increase the speed of building, the relative advantage shifts earlier in the process. Execution is becoming more accessible. Clarity of thought and intention (what to build, for whom, and why it matters) becomes more important, and harder to arrive at.
Most existing programs assume that decision has already been made. They are structured to accelerate what comes next. Free Agency is designed for the period before that commitment.
Season Three runs this summer, over eight weeks, from our office in New York. New York, especially in the summer, provides a uniquely energizing and generative backdrop for this kind of work.
The program centers on close, one-on-one engagement with our team and a small group of advisors. We do not take equity, and there is no demo day. The goal is not to push participants toward starting something quickly, but to help them arrive at a decision they have real conviction in — whether that means moving forward or choosing not to.
