About
About Faster Zebra
A new kind of business school.
Faster Zebra is for people doing the work that matters to them. Starting a venture of your own, sharpening a brand, rethinking how you work, and being changed by the building.
It comes from nearly four decades of building companies, and the occasional failure, distilled into tools you can use and a room to use them in. Kits to do the work. The Village to do it alongside people at every stage.
The name
Why Faster? Why Zebra?
Faster.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Attributed, possibly misattributed, to Henry Ford. We build what's needed, ahead of what's expected.
Zebra.
The deliberate answer to the unicorn.
A zebra is profitable, sustainable, purpose-led and entirely real, and works in a herd. Unicorns chase valuations. Zebras solve real problems and last. Zebra is who you grow into here.
What we believe
Mind. Skills. Soul. Make.
You're more than the product or service you create. Faster Zebra works across three realms of you, and the act that ties them together, because the person doing the building is part of the work.
Mind
How you see, frame, judge and choose. Self-knowledge and hard-won founder truths, so you know who's doing the building before you decide what to build.
Skills
How you research, sell, build and operate. Ventures, brands, innovation and design, with the frameworks that take an idea into the world.
Soul
Who you are, and who you become through the work. Creative practice, values that cost something, and the reason you keep going.
Make
The act that ties the three together. You bring all three to something real, reality answers, and you come back sharper. That's the loop. As you build something, it builds you back.
The Neupreneur era
Nine languages. One business. All you.
Nine languages run every company, and most of us are fluent in two. As automation absorbs the work that can be written down as steps, the advantage moves to judgement, identity and range, holding many disciplines as one.
BusinessMoneyBrandProductCustomerInnovationGrowthTechnologySelf
You learn them by using them, on the company you're starting, running or reinventing. Information can be downloaded: creating a business has to be a lived, living, evolving experience.
Because as you build a business, the business builds you back.
How it works
Tools you use, and a community to use them in.
Every Kit is two parts. A Playbook for the thinking and the moves, and a Workbook where you do the work. From $67 digital, or add print and we post it to you, yours to keep. Print shipping is free to Australia, the UK and the USA.
The coaching happens live in the Village: four calls a week, four seasons a year, in a mixed room of founders, operators and professionals from the just-starting to the thirty-years-in. A Kit is the door in. Once you're through it, the weekly rhythm and the room open to you, and you grow from strong in one discipline to capable across the whole.
See the Kits The VillageThe cast
Why does a business school use illustrated characters?
Stock photography casts your reader before they've read a word. A photo of a graduate in a blazer tells a fifteen-year-old this isn't for them. A photo of a teenager on a skateboard tells a fifty-year-old the same thing.
The characters keep the door open to both. They're warm, a bit cheeky, and they let a fifteen-year-old and a fifty-year-old work through the same Kit without either one feeling like an afterthought.
They started as profiles for the disciplines: entrepreneurship, product, brand, marketing, writing, artificial intelligence, service design, data, technology, customer experience. Every Kit adds to the cast and teaches one of the languages a founder has to speak.
Because that's the real work. Early on you're moving between customer, product, brand, money, marketing, technology and self all in one week, and you need enough fluency in each to make the call, write the brief, tell strong work from weak, and ask a specialist a better question. Collecting the cast is what becoming multilingual looks like on a shelf.
The characters open the door. The stories make the ideas land. The work builds the capability.
Good things come to those who make.
Faster Zebra is the distillation of one life's work, handed forward. Charbel A. Zeaiter founded Academy Xi, built it to a $22 million valuation at its Series A, and sold his stake for seven figures.
Meet Charbel
