Founder Communities

I really value the people I spend time with. There's something important about finding people at a similar stage to you — a stage ahead, a stage behind — who share your values. For me, those values are ambition, creativity, confidence, a willingness to make mistakes, and a high level of integrity and honesty with each other. We wanted to create spaces where a small group of high-quality individuals could come together and actually get to know each other over time. There's a formula to building real relationships: frequency and time spent together. That's why we structured things the way we did — we're not an events company that does a ton of stuff for outside sponsors. Our focus is on supporting our members. That's why we built it as a dues-based organization, more of a social club than an events platform.

There's also a bigger thesis here. In an AI-first world where we're spending more and more time inside our computers and AI systems, I think there's going to be an increased emphasis and value placed on coming together in real, physical spaces with other humans. I'm really excited by the idea of building platforms and tools that enable IRL — real human connection in the face of what traditional social networks have become. The future isn't another feed. It's curated, intentional, in-person communities. And I believe finding community and spending meaningful time with people is a panacea to a lot of society's challenges — our polarization, our isolation, our tendency to retreat into screens.

The wider NYC Founders Club network has grown to over 5,000–6,000 individuals, with a core group of around 50 paid members. We host different tiers of events: members-only dinners weekly, larger membership-wide gatherings, and "founders and friends" events like demo days and our annual tradition of buying out a ski mountain every February for 200 founders to spend the day together. We occasionally work with sponsors like JP Morgan, Rho, and Brex, but the community always comes first — sponsors support the experience, they don't define it.

When I moved to Cambridge for MIT, I took the same model and applied it with a lighter touch. The Cambridge community is focused on connecting builders and founders across the MIT and Harvard ecosystems — hosting dinners and creating spaces where people can genuinely get to know each other. It's a high-quality network centered around people who are actively building things. I really believe in the power of bringing people together. It's what makes society and humanity special, and it's worth doing well in every city I find myself in.

I do everything from organizing events to managing all of our backend technology. While I've been in Cambridge, the technology layer has been one of the primary ways I've continued to contribute to the NYC club — my partners handle more of the weekly day-to-day in New York while I focus on systems, strategy, and the Cambridge community. It's a distributed team running a community about in-person connection, which has its own kind of irony.

I custom-built our entire community platform from scratch — a full-stack application using Next.js and Supabase where I've been the sole engineer and developer. It handles everything: tracking applications, running interview funnels, managing membership, and coordinating events. It integrates with Beehiiv for newsletters, Luma for events, and uses Resend and Ingest for transactional emails. Building it replaced a patchwork of Zapier, Tally, and Framer with something purpose-built and cohesive. Having a proprietary system means we can move fast, customize everything to how we actually operate, and keep the experience feeling intentional rather than stitched together from off-the-shelf tools.