Founder Networks by Country and State

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Most founder lists point at capital. This one points at people.

Capital is the easier problem. If you know which fund writes which cheque at which stage, you can work the list. Access to other founders is harder to search for, because the useful groups are private, invite-only, or live inside a chat app that no search engine indexes.

So this is the other half of the reference. Every entry below is a network, a community, a calendar, or a programme whose main product is introductions.

A note on chat groups: WhatsApp and Telegram invite links expire, and most serious groups rotate them on purpose to keep out spam. Where that is the case, we link the community’s public page instead of a raw invite. Ask them directly, or email us and we will point you at the current door.

How to read this page

Four things decide whether a network is worth your time.

• Who gets in. Open, application-only, or invite-only. Open communities are easy to join and thin. Invite-only ones are the opposite.
• What it costs. Free, membership fee, or equity. Accelerators take equity. Peer networks take money. Chat groups take neither.
• Where it runs. A Slack or WhatsApp group is always on. An event calendar is a monthly commitment. A cohort programme takes a quarter of your year.
• What it is for. Hiring, fundraising, customers, or peer support. Very few networks do more than one of these well.

Global networks

These accept founders from anywhere and run mostly online.

If you only do one thing on this page, do Startup Tuneup. It runs about every quarter, it costs nothing, and two days gets you the fundraising and growth material that the paid programmes charge for. You can also pitch Jason Calacanis directly, and registrants get the recordings, so you do not have to clear both days. We recommend it to every founder who asks where to start.

Event calendars

Calendars are the cheapest way into a city’s founder scene. You do not need an introduction, only a free evening.

Germany

Germany’s founder scene is city-based, not national. Berlin and Munich run their own worlds.

Switzerland and Austria

United Kingdom and Ireland

France, Nordics and Southern Europe

United States by state

American founder networks are city networks. The state matters less than the metro.

Chat groups, honestly

Chat groups are where the real conversation happens, and they are the hardest thing to publish a list of. Three reasons.

• Invite links expire, usually within days, and good groups rotate them to block spam.
• The best groups are closed. A public invite would destroy the thing that makes them useful.
• There is a whole industry of SEO pages listing “top startup WhatsApp groups”. Almost all of them link to the publisher’s own low-quality channels. We checked several and do not link them here.

What works instead: go to two or three events from the calendars above, talk to people, and ask which group they are in. Every functioning city group is one conversation away from anyone who shows up in person.

If you run a group and want it listed with a stable public door - a landing page, a form, a rotating invite - send it over. We will add it.

What we could not verify

We check every link on this page before publishing. Some well-known groups have no public page at all, only a rotating invite, so they are named without a link. That is deliberate, not an oversight.