Startup

Let me share a founder’s secret: the most valuable conversation you could have next year might not be with a VC or a tech guru – it could be with a scientist. Early this year, I spent my holidays at a conference in London. My aim was to learn what the community has to say about a technology I’d been looking into for quite some time. A month later, I found myself talking and engaging with even more PhD students and postdocs from all over the world, from Dubai to San Francisco, from Belgium to Finland to South Korea....

This is a collection of thoughts following my experience building communities and observations based on the most promising ones. For a bit more context, I founded my first community when I was 16 and this wasn’t a thing back then either, or not as much as today. I’ve been part of several communities, developing or growing them, more intensively for the past five years including in my last role. Also, I saw (lots) of mistakes and I came across founders who still avoid giving enough importance to this topic....