Founder Communities

I really value the people I spend time with. There's something important about finding people at a similar stage — a stage ahead, a stage behind — who share your values: ambition, creativity, confidence, willingness to make mistakes, and integrity. We wanted to create spaces where a small group of high-quality individuals could actually get to know each other over time.

There's also a bigger thesis. In an AI-first world where we're spending more time inside our computers and AI systems, there will be increased value placed on coming together in real, physical spaces with other humans. The future isn't another feed. It's curated, intentional, in-person communities.

The wider network has grown to 5,000–6,000 individuals, with a core group of around 50 paid members. We host members-only dinners weekly, larger membership-wide gatherings, and 'founders and friends' events — including our annual tradition of buying out a ski mountain every February for 200 founders.

We occasionally work with sponsors like JP Morgan, Rho, and Brex, but the community always comes first.

When I moved to Cambridge for MIT, I took the same model and applied it with a lighter touch. The community focuses on connecting builders across MIT and Harvard — hosting dinners and creating spaces where people can genuinely get to know each other.

Next.js 16 App Router with route groups. (marketing) is the public site, the apply funnel, and event microsites. (portal) is the authenticated members surface — dashboard, directory, journal, billing — wrapped in PortalShell with QueryProvider + AuthProvider. (admin) is the operator CRM, gated by middleware that requires both auth and admin_users membership; non-admins get redirected to /dashboard.

Public blog at /blog is powered by Beehiiv's Posts API with Next cache tags + ISR. A beehiiv-blog webhook calls revalidateTag() on post.sent and post.updated so newly-published posts go live without a redeploy. HTML is sanitized via sanitize-html and rendered through @tailwindcss/typography.

The admin CRM is where the marketplace gets run. The applications screen is a stage strip across the top (one cell per ApplicationStage enum value, with live counts), a filterable table of applicants, and a right-side detail panel that slides in when a row is selected — pipeline visualization, interview notes, and the action stack (send dinner invite, send reminder, mark not a fit).

Event night is its own surface: a guest table on the left (with inline approve/decline for pending guests) and a 2x2 seating chart on the right that you can drag guests into. Every admin action fires a Convex mutation that fans out to the right Stripe / Resend / Luma side effects.

Supabase is the database. Every external system that already had data got a sync: Luma (events + guests), Beehiiv (subscribers + posts), Stripe (customers, subscriptions, payments), Cal.com (interview bookings), Resend (sent emails), Notion (legacy contact + application import).

Forward sync is webhooks; backfills are idempotent scripts in /scripts. Inngest handles the work that doesn't belong on a request — sync jobs, retries, scheduled reminders. The application funnel is its own subsystem: each stage (invite-interview, send-dinner-invite, send-reminder, send-rejection, initiate-membership, recording-url, transcript) is a single endpoint that fans out the right side-effects.

I've been the sole engineer through the entire build. Replacing the prior Zapier + Tally + Framer + Notion + Airtable patchwork with one cohesive system is what made the community model actually scalable.