In an AI-first world where we're spending more and more time inside our computers, I think the most valuable thing you can invest in is the people you spend time with in person.
I started the NYC Founders Club in 2022 with two friends from my YC batch — Akash and Mike. We weren't trying to build a business. We were trying to solve a problem we had ourselves: New York has an incredible density of founders, but that density actually works against you. The community gets diluted.
So we built something curated. A dues-based social club, not an events platform. Members-only dinners weekly. Larger membership-wide events. And our annual tradition of buying out a ski mountain every February for 200 founders. The wider network has grown to over 5,000 people, but the core membership stays small — around 50 paid members — because that's what makes it work.
The formula is simple: frequency and time. Relationships are built through repeated, meaningful interactions. Not one-off networking events where you collect business cards. Not Slack channels where messages disappear into noise. Actual time spent together, consistently, over months and years.
Curation is the product. The value of the community is entirely a function of who's in it. We look for founders who share certain values: ambition, creativity, confidence, a willingness to make mistakes, and a high level of integrity and honesty with each other.
IRL is the future, not the past. The more time we spend in our AI systems and behind our screens, the more valuable it becomes to come together in physical spaces with other humans. 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 technology.
When I moved to Cambridge for MIT, I started the Cambridge Founders Club with the same thesis. The irony isn't lost on me: a distributed team building tools to facilitate in-person connection. But that's exactly the balance I think the world needs more of. Technology as the tool, human connection as the goal.