3 min read
As a follow-up to “Why I started Founders Network“, I thought I’d post part of my internal 2013 Annual Report for our public audience. The headline of course is doubling to 500 members:
Growing our core expertise: Founders Network launched in April 2011 with a vision of building a problem-solving and peer mentorship community of vetted tech startup founders. Since then we have consistently set and achieved community goals of 100 members in 2011 and 250 members in 2012. Today I’m proud to announce – thanks to your nominations and our membership committee’s review, Founders Network doubled yet again to 500 members in 2013! Tweet the good news: http://fndrs.net/congratsfn!
Helping you succeed: Despite this growth, we’ve been careful to maintain membership quality by limiting cohort sizes to 25 per month. Each new member has contributed to our collective expertise through our forum, functions and member-to-member meetings. Member Domingo Guerra has attributed your feedback to making faster, smarter and safer decisions “all the way from a series of ideas, to our Series A”. Our culture of helpfulness has generated hundreds of founders helping founders success stories.
We organized over 200 functions in 2013. Pictured left to right: Tyler Dikman of LoungeBuddy shares tips on getting featured in the Apple App Store, our fnNYC’ers hang out on Laurel Touby’s famous couch, Rishi Taparia of Matrix Partners mentors our founders on fundraising, our LA members commiserate on startup ups and downs, Will Bunker (Match.com) and Dr. Galen Buckwalter (eHarmony, currently Tidepool) break bread at an fnDinner, Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital (founding investor in Skype) mentors on fundraising for a billion dollar exit, our April ’13 Cohort of new members is welcomed aboard, and Joe Kraus (founder of Excite, Jotspot) of Google Ventures mentors on corporate VC.
Continuing to make your membership valuable: To ensure our continued success, we’ve made huge investments back into the community. Most notably we hired Abby Crowley as FN’s first full-time Community Manager. Abby has done a great job helping us scale up the quantity, quality and geographic coverage of our offline functions. We also launched a new member site with the help of Alexey Ghanza, our first full-time Director of Technology. Our team’s long-term goal is to make joining Founders Network one of the most important decisions of your career.
Hope you enjoyed this excerpt from the 2013 recap and looking forward to sharing more big news in 2014. Thanks for following FN and please support our founders in the coming year!
Cheers!
Kevin Holmes
Founder & CEO
www.foundersnetwork.com
ps – for more about FN, we put this video together and remixed it with the help of member Hendrik van der Meer of www.vilynx.com:
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