Derek Andersen built a million-person community one monthly meetup at a time

In 2009, Derek Andersen had every reason to stay put. He was a producer at Electronic Arts, working on games that millions of people loved - Burnout Paradise, Mirror's Edge, The Sims 3, The Godfather. It was a good seat at a big company. He left anyway, with a plan that sounded reckless when he said it out loud: build his own products until one of them became a company.

What followed was not a rocket ship. It was a slog. "I left my job at Electronic Arts in 2009 and started building products, with the ultimate goal of launching a company," he has said. "It was a struggle and I failed about every five or six months." He founded a small incubator called Vaporware Labs and threw things at the wall. Most of them slid off.

The most memorable failure came fast. In 2010 he raised a quarter of a million dollars for an iPad app and watched it collapse on the day it launched. "In 2010 I raised $250,000 for an iPad app that failed spectacularly on launch," he recalls. "Most of the team quit and we ran out of money." For a lot of founders, that is the end of the story. For Andersen, it was tuition.

A meetup, once a month, for two years

In the same stretch, he started something almost too small to notice. Startup Grind began in 2010 as a single monthly gathering in Silicon Valley - founders getting together to hear one honest conversation and talk to each other. There was no grand plan attached. There was barely a plan at all.

The first two years of Startup Grind, it was just a project I did once a month.

Derek Andersen

That patience is the part people skip when they retell the story. He did not force it to scale. He kept showing up. "It takes time for something to take hold and become successful," he has said. The early days were unglamorous in the extreme - no capital, no brand awareness, and a year spent working out of his garage to save money. When an interviewer asked what the hardest part of building it was, his answer was two words: "All of it."

Slowly, then all at once, the thing took hold. What was a monthly meetup grew into a network that today reaches more than a million people across over 120 countries, with more than 20,000 events hosted in over 600 cities. The model was almost embarrassingly simple: put founders on stage, let them be honest about the hard parts, and let the audience make real friends instead of collecting business cards.

Bevy was built to fix a mess

Running events in hundreds of cities is a logistics nightmare. In the early years, Startup Grind's chapters were stitched together on a patchwork of Meetup, Eventbrite, and Mailchimp - tools that were never designed to run one consistent global community. So Andersen's team did what frustrated builders do: they built their own software to hold it all together.

That internal tool turned out to be the more valuable company. In 2017, Bevy was spun out on its own. The pitch was straightforward - big organizations increasingly need real community infrastructure, not another spreadsheet. The customer list came quickly and it was not shy: Google, Salesforce, Snowflake, Atlassian. Reporting has pegged Bevy's value in the neighborhood of $325 million.

Follow the customer, and stay in the middle

Ask Andersen for advice and you get something less like a growth-hack and more like a temperament. His first rule is to stop arguing with the people you serve. "Rather than fight against customers and users, just follow their lead and trust them to share what they need," he says. It is a humble stance for a founder, and it scaled to a million members.

His second rule is emotional, not tactical. Having lived through real lows, he tries not to ride the highs either. "I work very hard to stay in the middle and rarely get too high or too low," he explains. "I have experienced huge lows and it's easy to remember how quickly things can turn." For a job defined by volatility, that flatness is a survival skill.

Hundreds of times we should have stopped, but we didn't. Because we have pushed forward over time, the company has grown.

Derek Andersen

The timeline

The shape of a slow build

The reach did not arrive on a schedule. It compounded - the reward for showing up long after most people would have moved on.

Where the temperament comes from

Andersen grew up on the move. His family split time between several countries in Europe and a home base in Tampa, Florida, so he was a world traveler before he ever thought about startups. It is tempting to draw a line from that childhood to a company that belongs to no single city and meets in hundreds of them. He studied communications at Brigham Young University - not engineering - and a part-time stint at his brother's startup during college gave him his first real look at building something from nothing. From then on, he has said, all roads led to founder-hood.

These days he has added a microphone to the mix. In 2025 he launched Divot, a weekly podcast of long-form conversations with founders, creators, athletes, and visionaries. The name is a golf term, but the show is about the harder stuff - the risks, the failures, the breakthroughs, and the lessons underneath the highlight reels. It is, in a way, Startup Grind's whole thesis in audio form: the real story is more useful than the polished one.

It takes time for something to take hold and become successful.

Derek Andersen

That is the throughline across a decade and a half - the video games, the failures, the garage, the million-person community, the software company that customers pulled out of his own operation. Andersen did not find one big idea and ride it. He kept showing up for a small one until it grew up.