co-founder-matching
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The Foundry Circle Wants One Hour of Your Week
A free network for founders turns the lonely business of building into a weekly appointment. The price of admission is showing up with something to work on.
Founders Foundation’s bet: build startups where the customers already are
In Bielefeld, a nonprofit backed by Bertelsmann Stiftung teaches founders to sell to Germany’s industrial heartland. Its wager runs on patient funding, practical education and a refusal to take startup equity.
Science & Startups wants your research to pay its own way
Berlin’s university startup service offers founders free advice, lab access and a route to equity-free funding. The harder assignment is teaching a good experiment to become a business.
Xartup Built an Audience. Then It Had to Earn Its Customers.
The founder network joined HT Media’s Mosaic Digital in 2024. Its more revealing lesson came when a flood of leads exposed a product that needed work.
Y Combinator
Y Combinator is a startup accelerator founded in 2005 that invests $500,000 in early-stage companies in exchange for equity, then runs them through an intensive three-month program in San Francisco capped by a Demo Day pitch to investors. It has funded more than 5,000 companies - including Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, DoorDash, Dropbox, Reddit, Instacart and Twitch - whose combined value tops $600 billion, making YC the most influential template for how modern software startups get built and funded.
ODF (On Deck Founders)
ODF (On Deck Founders) is a San Francisco-based founder fellowship that helps aspiring entrepreneurs go from idea to conviction. Its signature offering is an intense one-week in-person experience in SF where 80-100 pre-vetted builders meet potential co-founders, pressure-test ideas, and commit to starting a company - followed by lifelong access to an alumni community, mentorship, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in startup perks. Unlike a traditional accelerator, ODF takes no equity. More than 1,000 startups have launched through On Deck, collectively raising over $2 billion from investors including Sequoia, a16z, Khosla and Founders Fund.