Groups
Curated small groups of founders facing the same problems. Not networking. Real conversation with people who understand.
Why most founder groups fail
Most founder groups fail because they are designed for networking, not for building. The structure is wrong: too many people, too many stages, too many agendas. The founder who is struggling with revenue is placed in the same group as the founder who just raised a Series C. The founder who is building in deep tech is placed in the same group as the founder who is building a D2C brand. The conversation becomes a performance: everyone sharing their wins, no one sharing their actual problems. The groups that work are the ones that solve these problems by design: small, curated, focused on the work rather than the network.
The SOE Groups are structured around the actual work of building. Each group is capped at eight founders, matched by stage and sector, and facilitated around the problems that the founders are actually facing. The conversation is not about performance. It is about the specific challenges: the revenue gap, the co-founder conflict, the hiring problem, the investor relationship, and how to work through them. The founders who participate in these groups consistently report that the conversation they have in the group is the conversation they cannot have anywhere else: not with their team, not with their investors, not with their family. The group is the one place where they can be honest.
The group as accountability system
The most valuable function of a founder group is not the conversation. It is the accountability. The founder who knows that they will be asked about their progress: not their pitch, not their vision, but their actual numbers. This is the founder who is more likely to make progress. The group creates a rhythm of accountability that is otherwise missing from the founder's life. The investors are not asking for weekly updates. The team is not asking about the numbers. The family does not understand the business. The group fills this gap. It provides the regular, honest, non-judgmental check that keeps the founder moving forward.
The accountability works because the group members are facing the same problems. They are not evaluating the founder's progress from a position of judgment. They are evaluating it from a position of shared experience: they know what it takes to move the numbers, because they are trying to move their own. The accountability is not a critique. It is a shared commitment to the work, and the founders who participate in groups consistently describe this commitment as one of the most important structural elements in their building journey.
How to join
Joining a group is not a sign-up process. It is a matching process. The groups are curated based on stage, sector, and the specific problems the founder is working through. The matching ensures that every group member is facing similar challenges: not identical, but close enough that the conversation is useful. The curation also ensures that the group dynamic is productive. That the personalities complement rather than clash, that the commitment levels align, that the conversation stays honest.
The application process is designed to understand the founder's actual situation: what they are building, what stage they are at, what problems they are facing, what they hope to get from the group. This is not a filter. It is a matching tool. The goal is not to reject founders. It is to place them in the group where they will get the most value and where they will contribute the most to the other members. The best groups are the ones where every member is both giving and receiving. Where the conversation is genuinely bidirectional, not a one-way performance.