When Seedcamp started back in 2007, there was a lack of great support networks for founders across Europe, and as such, we embarked on a mission to help connect those founders with the best people from across a network of founders, investors, operators, and functional experts.
That became the foundation of what we now call our platform, but our community and how we engage with it has not remained static over the years. Rather, it has been in constant evolution, and as more and more investors seek to build out their own networks or platforms, we are constantly learning, taking inspiration from various sources, and iterating on how we can best serve the needs of our founders.
In the same spirit of how the broader community has shared with us over the years, I’d like to share some insights about how we think about our network and how we have evolved to serve its needs. Perhaps a good place to start is in defining the key terms, and then laying out what I now consider to be the 5 golden rules of a platform from my personal experience and observing how others have approached things.
I see these terms (network, community, platform) used interchangeably, but to help provide some clarity, this is how I define them: a community is a group of people that has access to each other and can reach out to each other without necessarily needing much assistance from a node, a network is very similar to (Read more…)