Thereâs something startup accelerators offer that founder communities donât: Founder daycare. Itâs when one or few smart and ambitious people personally take interest in *every* founder and the founderâs company and check in with
them frequently like âhow is the new hire coming along?â, âhow are you feeling about the experiment?â, âhowâs your family?â, etc.
I attended 1 accelerator (Entrepreneur First) and loved that. YCombinator and Iterative and others are known for it too, in deeper ways. EF is more of a deep tech cofounder
matching than an accelerator but kinda has that daycare function too (itâs also where I met my first angel investor and now cofounder Peter)
By default you donât get that when you join a whatsapp group or slack community of hundreds or thousands of founders. Sure you can ask questions like âdoes anyone recommend an accountant?â and people answer it and thatâs one form
of caring, but itâs not a deep one.
The reason isnât that the people at accelerators are caring and the people in communities arenât; but that the structure of the 2 experiences and the incentives drive different caring behaviors.
Thatâs why the moment the accelerator ends, you stop getting daycare despite being added to their alumni network.
Experienced founders somehow solve this for themselves by building or joining some support network, and Iâve noticed a surprising number of founders donât do it at all, or donât do it well.
I built LearningLoop.com for myself first and foremost, but built it with scale in mind so that other founders will also love it and benefit from it as much as I do.
Any founder who joins LL gets 2-10 smart ambitious people who care about them (completely peer to peer).
When things go well in our work and life on Learning Loop, we text or call each other, sometimes before telling anyone else outside of our companies.
That is what you are signing up for.