When the time to leave their incubators arrives, many startups face one challenge: how to continue to work together, how to maintain the environment where people share their knowledge, problems and solutions
This was what Musicverb, Infraspeak, LabOrders, ShiftForward and Tuizzi felt when they had to leave UPTEC.
That was the motivation to create Founders Founders (F2), a creative hub that aims at promoting a sharing culture for startups on an advanced stage of growth.
Paulo Cunha (ShiftForward) explains:
“People ask: are you an incubator, an accelerator? We describe ourselves as a peer-to-peer community, different teams that work together.”
Rui Couto (MusicVerb) adds:
“Our mission is to grow, learn, share and then, grow again.”
But working together, with a sharing mindset, was not the only purpose of this project – at F2 people can have access to an interesting mentor network that’s being created.
“We’re targeting scaleups, so we’re building the kind of network these companies need.” – Felipe Costa (Infraspeak) says.
Born from the community to be a community, Founders Founders knows, for experience, that the type of problems faced when companies leave the startup phase and intend to scaleup, are quite different from the early stage ones, so they are focused on solving to those specific challenges.
The Founders House, which is the physical realisation of the vision, is a 1500 square meter historical house with capacity for 150 people. Besides the founding companies, Xhockware and GetaFest are already in and the applications to fill the whole space opened this month.
Besides the building, F2 aims to be active and to provide the community with different events from informal talks and drinks to more structured activities. So beware and don’t miss a thing!
Founders Founders is a very good example that came to prove, if any doubts existed, that the city’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is bubbling and looking for programs that help startups grow. It was precisely to help the scaleup process that ScaleUp Porto emerged.
