Networking Club

A trust-first home for people building what matters.

Not a social app. Not a job board.

Tell Cleo who you need. She assembles the Room.

Built around demonstrated reliability, not inherited proximity. A home for founders, investors, operators, and mentors. Open daily.

Try the Demo Read the Deck

Cleo asking the next question in a planning conversation

The Problem

Founder networking is structurally broken.

Every existing channel fails founders in a specific, compounding way.

Access is gated.

Most checks close through people the firm already knew. Cold outreach without that proximity rarely closes.

Signal is flattened.

Titles travel. Track record doesn’t. Build-in-public broadcasts, but no reputation layer sits underneath.

Trust isn’t calibrated.

Reliability under prior commitments, the signal that matters most, shows up nowhere in either direction.

Product

Three coordinated discovery loops.

Three surfaces, three intent profiles, three frequencies. Together they answer every networking job a founder does.

Cleo Plan and Explore modes side by side

HIGH-INTENT

Cleo plans a Room.

An AI concierge that orchestrates introductions and small-group Rooms. Plan mode for "I need someone." Explore mode for "what’s happening this week."

Use: 2–5× per week.

Updates create screen — caption form and video recording

DAILY DEAL FLOW

Founders broadcast. Investors source.

A ≤60s video feed where builders post real progress. Investors get the same data in a sortable Pipeline view. Posts rise on the connection requests they earn.

Use: daily.

Horizon picks and the in-app map of nearby events

WHAT’S NEARBY

Horizon, the now-hub.

What’s for you, right now. Curated public events worth showing up for, suggested people nearby, and an in-app map of the ecosystem around you.

Use: whenever you have a moment to act on something nearby.

How It Works

From conversation to confirmed Room.

Cleo doesn't browse. She plans. Type what you're looking for, answer two or three questions, and the network assembles itself. Every match comes with a transparent reason.

Cleo plan card with date, location, and group size

The plan emerges. Time, place, group size.

The algorithm explains itself.

Two Bets

Same problem. Different bet.

The Lightweight Bet

Series.

AI-mediated intros over iMessage. Text who you want to meet, get a carousel back. Backed by Pear VC + Steve Huffman, live across 750+ campuses. Lightweight, fast, easy to adopt.

The Depth Bet

Vesper.

Trust infrastructure. Persistent identity. Relational depth. The graph that knows who showed up, who followed through, who hosted. Slower to launch. Harder to imitate.

An iMessage carousel can be cloned in a weekend. A graph that knows who showed up, who followed through, and who delivered cannot. That history takes years to accumulate. It doesn’t walk out the door when a member leaves.

Interfaces get cloned. Graphs compound.

What's Been Tried

The pattern is consistent.

Every attempt has solved one dimension while missing others. A clean read on the landscape:

Lunchclub

AI matching without behavioral signal is just shuffling profiles.

Polywork

Profiles don’t generate sessions. Flow does.

On Deck

Paid-membership scale is fragile when gating stops curating.

Cocoon

Small-group chat couldn’t retain on its own.

Pavilion · Startup Grind

A community is not the same as a product.

Build-in-Public on X

Audience works. The reputation layer is missing.

Why Now

The bottleneck is shifting from access to signal.

The traditional entry point for ambitious talent is breaking down. More high-potential people are open to building earlier. The systems they’d use to find collaborators weren’t designed for the shift.

The shift.

AI is compressing junior work. Hiring is volatile. The long-term payoff of structured early-career roles is less reliable than it used to be. More high-potential people are open to building earlier in their careers.

The constraint.

Existing systems fail at signal. LinkedIn shows credentials, not capability. Twitter shows ideas, not follow-through. IRL networks provide trust, but are limited and exclusionary. Willing to take the risk of building, not the risk of building with the wrong people.

The bottleneck.

As more people explore building, the ecosystem expands. So does the noise. Easier than ever to meet people. Harder than ever to know who actually executes, follows through, is worth committing to. The bottleneck moves from access to signal.

“As institutional signals weaken, interpersonal trust becomes the new infrastructure. Vesper makes that trust legible, scalable, and actionable.”

The Thesis

Reliability becomes more valuable than reach.

"In a vertical curated tightly enough that members can recognize each other, reliability becomes more valuable than reach. Vesper engineers that reliability into compounding social currency, inside a network architected so it actually compounds."

TRUST SCORE

Reliability surfaces on profiles and weighs every match. Built from behavior: attendance, peer ratings, rooms hosted, intros that landed. No purchase path.

MATCHING ALGORITHM

Selects for demonstrated reliability, weighted at every match decision.

CLEO + ROOMS

Not a chatbot. The orchestration layer that makes everything else navigable. An AI concierge distributing trust through curated intros and small groups of two to six. In-person first, remote when needed.

Consider a 23-year-old engineer deciding whether to leave a stable role to build. They don’t want to do it alone, but they don’t trust cold outreach. On Vesper, they spend months watching how potential collaborators actually work. By the time they reach out, the question isn’t “are you legit?” — it’s “what should we build together?”

Vesper demo picker — step into one of four archetypes

See it operate end-to-end.

Pick an archetype. Cleo plans a Room. The network responds in real time. A 60-minute sandbox. No signup required.

Open the demo