About the series
The Builder Dinner series is offered by Builders Club and Barn Ventures. The series features home cooked meals, founder discussion and connection, and is supported by a workshop series developed with founders over nearly three years. We have had a significant number of founders move on to raise capital from YC, Afore.vc, Garage VC, and others. Founders from companies like Datacurve.ai, Voltra, Automax.ai, and many others have attended.
You don't have to be on a venture path to apply. This is to help you better understand it so you can build in a way that makes sense to you.
You do not need to be qualified for this. Look at the first table two years ago. You can see where those founders ended up, but that is not what they looked like then. For most of them the willingness to show up was the first signal they could build something. Not sales. Not funding. Not the pitch.
Early is fine. Not sure you want to go the VC route is fine. You do not need to have it figured out. This is meant to educate you in a way a workshop series will not, from the experience of your peers.
If you want to build something meaningful, this is for you.
Read the writeups from the S26 series here, along with related content.
Jesse is the founder behind Velocity and the Creative Destruction Lab, two of Canada's most influential founder-building platforms. For over two decades, he's been focused on one problem: how to turn exceptional technical talent into real founders. He now runs Builders Club, a founder-first space for ambitious people who want to build without permission. Direct, opinionated, and deeply invested in fixing the startup pipeline.
Six speakers, one per dinner.
September 22
Mazin co-founded Definite (YC S26, incorporated as Ledgix), which builds AI agents for back-office financial work. Definite connects a company's ERP, ledger, payroll, and billing systems into one live data model so finance teams can automate in plain English instead of hiring engineers. Before that he worked on quantitative trading systems at Optiver and AI agents for financial analysis at Boosted.ai. Waterloo CS, building between San Francisco and Waterloo, opening the term fresh out of a YC batch.
September 29
Alex is co-founder and CTO of Senpilot, which builds AI agents for electric utilities: engineering, regulatory research, and customer operations for an industry where a hallucinated answer isn't an option. Before Senpilot he was the founding engineer and CTO of a startup that reached a $100M valuation, and he did infrastructure engineering at Uber and NVIDIA. He's based in Waterloo, selling software into one of the slowest-moving, most regulated buyers there is. A good person to ask about building for customers who can't afford to get it wrong.
October 20