For years, Lauren Lee, a 29-year-old San Francisco-based app designer, has been obsessed with boba tea. She wears sweaters embroidered with tiny boba cups, plasters her laptop with kawaii boba stickers, and has a boba cup keychain attached to her boba cup crossbody bag. Grabbing boba with friends was a self-care ritual she started in high school, she said. But by 2022, her tea circle had dwindled, and it was hard to find someone she could get a quick drink with.
Sure, she could boba solo, but tapioca pearls are more delicious when they’re a shared experience, she said. To grow her network, she launched Boba Buddies, a free-to-attend weekly meetup exploring San Francisco’s boba shops. Lee keeps each hang intentionally small – a max 30 people, she said, as, “it’s super scary to go to a huge event.” Over time, news of Boba Buddies spread via word of mouth and the club swelled to 2,020 members and a very busy Discord channel. It’s gratifying, she said, but it does take a lot of work. She needed some guidance.
So Lee applied to become part of the inaugural cohort of the Build IRL, a monthlong, intensive in-person program hosted at event spaces across San Francisco, which provides mentorship, education, and coaching to help founders supercharge their social clubs.
Like Y Combinator or 500 Startups look to do with profit-making startups, Build IRL is trying to fight the loneliness epidemic as the world’s first “friendship accelerator.”
Build IRL, was concocted by two Bay Area techies who were alarmed by the levels of burnout they were seeing among social-group founders. “Community building is ridiculously hard and financially unviable,” said co-founder Saumya Gupta, a former product manager at Google. “Many people would do this full time if they could but they don’t know how to.”
For Gupta, this is personal. Two years ago, she had her first child, and suddenly the scary statistics about teenage suicide and youth depression felt more pressing. But as she looked into it, she realized that the loneliness crisis was reflective of a larger issue. “We don’t have a social gathering infrastructure,” she said. Social media has watered down what it means to join a community, she explained, saying that “superficial memberships” with little engagement, had become the norm. “How have we created a world where our kids are not finding purpose in life?”
Supercharging SF’s social clubs
Colton Heward-Mills, a strategist for a corporate education startup, had been having the same thoughts. Heward-Mills grew up in New Jersey, the son of two Ghanaian immigrants, and his home life was vibrant and busy. “I had an abundance of aunties,” he said, a network of “people who cared about you and wanted to support you.”
As Heward-Mills considered his future in San Francisco, he realized that the “community layer” that he’d found so supportive as a child was missing here. This wasn’t just a problem for him—many of his friends and acquaintances had told him they felt disconnected. In January, he quit his job to focus on solving loneliness full-time. He met Gupta at an event, and they instantly clicked. We need to figure out what to do, he said. After much brainstorming, they came up with Build IRL—a startup accelerator for social cohesion.
In general, most Bay Area accelerators offer four-to ten-week intensive programs that combine support, mentorship, and funding (often in return for equity) to quickly scale up growth. Build IRL would be a little different, said Heward-Mills; they wanted no equity, but they also offered no funding. They just don’t have the money, he said—although they promised to connect people to potential funders who do.
The duo bootstrapped the organization, committing themself to at least 12 months of operation. “We’re lucky enough with our careers to live in San Francisco for a year and not need cash,” said Gupta. They received a small grant from the dating app Hinge, as part of the company’s social impact initiative. That helped cover food and venue space for the first cohort, they said.
Together, they crafted a rough outline for their program; a combination of fireside chats from organizational and community-building experts, and workshops on the logistics of executing events, developing outreach strategies, and tapping funding sources “in a way that’s not awkward.”
They’d close out with a friendship “demo day,” scheduled for June 27. In March, they announced an open call for submissions. More than 50 groups applied, and 24 were accepted. They were amazed by the volume and variety of applicants.
In addition to Lee’s Boba Buddies was the AI Salon, an AI philosopher’s meetup; the Run Your Life runner’s group; Design Buddies, a group for design-minded people, Life Pods, a how-to-adult get-together for graduating seniors,’ Pawrents, a grassroots dog sitting meetup’ and The Doghouse, a swing-dancing group.
“They’re all diverse but they all [share] very consistent needs and challenges,” said Heward-Mills. BuildIRL’s founders prioritized groups that could show some proof of concept and were neither too established nor too nascent (Noisebridge, a 15-year San Francisco hackerspace, was included as it was pivoting).
“We really didn’t want this to be networking,” said Heward-Mills. “We wanted people gathering around passions on a repeat basis.”
Some community groups were more esoteric than others, such as the San Francisco Contemplarium, created by Seanan Fong, a former pastor who identifies as a “non-religious, queer, Chinese-American.” It’s a secular space for people to pause and reflect, he explained, something that’s almost nonexistent in San Francisco, one of the most religiously unaffiliated metro areas in the United States.
“There are lots of spaces where you can talk about how to make a $1 billion unicorn, [but] very few where people can go and really talk about the big questions,” said Heward-Mills.
Fong’s events include reflection jams, which consist of self-reflection, tea, and lo-fi beats, and pop-up reflection stands in parks, where passersby are encouraged to write down their memories and pin them to a board. He plans to workshop his next steps. “I want this to be, like, a co-creative thing,” he said; going through Build IRL helped him narrow his focus, he said.
Tara Raj, the 29-year-old cofounder of the Neurodiverse Startup Ecosystem—“a community for those who build things differently!”—said her Build IRL cohort provided her with much-needed support. It’s hard figuring out how to best structure events, and how to bring people with different mindsets together, she explained.
Raj, who is autistic and has ADHD, said that while public awareness of neurodiverse people has increased, all too often, they are lumped together in the same bucket – you can’t empathize, or you’re good at math or you’re an anime nerd. Raj’s group tosses the buckets out entirely, hosting in-person and virtual meetups in San Francisco and Chicago (she splits her time between the two cities), plus a robust Slack channel. “Having conversations with others going through similar things helps a lot,” she said.
June 27 was demo day at the Friendship Accelerator. The founders nervously assembled inside MindsDB HQ, an AI event space in the Mission. Each founder got a couple of minutes on the mic to make their pitch.
Throughout the presentations, Niraj Dattani, the 36-year-old founder of Now To Vow, an Indian wedding startup, scribbled names in his moleskine notebook. His partner would love Pawrents, the dog sitting meetup, he said, and he wanted to tell his sister about Interwoven, a group for people navigating mixed-race and -cultural identities.
Dattani loved the energy of Build IRL: “I’ve seen so many accelerators for tech startups…and they’re all modeled [around] profit.” Using the same structure predicated on friendships instead of finances is “super exciting,” he said. “It’s really inspiring that [people] are hacking connections.”
That’s exactly the takeaway that Heward-Mills was hoping for. “There’s a lot of talk about doom and gloom in San Francisco,” he said. “But we think the city is vibrant. There are cool things happening. And we should build more of them.”