The legend we are named after
Sunnyvale, 1971. A mutual friend says the five most useful words in startup history to two Steves: "you two should meet." One is 21 and can build anything out of a handful of chips. The other is 16 and already knows what the future should look like, and what it should cost.
First came the pranks, the Dylan bootlegs and a not-entirely-legal blue box for free phone calls. Five years later, the Apple I, in a garage.
Neither Steve builds Apple alone. That is the whole idea.
Steve no. 1
builds the impossible
Steve no. 2
sells the future
And one much closer to home
Ilya Segalovich and Arkady Volozh met as schoolboys at the physics and maths school in Alma-Ata. Their paths split after school, met again in Moscow, and in 1993 they coined the word Yandex - "yet another indexer", with Volozh proposing the Russian "Я" out front.
Segalovich became the CTO and Volozh the CEO, and they founded the company together in 2000. Two people again, very different again, and again it started with a school introduction.
Sunnyvale → Cupertino
Alma-Ata → Moscow
Today
Both stories start the same dull way: someone made an introduction. Yours is below.
Online, whenever suits you. Offline, when you would rather talk to twenty people in one evening. Either way it is the same card.
Online · the room, always open
Cards from people looking for a co-founder right now. Mark anyone you'd like to talk to: they won't know unless they mark you back. There are no ratings and no popularity counts here.
There is a third, far less formal way in: Founders Coffee on Thursdays at Strastnoi, every week since 2011. No application and no timer.
Come for coffee on a Thursday →9 verified · 3 awaiting review
The room is global - looking for a co-founder outside your own city is normal, and half the pairs in the ecosystem came together that way. The evenings are tied to a place: the next one is in Moscow, on Strastnoi.
Your card is already in the room. It is flagged "unverified", which is normal: we read cards by hand and usually get to them within a week. No need to wait - you can start marking people now.
Add to your card →Demo cohort: these cards are illustrative. In production this is real, hand-screened applications.
A match only means "let’s talk again", nothing more. So each one comes with an idea for a small piece of work together: two weeks usually explains more than two months of messaging.
Nothing here yet, which is normal.
Choices are private, so mark people freely. As soon as someone marks you back, they show up here.
Back to the roomThe card is not just a way into the room. It is where your history with Yellow Door starts: from here it follows the same path every one of our teams has taken - Founders Coffee, the Night Climbers mentors, the Intensive at Labs, the fund.
You fill it in once, in about ten minutes. The in-person evening and the online room use the same card.
The card
You are here.
Room and evenings
Online all the time, in person every two or three months.
A match
Only when it is mutual.
A two-week experiment
A trial-project template and a table at the coworking.
Founders Coffee
Thursdays on Strastnoi, since 2011.
The Night Climbers
The Yellow Door mentor network.
The Intensive · Labs
Three months to a new market.
Innov8 Global Ventures
For the ones that work.
Visible to you, to us, and to people you match with. Never published, never sold. You can delete it in one click. Privacy
Almost everyone here came because somebody brought them. That is exactly how both stories on this page started: Apple and Yandex alike began with one person introducing two others.
