Reminder: Join the Long Journey Founder Slack here 

Once you're in, three quick things to get started:

  1. Introduce yourself in #welcome-to-the-flock to build a searchable, personal founder directory (intro template pinned in channel)
  2. Post your first ask or offer in #asks-and-offers (ex: share your favorite vendor) and check out the Long Journey Team Offerings and Founder Resources tabs there
  3. Check out #announcements to RSVP to September experiences, workshops and dinners. We have new monthly office hours with Bijan and two mastermind dinners coming up at the Long Journey house in SF!

Here's how to make the most of this space:

  • Ask for help: from complex problems to a warm intro, this is the place to get peer advice. Founders told us again and again they'd show up to offer help, so please, ask.
  • Offer what you know: advice, network, feedback. Generosity and giving back is the whole point.
  • Bring the community together: reconnect with founders you've met, post open invites to events you're hosting, organize meetups, and facilitate spin-off gatherings.

📌 The Corkboard (Upcoming Events & Workshops) To RSVP go to #announcements channel in the Long Journey Founder Slack

Virtual Workshops

  • 🧭 Founder Group Executive Coaching — Tues, October 13 | 1:00–2:30 PM PST
    A 90-minute small-group coaching session with Shane Metcalf where you bring a current challenge and work through it with expert coaching and peer feedback from Long Journey founders at similar stages.
  • 📖 Founder Group Storytelling Workshop with Bijan — Thurs, September 22 | 4:00–5:00 PM PST
    A hands-on workshop with Venture Partner, Bijan Marashi, where you'll come with your company's story as it stands today and leave with a sharper version of where you are, where you're going, and what's next, ready to leverage in your next fundraise conversation.
  • 🤝 'Cofounder Lab' Executive Coaching Session for Cofounders — Tues, October 27 | 1:00–2:30 PM PST
    A 90-minute hands-on coaching session with Shane Metcalf designed for co-founding teams to strengthen how they work together. We're creating a container where cofounders can work on communication patterns, decision-making friction, or simply get a general tune-up and identify what to improve.

In Person Workshops, Dinners & Experiences

  • 🍽️ Austin Founders Feast with Lee, AZ and Justin — Austin, TX | Tues, October 13 | 6:30–9:00 PM EST
    AZ and Lee will be in Austin and would love to gather Austin based founders to meet and connect with one another over a delicious meal.
  • 🌙 After Hours @ Long Journey — San Francisco | Wed, October 28 | 7:00–10:30 PM PST
    The entire Long Journey office will be open for coworking from 7:00–10:30 PM. Come get some work done alongside magically weird Long Journey folks, wander the rooms for a spark of inspiration, and stay as long as the energy feels good. Feel free to share the invite with other founders or builders in your network!
  •  🎭 NYC Weird Hobby Night — Manhattan, NY | Tues, November 3 | 6:30–10:00 PM EST
    The whole Long Journey team will be in town and we'd love to gather you all for a fall evening to share weird hobbies at a magical town house in East Village with our favorite investors and operators on the East Coast.
  • 🍽️ NYC Foundersgiving — Brooklyn, NY | Wed, November 4 | 7:00–9:30 PM EST
    We’re throwing a Foundersgiving, a dinner to celebrate, acknowledge and show gratitude to all of you. We’ll cozy up in a loft in Brooklyn and enjoy a Thanksgiving-inspired feast.

🏕️ Founder Field Guide (save these pages!)

🐏 Joining the Flock?

  • James (Shielded) is the founder and CEO of Shielded, a supply chain risk intelligence platform. It maps tariffs, market shifts and disruptions onto a company’s own suppliers, products and margins, so manufacturers can decide how to source, price, stock and hedge before the hit lands. Before Shielded, James worked in commodities trading, where the edge came from reacting faster than competitors when markets moved. That experience is what he’s now building for every manufacturer.
  • Seb (London Quantum Group) is the co-founder and CEO of London Quantum Group, a London research lab building the Blind Data Platform. The platform lets hospitals and researchers run computation and train AI models on encrypted health records without ever exposing the underlying data, starting with clinical trial matching inside the NHS. While still finishing his studies, Seb has won the Quantinuum Year of Quantum Hackathon, the Slaughter and May Innovation Competition and an NHS Hackathon. He was also named a Bridgewater Top 100 Research Fellow, and he worked on the first three-variable satellite optimization problem run on a quantum computer.
  • Jeff (Atomic Machines) is the founder and CEO of Atomic Machines, which is building the Matter Compiler: an AI-native manufacturing stack that turns digital code directly into working micro-machines, starting with its first device, PrimeSwitch. He was previously Chief Product Officer at Uber. There he founded the Advanced Technology Group behind its self-driving work, led Uber Eats from the start, and launched Uber Elevate. Before that he was SVP of Product at Groupon and founded the city-discovery startup Pelago. He also spent nearly a decade at Amazon, where he led consumer websites worldwide and the development of Amazon Prime.
  • Shengkun (Monid) is the co-founder of Monid, the “OpenRouter for agent tools.” With one integration, AI agents can find, compare and pay per call for more than 1,700 tools and APIs from a single balance. He previously worked at Founders Inc, TabaPay and WeChat.
  • Joe (DealFlowAgent) is the founder and CEO of DealFlowAgent, an AI-native investment bank for small and mid-sized M&A. It pairs human advisors with an AI matchmaking agent, Sterling, to help owners of £1M–£30M businesses in the UK and US sell. It focuses on essential sectors like building services, healthcare and software.

Until next time,

The Long Journey Team

Second Believers in the Magically Weird