Barn Ventures
Founder Dinner Series · S26 · Waterloo
Six weeks. Real founders. No performative networking.
The Founder Dinner Series is a structured six-week program for early-stage technical founders in Waterloo. Each Tuesday: a midday workshop and an evening dinner with a guest who's built something real — raised from YC, scaled a product, navigated acquisition, or simply stayed the course long enough to have something worth saying. The format is intentionally small so conversations stay honest and high-trust. Nearly three years running out of Builders Club.
Builder Dinner Series · Builders Club, Waterloo
How it works
Past guests
Michael Litt
Vidyard · Garage VC
Co-founder of Vidyard (YC '11), GP at Garage VC. On founder-market-channel fit and what 15 years of building compresses into.
Humza Ahmed
Automax.ai · YC F25
Dropped out of Waterloo, moved to SF, went through YC, raised $4.5M. Building AI-native appraisal infrastructure for the mortgage industry.
Mike Kirkup
Elderella · ex-Velocity
Coached 1,000+ companies through Velocity and Communitech. Now back in the founder seat — zero lines of code written by hand, concept to alpha in four months.
Brad Murray
Automattic · ex-Beeper · ex-Pebble
Pebble's 4th employee. Co-founded Beeper, navigated the Apple fight. Now Head of Engineering at Automattic. On staying technical as you scale.
Matt Stevens
Agritech Robotics · UWaterloo PhD
Building robotics for agriculture — thinning baby apples to improve yields. On the economics of farming, hardware constraints, and why the vision has to be bigger than the product.
Hongwei Liu
MappedIn
15 years into building MappedIn — indoor mapping infrastructure used in malls, airports, and campuses worldwide. On staying the course when the market takes time to catch up.
Matt Stevens
Finite Robotics
Building robotics for agriculture — thinning baby apples to improve yields. On the economics of farming, hardware constraints, and why the vision has to be bigger than the product.
Jim Murphy
Boltmade · Waterloo
Sold a previous company to Google. Sold Boltmade to Shopify. Both built in Waterloo. On craft, product thinking, and what it means to build something worth acquiring.
Where founders go from here
Nearly three years in. The outcomes are real.
A significant number of founders from this series have gone on to raise from some of the best investors in the ecosystem.
- —Y Combinator
- —Afore.vc
- —Garage VC
- —Companies include Datacurve.ai, Automax.ai, Voltra, and others
Supported by
Osler LLP
One of Canada's leading business law firms, with deep expertise in emerging and high-growth companies across every stage.
TD Innovation Partners
TD's dedicated team supporting high-growth companies across Canada with banking, financing, and ecosystem connections.
Apply
If you're actively building and want real momentum — not another event on your calendar — this is for you. You don't have to be on a venture path to apply. S26 runs May through July. Applications close April 15, 2026.
Apply for S26