Meet 2500 people who pleasantly surprise you
icp.community is a place to meet people who pleasantly surprise you. Founded by Joshua Vantard (that’s me) it is still to this day a hobby. The community was lucky to have 2500 members with 30,000 applications, 95 percent or more through word of mouth. So far there have been at least 200 ICP meetups in cities like San Francisco, New York, London, Singapore. Apply and see all our channels here, it’s free.
The Origin Story
Since my very first day at school, I’ve always sought out “ICPs”, sorts who don’t follow the crowd. It describes everyone I ever have or ever will respect. All my closest friends have been ICPs and hopefully all I ever will have will be too. So in a way I’ve been training to spot Intelligent Crazy People my entire life.
The name “Intelligent Crazy People” came about on a day I started a group chat for friends meeting up in my apartment in, of all places, Leuven, Belgium. Leuven’s barely known, but one of the oldest and prettiest university towns in mainland Europe. In a split-second, I named it “Intelligent Crazy People,” because, at the time, it just felt right. Sufficiently awkward, funny with multiple layers of irony, descriptive and memorable.
I tried renaming ICP so many times let’s say to something more “respectable”. Nothing stuck. In light of this extraordinarily absurd name, within three months, meetups were happening in New York and the Bay Area, hosted in skyscrapers, with companies offering free food and drinks.
Soon after, I built a strong network via Facebook. Friends of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman joined. Prolific founders, like the founder and CEO of Zoom, got connected too and too many others to name. All the people you hear about in podcasts, the Silicon Valley OGs are either in ICP or friends with multiple people in ICP. When I “playfully procrastinate” I like to connect people via ICP. Hosting a small meetup, accepting one new member, making one new introduction can change someone’s life feels pretty cool. I don’t even need to attend these meetups. The more I attend, the less time I’d have to help others organise more.
Our Members
Members include everyone from students and artists to former CEOs of billion dollar companies. We try to be a microcosm of amazing people from all walks of life good at things from DIY to data science. Here are some of our more eye catching members. Hopefully some of these will draw you into meeting our members who are just starting out, unknown and underappreciated. That’s what we really mean by people who will pleasantly surprise you.
These aren’t our top members by any stretch. We have plenty more — musicians, artists, politicians, and world-class founders:
- Andrew Yang was a US presidential candidate.
- Yoni Assia founded eToro the world’s leading social investing firm, valued at $10 billion.
- Lucy Guo founded Scale AI with Alexandr Wang, a machine learning data labelling company valued at $14 billion while she just 24 years old.
- Kairan Quazi graduated college at 14 and became SpaceX’s youngest paid full-time software engineer.
- Harshita Arora raised $150m+ for her startup Atob in her early 20s. Immigrated from India to the USA at 17 having dropped out of school in 9th grade.
- Danielle Lynne Strachman and Michael Gibson were the original team behind the Thiel Fellowship which created companies like Luminar, valued at $3 billion and and Scale AI, valued at $6 billion.
- Celine Halioua founded Loyal, a company developing treatments to significantly extend the lifespan of dogs. Between 2020 and 2024, while still in her early to mid-20s, she raised $125 million for the venture. On top of being sharp, smart, and genuinely kind, Celine’s also an incredibly cool person. The only downside of her rapid rise to fame is that as Loyal continues to grow, she’ll probably have less time for us as friends.
Building Friendships Through Meetups
ICP’s binding theme is each of our members have a story or trajectory that will pleasantly surprise you. We all have stories or histories either unexpected, interesting, informative or inspiring. Whether a lawyer like Alix Philippe who turned her life upside down to focus on art or Ali who fled persecution in Somalia to flee to Europe. icp.community is not monetized in anyway.
Curating For Friendliness, Promise And Disciplinary Diversity
We often get the question; how do you pick members? We like members who show a passion and action in something small like mastery of bonsai or something large like planting a million trees. Are they approaching that passion and that action by thinking differently from most? What is a members’ story and is there a spark of something distinguishing?
We also get the question; is this a homogenous group of people like a second Cambridge or Harvard? If ICP were a group of planters and gardeners it would not be that interesting. We try to be place where you will pleasantly learn unexpected things. We bring together musicians, engineers, artists, people in their teens to their eighties, the rich, the poor, the old and the young. All we look for is a distinguishing spark.
Finally what is this all for? Using some of our more established members as a magnet, we hope to give the the potentially amazing yet unknown or under-appreciated a group of friends who can carry them forward, perhaps out of their deepest and darkest times in life. Even if we help 10 people through this, ICP will have been an achievement.
Our Channels
ICP’s focus is let you *meet* people who pleasantly surprise you in real life. We’re not a Discord server, we’re not a marketing channel posing itself as the contemporary community buzzword. A real community is simply a group of people who help each other. A community is a community to the extent that help endures. All our channels try to funnel our members meeting as often as they can. We believe if they do that, regular help will follow. You’ll find all our channels here on our Linktr.ee including our group chats.
