How Open Water Accelerator Builds Community for Young Founders

Open Water is a new type of startup accelerator. They believe that the limiting factor to growing a startup is talent, not capital. This is why they provide their founders with a dedicated team of designers, engineers, and growth hackers to help them innovate better and build faster. They also strongly believe that a strong community is extremely important to the success of early-stage startups.

“Community allows you to brainstorm and take your company in exciting directions. Without community, startups could not move nearly as fast as they do,” said David Bromberg, Partner and Founder of Open Water Accelerator.

This is why Open Water decided to use Glimpse.

Glimpse is the best way to virtually engage communities in a meaningful way. Glimpse allows people in a virtual room to connect one-on-one for timed conversations, complete with fun icebreaker prompts and mini-games. Open Water uses Glimpse to hold networking events between its community of builders and founders. During their weekly calls, its 100 members get to meet other members of the Open Water community and share what they are working on with each other.

“We chose Glimpse because we wanted something that felt personal,” David said. “We can’t just put everyone in a large Zoom call, we wanted to recreate the feeling of putting everyone together in a room.”

If you are looking for a way to build community within your organization, here are some tips and tricks for using Glimpse:

• Check out our Hosting Guide for general advice on how to get started!
• Decide on a match time length (the default is 2 minutes) that best suits your event
• Set up a weekly recurring time for the Glimpse call
• Customize the question prompts to personalize your event

If you are a startup founder, applications for Open Water’s fall cohort are open now! Apply here.