The Tech Community Reality Pyramid (As Sponsors Should See It)
If you’re running a tech community of any scale, you have to build around a certain reality:
Only a few people, founders or investors, will achieve breakout success.
And the majority of the people who RSVP to anything — no matter how curated you think it is — are aspirational.
Not bad. Not unworthy.
It’s just not mathematically likely to happen for them—it being a huge exit or IPO.
You have to design around this. That doesn’t mean you try to cut out the aspirational folks—you just need to figure out ways to scale appropriate accessibility. Every quarter, nextNYC runs hundreds of open office hour meetings with VCs where any founder who has a real startup and doesn’t seem like a problematic nut can get a 20 minute intro to a VC.
We also run a twice a year conference, our Pre-Series A Offsite where hundreds of startups apply to be one of between 50-60 high potential companies likely to raise a Series A. Many of those companies started out with our office hours but only a handful make it to this much more curated event. The Offsite has had companies like Spring Health and Hugging Face in attendance well before their Series A.
I’d never try to tell a sponsor that the companies at Office Hours are the same quality as the companies at the Offsite. However, the VCs that participate because they want to support the community are the very same VCs who can make curated intros to the best companies in their portfolio—so while the air cover is nice, it’s the VC relationships that are most important.
Saying that a group of hundreds of unvetted founders is the same as the best 50 who applied would feel like trying to sell this with a straight face:
This was taken from the Slush Conference’s website.
I’ve never been and I’m sure it’s a well produced conference that is a lot of fun—but the “best” 13,000 people in the tech community is just… not very “best”.
Instead, I’ve been visualizing the ecosystem as a triangle.
The Tech Community Reality Pyramid
It’s the only honest way to explain who actually shows up, who sponsors really want to meet, and how you build something that doesn’t collapse under the weight of its own ambition.
Tier 1 - APEX FOUNDERS & VCs
The red herring — and the necessary illusion
This is the tip of the pyramid. The serial winners. The GPs with names people drop into conversations like Easter eggs. The operators who’ve done it enough times that they can smell chaos the second they walk in the room.
Sponsors see these people and immediately start salivating.
“Can we get Melanie Perkins to switch her banker if we meet her at your dinner?”
No. Absolutely not.
Melanie Perkins already has a banker.
And a tax person.
And a lawyer.
And a person who handles the other person who handles her family office.
She is not switching because you sat next to him over a passed appetizer.
But Apex Founders & VCs are still incredibly valuable — not because they convert, but because they attract the people who do.
A Josh Kopelman sighting brings out all the future Josh Kopelmans…
The rocket ship Associates, the “Little P” Partners, the up-and-coming operators who aren’t famous yet but will be.
Tier 1 is the signal.
Tier 2 is the ROI.
And you don’t get Tier 2 without Tier 1.
Tier 2 - FUTURE STARS
The group sponsors should actually want when they say “top tier”.
This is your CoS, Director, VP crowd — people who’ve actually seen the inside of a fast-growing startup. They know what “good” looks like, even if they weren’t the ones making the final calls. They have taste. They have instincts. They have relationships. They are warm to VCs and, more importantly, VCs are warm to them.
This tier is where sponsorship math suddenly starts working.
Future Stars convert because they’re early enough in their trajectory that they haven’t locked in all of their trusted relationships yet. They’re still choosing their go-to lawyer. Their fractional CFO. Their banking partner. Their payroll system. Their GTM consultants.
They’re the people who — with the right support — become the founders that sponsors will brag about being “early” on five years from now.
But they don’t show up for “big.”
They show up for quality.
High-signal rooms.
High-trust curation.
Events with a point of view.
You earn Tier 2 by earning Tier 1.
That’s the whole game.
Tier 3 - SMART, REAL PROFESSIONALS
This tier is full of people who are sharp, credentialed, and ambitious — they’re just early in their tech identity formation. Consultants, MBAs, PMs, bankers, newer GPs at firms you may not have heard of.
These are smart people with great raw ability but, to be honest, are a little indistinguishable from each other because they’re not yet the person who started that company or the VC who wrote that check.
They’re not Tier 2 today, but a surprising number of Tier 2 people started exactly here.
What this group needs is exposure:
Exposure to how top founders assess problems
How top VCs evaluate
How experienced operators make decisions
They don’t need velvet ropes — they need repetition.
These are your “high accessibility, medium sponsor value” folks.
And this is the part of the pyramid where scalable programming builds trusted service brands—because they’re in all the communities, the alumni groups. You want your name out there with them because, successful or not, they’ll probably raise something, they’ll need some support, and for every 100 founders, you want to lead the league tables even if you know the success numbers are low.
You don’t build handcrafted dinners for Tier 3.
You build gravity — and let talent pull a handful of them upward.
THE ASPIRATIONAL MAJORITY
The part of the triangle that keeps everything buzzing — but cannot run the show.
This is the biggest group in any community. People with big dreams, early ideas, or nothing more than ambition and a notebook. They’re trying. They’re curious. They’re looking for momentum.
They matter — a lot.
Some will become tomorrow’s Tier 2, but probably not for this idea.
If you build your event strategy around this group, you’ll burn out sponsors in six months.
These folks need wide, low-lift experiences: open events, content-driven gatherings, online communities, scalable formats. Not precision-cast dinners or invite-only salons.
The bottom of the triangle gives your community energy.
The top of the triangle gives it shape.
THE Lynchpin
Here’s the actual engine under all of this:
VC relationships.
VCs are the key.
If they trust you, Tier 1 shows up through a personal ask from a top VC you know well.
If Tier 1 shows up, Tier 2 follows.
If Tier 2 shows up, sponsors renew.
And if sponsors renew, you can afford to run the broader programming that keeps the whole community healthy.
This is why great communities are built on appropriate accessibility:
High trust for the top
High quality for the middle
High scale for the base
This way, you balance community support with KPIs that improve everyone’s bottom line.