About us
Startup Grind is the largest independent startup community, actively educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs globally.
The cornerstone of our global community are monthly events featuring successful local founders, innovators, educators and investors who share lessons learned on the road to building great companies.
Founded in Silicon Valley, Startup Grind has helped millions of entrepreneurs build their businesses, connect with strategic partners, and secure funding.
- Start a Chapter in your city! - http://www.startupgrind.com/start
- Sponsor an event! - https://www.startupgrind.com/sponsor
- Have a Startup? your startup & meet investors at a regional conference through our Startup Program - http://bit.ly/sg_meetup_startup_first
Upcoming events
5
The Startup Pitch: Demo Showcase
The Yard: Herald Square, 106 West 32nd Street, New York, NY, US🚨 CLICK HERE to RSVP 👈
It's time to go beyond the deck and see the best live tech from New York's emerging startups.
Welcome to a pitch event with a twist. We skip the fluff and focus on what matters: a live look at real products.
This pitch & demo showcase gives you a first look at new technology from startups that are actively building and shipping product — sometimes even before VCs have seen them!
🚨 CLICK HERE to RSVP 👈
The format is fast-paced and interactive. After each demo, the floor is open for questions, ideas, and honest feedback from the community.
We welcome investors who want an unfiltered look at new technology and early-stage teams.- 📅 Date: Thursday, Sept 17th
- 🕓 Time: 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
- 📍 Venue: The Yard: Herald Square
- 🎫 Tickets: Only $5 (includes happy hour refreshments)
- 📑 Founders: Sign up here to apply to pitch at an upcoming event
🚨 CLICK HERE to RSVP 👈
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
- Startups ready to demo a real product and get honest feedback
- Engineers, PMs, and designers who love seeing new tech in action
- Investors looking for a ground-floor, early look at local startups
- Anyone in the NYC tech scene who wants to connect with and support the people building things
AGENDA
- 5:30 PM: Doors Open & Networking
- 6:00 PM: Startup Pitches & Demos with Audience Q&A
- 7:00 PM: Meet the Presenting Startups
PITCH FORMAT
- Pitch & Demo - 6 minutes
- Audience Q&A - 4 minutes
- Pitch deck AND product demo are required
🚨 CLICK HERE to RSVP 👈
2 attendees
Hidden Patterns: The Visual Journey of Networks
The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, NY, USHave you ever wondered why one startup, one tweet, or one node in your product's user graph explodes while a thousand identical-looking others don't?
You've already run into Albert-László Barabási's work, whether you knew his name or not. He's the physicist who discovered scale-free networks: the finding that most real networks, from the web to your own social graph, run on a small number of massive hubs instead of evenly spread connections.
That's the math behind preferential attachment, and it's why the web, social networks, and citation networks all follow the same power law.
In collaboration with the National Arts Club and its Art and Technology Committee, Barabási will walk through 25 years spent turning that math into something you can look at.
BarabásiLab's work has moved from raw data visualizations to physical, 3D-printed network sculptures, and from academic papers to museum installations.
The current centerpiece is Constructing La Biennale, a 30-by-8-meter data visualization wrapped around the scaffolding of the Central Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. It maps roughly 12,000 architects and 3,800 projects across the Biennale's 45-year history, back to its first edition in 1980, as a single connected graph.
Barabási has called it the most visible work at the Biennale, and building it, in his words, "was a massive data science project."
If your product, your portfolio, or your own career runs on network effects, this is a rare chance to hear from the person who wrote the math for it.
Reserve your spot and arrive early. Space is limited.
12 attendees
Tech Happy Hour by Startup Grind
Time Out Market Union Square, 124 East 14th Street, New York, NY, USThis is the monthly Startup Grind tech mixer. It's a low-key way to connect with the NYC tech and startup community to discover shared interests, explore areas for collaboration, and find your next co-founder or key hire.
Join us for a casual happy hour to build real relationships and make friends, not just contacts. No pitches. No presentations. No agenda.
This happy hour is for:
- Startup Founders & Employees
- Technologists, Developers & Tech Workers
- Product Managers & Designers
- Investors, VCs, Advisors & Mentors
- Anyone curious about the NYC tech scene
Agenda:- 5:00 PM: Happy Hour starts. Come and go as you please.
We're at the new Time Out Market at Union Square. It features a selection of the city's best food and drink together under one roof, offering a wide variety of options to choose from throughout the event.Look for Startup Grind table signs toward the back near the outdoor terrace.
22 attendees
The AI Briefing by Startup Grind - Private Equity: What Owners & Buyers Pay For
Civic Hall, 124 East 14th Street, New York, NY, US👉 CLICK HERE TO RSVP FOR FREE 👈
The AI Briefing is a recurring AI deep-dive for decision-makers.
Each month, we select one high-signal industry report, circulate it in advance, and meet to cut through the noise.
📜 This month's source: The PE AI Adoption Benchmark: From scaling to systematizing (Accordion with Wakefield Research – May 2026)
Somebody's going to ask what your AI spend returned. If your company has a board or an eventual buyer, that question is already scheduled.
Private equity gets asked first, so that's where this month's data comes from. Accordion surveyed 150 technology and AI operating partners at PE sponsors about the finance functions inside their portfolios. 41% are scaling AI across multiple companies with no operational playbook, and only 29% describe their firm as systematizing or leading.
75% of those companies arrived at acquisition unprepared or only partially ready for any of it.86% of these operating partners expect buyers to pay a premium for AI-enabled finance capability within two years, and 44% say buyers are already asking in diligence without paying for it yet. Conviction is running ahead of price.
The deployment that worked and left no evidence behind it is the one that costs you at exit. 67% of firms measure hours recovered. 29% put AI impact in front of a board.
🏔️ The Mission: Building the evidence a board or a buyer will accept
- We'll work the measurement problem directly: which AI metrics connect to EBITDA, and how a company gets there without starting over.
- We'll examine why only 14% of portfolio finance functions have crossed from back-office automation into real decision intelligence, and what the rest are paying for instead.
📊 The Format:
- The benchmark, fast: Five findings and the numbers under them, including the ones that don't hold up.
- Translating it out of PE: Sponsors run this test on a clock, so the pressure shows up there first. We'll take what it exposes and apply it to companies with other kinds of owners.
- Cross-pollinated debate: Operators compare what agentic finance already does in production (58% report automated covenant monitoring, 44% report AI-drafted board packages) against what their own governance can defend today.
🤝 Who Should Attend:
- Enterprise Executives: Leave with the measures a buyer or board will scrutinize, and an honest read on which ones you could produce this quarter.
- Founders & Builders: See what sponsors and portfolio CFOs are buying, and where the 47% assembling AI tools case-by-case stall out before anything compounds.
- Product, Data, and Operations Leads: Compare notes on the constraint everything else runs into. Poor data infrastructure ranked first among all barriers by a wide margin, ahead of talent, legacy systems, change management, and budget. Most of it arrives at close and gets fixed while the books are closing.
📬 The Prep: This is a working session, not a lecture. Read the report here. Bring your perspective.
👉 CLICK HERE TO RSVP FOR FREE 👈
2 attendees
Past events
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