Essay · 7 min read

The importance of a founder peer group

Mathias Klenk · Medium (Passbase CEO) Free Beginner

A founder describing his actual peer group, not a coach selling a framework. Klenk ran a group that met every one to two months for one to two hours, where each person brought a short update and one clear ask, and he is specific about the design choices that kept it useful: cap it around ten, mix backgrounds and stages (seed through Series B), and hold time limits so the meeting does not sprawl. It is the concrete counterpart to a how-to: this is what the room actually felt like, and why it turned into the people he calls when things break.

• Structure every meeting around a short update plus one specific ask per person, so the time converts into help, not status updates
• Mixing stages and functions (engineering, product, ops) beats a room of clones: you get answers you could not give yourself
• The formal cadence is the scaffolding; the real payoff is the honest feedback and friendships that outlast any single meeting