👋 Hey, it’s Remy.

The last few weeks have been intense. I’ve been traveling across several countries, including China, to feel the pulse of the scene there and explore where this could scale next. More on that soon.

Behind the scenes, the pace was high. I spent much of the past two months on 1:1 calls with many of you, building partnerships, refining formats, and rethinking parts of the community infrastructure. I came close to burning out at end of last year, not because things were chaotic, but because things have been growing much faster than expected.

I also took time to step back and reflect on what we’ve built. Below are a few reflections on what 2025 taught us, and why I’m extremely excited about 2026.

This edition is about what quietly but undeniably happened in 2025. The next one will be about what we deliberately turn on in 2026.

It’s good to be back writing to you.

Game on 👾

Over the past year, something became increasingly clear.

This community we’ve been building has been strongly resonating with and attracting a very well-defined group of startup founders, operators, and investors. They tend to share two defining traits: a deeply mathematical way of looking at startups and the world, and a visceral appreciation for games and competition.

They naturally think in systems, reduce complexity into rules, incentives, probabilities, and edge, and feel at home inside abstract games, whether those games are chess, poker, StarCraft, or startups themselves.

Games have long been dismissed by parents and media as distractions, or as the opposite of discipline. That judgment was wrong. Among the best founders, operators, and investors we’ve met, excellence at games shows up again and again. Games don’t undermine discipline; they are where elite thinking is sharpened.

For many of us here, two things have remained constant since childhood and very likely for the rest of our lives: a deep love for games, and a visceral pull toward building technology and pushing boundaries. The latter isn’t just a job or a way to pay the bills, even if it sometimes does. It feels closer to a visceral calling. A need to play this particular game at the highest possible level.

What binds this group isn’t background, pedigree, or titles. It’s a very comparable & aligned way of thinking. A shared abstraction of the world. A common set of logical concepts that form our unique language, even though we haven’t given a word to it.

People who don’t share these paradigms often don’t quite get it - they think we’re on another wavelength. Not because they’re wrong, but because they operate using a different mental model, perhaps mainly rooted in emotions, art, or personal experiences over this specific framework driven by logic & structure we evolve in. They don’t instinctively think in odds, compounding moves, equilibrium shifts, or asymmetric bets.

Until recently, there wasn’t really a space for people like us - folks who are wired like that AND have this burning desire to push the technological boundaries of mankind - to meet. Bond. To recharge. To build relationships while building the future.

The last few months made the need undeniable.

In 2025 alone, more than 10,000 of you met, played, and helped each other through these games & this newsletter. Across London, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, and Munich. You came back. You brought friends. You stayed.

This was our thesis going in.

We believed that people who think clearly in games, who are comfortable with uncertainty, and who enjoy competition without ego would also tend to be strong startup teammates. What we didn’t know was how cleanly this would show up in practice.

After running close to a hundred games over the past year, the patterns & what your feedback became hard to ignore.

The same traits that bring people together intellectually also seem to translate directly into how they collaborate. Clear reasoning under pressure. Comfort making decisions without perfect information. A bias toward action. A willingness to take responsibility for outcomes rather than outsource blame.

In games, these traits show up as discipline, patience, and an ability to compound small advantages. In startups, they show up the same way. People who communicate precisely. Who stay calm when the game state changes. Who are hard to shake when things get uncomfortable.

Over time, it became clear that this community wasn’t just bonding around a shared way of thinking. It was also quietly optimizing for the kind of teammates you’d want beside you when building something hard.

That realization changed how we looked at what was forming.

Among all the communities one could end up in, this combination turns out to be rare. Not because it was engineered deliberately, but because it emerged naturally from the filters we put in place.

Below is a small, non-exhaustive, and anonymised sample of the kinds of people who showed up this year. I also added a selection of quotes from the games feedback.

One of the clearest signals from 2025 was how many of you reached out offering to help beyond simply showing up to games.

As the community started to take shape, a surprising amount of energy emerged from within it. People offered to run games in new cities, mentor early-stage founders, host retreats, make introductions, open networks, and support others financially or operationally. Not because they were asked, but because they recognized something worth contributing to.

We also spent time speaking with a wide range of startups, funds, and technology companies who were curious to be involved. There was genuine interest and goodwill, but it became clear that we hadn’t yet built the right structures to fully harness the energy coming from within the community itself. That wasn’t a lack of intent. It was simply a reflection of how quickly things were forming.

What mattered more was the signal.

The fact that so many of you independently reached out, in different ways, with a desire to help shape and grow this space says a lot about the kind of people who ended up here. It reinforced the sense that this wasn’t just a set of events, but something people felt ownership over.

We’re deeply grateful to the partners who supported what we built this year, including Deel, Google, Canva, Dawn VC, Airwallex, WeFunder, PT1, Amazon Web Services, incident.io, sequel, Attio, and many others as well as the MANY individuals who contributed quietly and consistently, e.g. Ben Share, Tom Charman, Zefi Henessy Holland, Brandon Arvanaghi, Anaïs Cimbidhi, Alexander Christie, Michael Brod, Burhanuddin Pisavadi, Yabing Wu, Andrea Guariglia, Rami Habib, Ilia Zintchenko, Tidor Vlad Pricope, George Kailas, Philip Bossonney, Marcello Melandri, Lukas Koebis, Aleksander Misztal, Tobias Wagner, Kerem Karadag, Zach Resnick, Anthony Dann, Yavuz Ozgun, Jamesin Seidel, Lotanna Ezeke, Ali Attar, Jay Kumar, Eito Miyamura, Misha Jessel Kenyon, Henry Moulton, Norbert Podsadowski, Matthew Schkolnick, Jacob Fortinsky, Sanjay Goel, among hundreds of others! <3

To those who ran games, replied thoughtfully to emails, gave feedback, helped others without being asked, or simply showed up with the right spirit: thank you.

We read and engage with every single message.

The value here doesn’t come from any single outcome. It comes from concentration.

When you put highly capable, aligned people into repeated games with each other, speed emerges naturally. Signal compresses. Trust carries over. Business moves or decisions that usually take months happen in a single evening

We’ve already seen founders raise money through relationships built here, without formal pitches. We’ve seen people hire exceptional teammates after a single night of play, where signal was clearer than it would have been in weeks of interviews. We’ve seen clients, collaborators, and advisors emerge organically, often without anyone actively looking.

There’s also a social layer that matters just as much. People finding peers to think with, unwind with, and stay grounded with while building demanding companies. That kind of support prevents burnout and makes long games sustainable.

On top of that, more concrete benefits have emerged over time. High-quality introductions. Informal mentorship. Early access to opportunities. Software discounts and shared resources. Small advantages that add up when the right people are in the room.

None of this was tightly planned. It happened because of repeated interaction among people who are both capable and aligned.

That’s why the upside of this community is difficult to fully enumerate. As density and trust increase, the number of ways it can help you grows with it.

Not through hype or promises, but through proximity and alignment.

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Over the holidays, I spent a few days up in the mountains.

There’s something about being in nature, with no signs of technology and nothing competing for your attention, that just purifies the mind and sharpens it.

Simple landscapes. Long walks. Fewer inputs. Better thinking.

A lot of clarity comes back when you strip things down like that. It helped me reflect on what actually matters, what’s been working, and what we should deliberately turn on next.

More on that soon.

Wishing you a strong and healthy start to 2026!

If you want to chat or discuss about anything, hit reply - we read everything.

Feedback, comments, questions - help us iterate & help you win! 🙏🏼

Also, if you know brilliant individuals who think like us here, please…