Manifesto

General-purpose professional networks were built for volume. More connections, more messages, more time on the platform. That model works if the goal is advertising revenue. It does not work if the goal is helping a seed-stage founder find a technical cofounder in AI safety, or a healthcare AI startup fill its first product hire.

Founders building in artificial intelligence need context: sector, stage, intent, and a path to a credible introduction. They need to know whether the person they are looking at is actively hiring, whether they have shipped anything, and whether someone they trust can vouch for them. CoStartups exists to provide that context by default, not as a feature you pay for or a setting you configure.

Profiles should tell you what someone is actually doing before you reach out. Are they hiring? Building in stealth? Open to a cofounder conversation? That context should be visible by default, not buried or absent. Ghost accounts, stale bios, and vague titles make a network useless. We surface intent, not just identity.

AI Safety, Healthcare AI, LLM Infrastructure, Robotics, AI for Climate. These are meaningfully different worlds. A founder in healthcare AI needs to find engineers who understand regulated data environments, not just engineers who have written Python. CoStartups lets you filter by what people actually build, not just the job title on their profile.

The best introductions come through people who already know both sides. Cold outreach with no shared context has a low hit rate and a high cost in attention for the person receiving it. We surface mutual connections and degrees of separation on every profile, so you can ask for a warm introduction rather than defaulting to cold.

CoStartups is for people doing the work: founding companies, writing code, shipping product, closing hires, and helping early teams grow. Lurking is fine; creating an account to harvest contacts, broadcast spam, or project a personal brand without adding value is not. We review profiles and act on conduct reports because the quality of the community is the product.

Membership is reviewed before profiles go live. Conduct is governed by clear terms. Data is handled under UK GDPR and explained in plain language, not buried in legal boilerplate. Messages are end-to-end encrypted by default. Security and privacy are not afterthoughts or marketing claims: they are design constraints.

Hiring, cofounding, and advising are high-trust decisions that unfold over months and years, not one-off cold pitches. The network is designed to support those relationships: a shared history, a feed of context, and a clear record of how you know someone. We optimise for the quality of a single relationship over the quantity of connections.

• Engagement metrics that reward outrage, controversy, or spam over useful signal
• Anonymous outreach without accountability or a path to a warm introduction
• Selling member data or using member content to train third-party models
• Features that look impressive in a deck but do not help people build companies
• Growth tactics that dilute the quality of the community in exchange for headline numbers

These principles are not aspirational. They are constraints we have accepted and built around from the start. When a product decision conflicts with them, the principles win. We put this in writing because accountability requires specificity, and because the people who choose to build on CoStartups deserve to know what they are building on.

Read more about how the network works on our about page, or request access to join.