Novus Lore
If you've heard about us, Novus has grown quite fast within half the year. If you're new — Manveer and I host a local meetup called Novus every Saturday in Vancouver, co-working for three hours and demoing for the last thirty minutes.
Origin Story
The past 10 years I've been part of various founder communities — TiE Vancouver, EO, LOI, and various incubators/fellowships. I even joined the team at TiE Vancouver as their first operational person, and today I moderate monthly meetings at EO. But even then, there was something missing. Often times, I felt out of place — or there wasn't enough being done to build a sense of belonging in these collectives.
Back when Manveer was starting his company, Scholar, I proposed the idea of getting founders together — and just like that, we became co-hosts of Novus.
At first, we called it Young Founders Club — gathering founders under the age of 30. We played around with YC's logo by adding an F between the Y and C. We were pretty silly. We had maybe 8 people max, with random people from Eventbrite at the Homekey before they shut down. It wasn't “successful” by any terms. We're grateful for Jonathan Kim for being the first person to provide us space.
As summer rolled along, we joined Saturdays in Vancouver — Vancouver's early form of Socratica. For quite a few weeks, Manveer and I were the only ones there. We'd just sit in UBC classrooms, chugging away at work. We were pretty lonely, ngl.
Mid-way through the summer, Arielle from Peko started hosting more events and was one of the early advocates that rallied for meetups and fun events. This led to Donald hosting people, which spread through X (where Meatbox was founded, btw). Saturdays in Vancouver was going through a period of change as Arielle was leaving — and we decided to branch off from what was going to be the future of Atelier to set an intentional group leaning into startups.