Courage Needs a Place: How the Young Founders Network Turns Ideas into Startups

Guest Post on Gründungsmonitor: Our next guest post features a “Startup Initiative Spotlight” on the Young Founders Network, an initiative from our network. We’ll start by introducing what they stand for and why Germany needs more young founders.

More Than Just a Network: What We Offer Young Founders

When did you have your best idea? Probably not at your desk. Rather, it was during a conversation with friends, in a lecture, or at an event where you struck up a conversation with a stranger. An exchange turns into an idea, and an idea sometimes even becomes a startup.

But this is exactly where many people give up. It seems impossible to start a business without capital, without professional experience, and without any safety net. How can you make your first connections in the startup community if you don’t even know where to start?

If you don’t even know where the startup community begins, you often can’t find a way in at all. While there are plenty of funding programs and events in Germany, the hurdles often seem higher than they actually are. This stifles precisely the ideas we need most right now.

That’s where we come in.

Community Instead of a LinkedIn Contact List

We’re the Young Founders Network (YFN), a nonprofit community with over 2,000 members under the age of 25. Our goal is simple: to make the transition into entrepreneurship as easy as possible—whether someone has already launched a startup or is just starting to mull over their first idea.

For us, networking doesn’t mean exchanging profiles and then never hearing from each other again. We bring together people working on the same topics so they can help each other grow. To that end, we have topic-based discussion groups, such as those focused on robotics, e-commerce, or design.

By young people, for young people

What makes YFN special: We’re led by people who are right in the thick of it themselves. Our volunteer board consists of five areas, each overseen by a board member: Nils Heck (Partnerships), Navid Mosaffari (Marketing), Luca Kammerer (Operations), Katharina Zieße Suari (Education), and Sophia Sowa (Community). Not a generation that talks about young founders—but one that is part of that very community.

What We Offer

Exchange alone doesn’t build a company. That’s why we give our members the tools they need to turn an idea into a real startup:

- Crash Course in Bureaucracy: Easy-to-understand tutorials that untangle the paperwork—from the initial registration to the questions that often trip up many founders.

- Incubator: Support for anyone who wants to seriously develop their idea. Structured, with feedback and the right people by your side.

- Legal Support: Access to experts for the legal questions that inevitably arise when starting a business.

- Startup in School: Our program that brings entrepreneurship education to schools across Germany—because the entrepreneurial spirit starts early.

In addition, through our partnerships, we offer free or discounted tools that make starting a business noticeably easier.

Local Chapters: Community Right on Your Doorstep

Our interactions don’t just take place online. Through our local chapters, members of the startup scene in their city can connect and get to know each other right there in their community. Whether in Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin, Münster, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Mannheim, Karlsruhe—and many more cities—our chapters regularly host meetups, workshops, and events where high school students, college students, apprentices, and young professionals meet investors and mentors from the region.

This fosters connections that strengthen the local ecosystem and lead to real projects.

From Meetups to Conferences

The local meetups are just the beginning. Several times a year, we bring the entire network together. The focus isn’t on the presentations, but on the conversations in between. Our highlight is the Young Founders Conference (YFC): around 1,000 young founders, investors, and entrepreneurs from all over Europe in one place. Keynotes, workshops, conversations on equal footing—but above all, the space to develop your own ideas and grow as a person.

Courage Needs a Place

Germany needs more people to start businesses. More capital and new technologies alone aren’t enough. It needs spaces where young talent can come together, think bigger, and find the courage to take the leap into the unknown. One example was YFN 10.0 in Leipzig. When the entire network comes together, it’s the conversations between program sessions that matter most.

If you don’t want to live by the motto “play it safe for now,” you’ve come to the right place.