The Builder Series: New Year, New Builders, Real Connections

Builder Series networking responds to a quiet collapse in early-stage trust. While NYC closed $3.2B in seed funding across 520+ deals last year, founders are lonelier than ever. The pipes for capital widened. The pipes for trust collapsed. Algorithms promised efficiency and delivered silence. 30 second conversations. LinkedIn confetti. No memory, no follow up, no real friction. The cost shows up in the data and hides in the rooms where companies are supposed to begin.

That pressure is what The Builder Series: New Year, New Builders, Real Connections responds to on January 15, 2026 in New York City. Dylan Oriundo did not start this to host another night out. Dylan Oriundo started it because transactional networking optimized itself into meaninglessness. Pre-seed founders are building inside ambiguity, deciding whether to bootstrap or raise, whether a co-founder is real or a cautionary tale, whether to keep going at all. 74.6% of the room lives right there, before the headlines, before the decks harden.

The room is intentionally small, 40 to 75 people, application based, every 3 weeks. Mandatory icebreakers. Professional photography. Short spotlight videos. Tapas moving like a social lubricant instead of a distraction. It is not scale. It is cadence. It is repetition. Relationship as infrastructure instead of overhead.

That structure matters because the mix matters. 41.8% founders. 40.8% operators and senior professionals. 17.3% investors and advisors. Not a founder echo chamber. Not an investor cattle call. Operators come to see what is forming before it gets priced. Investors come to listen before companies get loud. Founders come to breathe and test ideas against other people who are actually building.

@Iris Coldibelli anchors the night with a reminder most startup rooms avoid. Product is not the only battlefield. Positioning is. Iris Coldibelli brings 20+ years of strategy from McCann, AKQA, Ogilvy, and @Snova Biotech into a thesis launched January 1, 2026 through @Netra CRB. Women 40+ are the most underestimated economic force in the market. Wealth, purchasing power, decision making authority, culturally ignored. Market inefficiency disguised as invisibility. Founders who understand who they are really building for build moats without realizing it.

The physical gravity comes from @Tavern Community. @Ben Schwartz, with cofounders @Frank Albanese, @Madeleine Cahn, and @Tamara Musulbes, solved what coworking forgot. Space without ritual is just furniture. Tavern built daily structure, curated membership, and community organizers inside underutilized hospitality spaces like @Tempo by Hilton Times Square. Structure beats serendipity when trust is the scarce asset.

The Builder Series sits inside a capital concentrated era where AI eats attention and generalists fade. This is not nostalgia. It is adaptation. Relationships are no longer a nice to have. They are the operating system founders quietly compete on, and January feels less like a calendar turn and more like a decision point where who you build with starts to matter more than what you build next.