Inheritors 0/3 - Recollections

Dedicated to the people inheriting this country, continent and world.

Filip Nowak · 2 min read

Hello! I am Filip. I am 25 years old. I am originally Polish. I came to Belgium 6 years ago to study and have stayed since. I like fries, Antwerp has a nice river and a cool applied university, and I love Europe - the history, the heritage and the concept of the European Union.

First - to introduce North Star - at this point, we're the biggest AI & Robotics community in Belgium, probably in the Benelux. We want to build out the ecosystem in AI & Robotics - to lower the barrier to entry, to work on meaningful engineering projects, to host cool events that inspire and to tell a story that you can build something from Europe.

We hosted our first hackathon in March 2025 and since then have involved 2000+ builders and have (co-)organized over 30 events. We host a very cool robotics lab in our hangar with support from Port of Antwerp-Bruges.

North Star is different in the way that we don't really focus on big events with expensive catering. I will avoid the feeling of "posh" at all costs. One more thing: I am not a VC, nor am I affiliated with any - which you'll often find behind similar initiatives. North Star is here purely for the love of the game - seeing people build, then come back and tell us what they were able to achieve with our help.

Why? You might've heard of the Homebrew Computer Club, where 2 random Steves met and Apple was born. My goal is to make such clubs pop up in as many places as possible. For such a club, you only need passionate people - which you will find everywhere. They simply might not have a shared space to meet.

After 10 months of working on North Star full-time, I finally was able to take some proper time off. In this time I decided to write down a bunch of thoughts on all kinds of topics related to my professional life and the kind of person I'd like to become. I would like to talk about North Star's journey - what building a community/non-profit/startup has looked like from my perspective so far, and at what point I would be able to say: "I've done everything I could".

I titled it "Inheritors". In 20 years, today's executives, VCs, board members and politicians will fade away - and everything they run will land in your hands, ready or not. This is dedicated to you.

And just as much to the people retiring in those 20 years: the world you leave is the one your children, and everyone carrying your legacy, will have to work with.

I hope you enjoy it!

Inheritors 1/3 - Funding

How is North Star funded? Grants, sponsorships, infrastructure - and the public and private North Star.

Filip Nowak · 5 min read

You might imagine the question I get the most when talking about what we're building: how is North Star funded?

It's not beautiful! It's a lot of hard work. The past 10 months since I quit my full-time have been focused on figuring this out. We don't yet have proper recurring revenue, and it was only recently that I started paying myself enough for rent and instant noodles. But now we have a few more months of runway to be able to figure this out.

Why a nonprofit

By default, communities are incorporated as nonprofits. And if they're not, you should probably wonder why...

But first, what even is a nonprofit? It's a company without owners. No shares, no shareholders, no dividends. It can make money - "nonprofit" doesn't mean "no revenue" - but every euro of profit has to flow back into the mission and towards supporting that mission.

This is why the structure fits communities so well:

• Less taxes
• Volunteers - a for-profit generally can't have people work for free, a nonprofit can
• Neutral ground, which in theory makes it easier to get sponsors
• By law there is no owner to funnel the value to
• Grants, many of which are only open to nonprofits
• There are no shares, it's easier for it to be a continuous effort, since nobody really owns it

What are the cons?

• There are no shares! No equity to sell, so classic external funding - the investor kind - is off the table (but there's a way!)
• The benefit is that I see my face on social media more often now (is it a benefit?)
• Governance slop (formal decision making, statutes, general assemblies - it gets worse with bigger non-profits, for us it's very centralized)
• Non-profit label influences the price - especially since most new non-profits are student initiatives - people expect free work and margins are low
• If you earn too much of wrong kind of revenue you'll get taxed like a normal company

What is the product?

Since funding isn't very clear. What is the product?

Well, the product is the community itself. And a community is built on trust. Aggressive monetization will kill it, and people can smell when you're in it for the money.

What we've found is that all business stems from community. All our deals happened because people simply find cool what we do, even though our "offerings" page doesn't really exist (we're fixing it!!).

But again, this isn't very sustainable. North Star shouldn't become a consultancy, and event sponsorships aren't very high margin. So of course we looked at how others did it: grants, sponsorships, infrastructure.

Grants

The most obvious way is public money, right? Grants are project-based initiatives, and I've heard "you should do European grants" more times than I can count. We've had some success with local grants, but only through the help of AI actually finding them and helping us through the process.

The grants space has a not-so-nice side too. Corporations have entire teams for grant writing and the distribution is not even. From experience, grants work from connections, not from submissions : )

Sponsorships

Sponsorships and partnerships! A topic where I feel like we genuinely could be doing better. I've also noticed it's simply better in richer countries, which makes sense. Caveat: this is just my experience - my circles, my environment, the way I approach things.

It is also a matter of the person on the other side. We've found people who, after one pitch, were so on board with the idea that things moved incredibly fast (you know who you are : ) ). In general, this is probably our biggest blocker from organizing more events - often the risk of finding sponsors is simply too much.

Infrastructure

The most interesting one. Some big communities have grown into infrastructure. AI Tinkerers has a hackathon platform where companies can run their initiatives. FR8 has a huge university, offering space, and has created a symbiotic relationship with VCs. HuggingFace (wait, it's a community??) is a great company built on open source, inherently community driven.

So, out of all the ways community-like initiatives fund themselves - what's the north star for your community? Different people will have different north stars!

Math has to math

Here's a bit of knowledge I don't share very often - the first few North Star event cost me around 5k, even though we had a few sponsors they were never enough to fully cover our costs. This is also why you see so many of these initiatives die. The amount of time to put into this is also a huge cost. It is all a numbers game, and of course - perseverance.

Why does this matter? As a director of a nonprofit, you're playing this balancing game of resources, as basically all startups do. The end goal is to have enough recurring revenue to sustain the base operations and take bigger and bigger leaps, while continuing to execute smaller hops.

If you have this goal, which is not that much actually, you realistically need enough revenue to sustain ~3 people full time. We're making do with less people and less time, but in an ideal world: say you'd be going for around 2k net, that's 4k brutto per person, so 3 x 4k = 12k monthly.

An event might yield around ~10k in the best case scenario, with the average being around ~5k. Lead time is around 3 months. You'd probably want to have everything ready a month before, you'd need to spend time on marketing (or pay for it), prepare catering (better pray that your venue doesn't have a catering contract!), story and content. And you don't want to mix events, just saying.

Something to keep in mind: this is a shot at a professional organization. There are lots of student ones that are just looking at net 0. Compare that to us: we were trying to commercialize these initiatives very hard, but the margin was quite low. Things got easier after an aha moment:

Events are not the business. Events are the distribution engine - the reason people know our name at all.

At ~5k average per event and 3 months of lead time, events alone will never cover 12k a month.

Right now we're having internal discussions around our first GTM role. The biggest question that we will have to first answer is what is the exact product we're trying to sell that scales beyond just sponsorships and events.

So you have to be creating something that's either:

• incredibly valuable, breaking the equation
• easy and repeatable, turning the resource cost down to barely anything
• or something decentralized, perhaps an ambassador system, which lots of initiatives are exploring

Public and private North Star

And so a side business needs to develop. Now we have a public and a private North Star.

The public North Star runs events, tells our story, and utilizes the nonprofit to its limits: volunteers with responsibility, sponsorships in kind and monetary, grants.

And it acts as distribution for the private North Star, which runs consulting (simple, fast), develops internal products (dog-fooding is very important), and strives to spin off for-profits that the nonprofit has a stake in. This lays out the "North Star Foundation" system, akin to Mozilla or Raspberry Pi, where the foundation fully owns the company.

I sometimes get comparisons to OpenAI. I like how Ilya Sutskever put it on the stand: "if there's no funding, there's no big computer." The nonprofit suddenly became incredibly successful, and to keep up with the race it had to raise money. And with raising money come expectations. In Mozilla and Raspberry Pi, the company funded the nonprofit. In OpenAI, the nonprofit needed the capital to be able to pursue the mission at all. You can imagine - there is no playbook for this.

The most promising path for North Star is to be creating spin offs - that can fund the mission. The public North Star builds trust and distribution. The product fuels the public North Star. And the public North Star operates no matter what, with governance of the spin-offs lying partly with the board of North Star.

This is the solution we have so far - of course it's easy to say "just make a successful spin off" and hope for the best.

I would hope that when more money starts going into the non-profit we can start sponsoring other initiatives and utilize this unique positioning we're in of a professional non-profit to uplift others who'd like to run something similar.

Building startups is difficult, and North Star is definitely not the most profitable way to be spending time. But nonetheless, there is meaning in the struggle.

And of course, who knows if this is right. There are no rules and no one knows what they're doing really.

To wrap up, 1/3 - I tried to write down the key paths I see to similiar initiatives really scaling, there is no free lunch - it is still hard work and something that you will most likely figure out only after talking to people and trying things out!

The next part will be about what it looks like running a brand new non-profit. Enjoy!

Inheritors 2/3 - The old world

A journey of perseverance.

Filip Nowak · 2 min read

I talk with a lot of different demographics - students, young builders, professionals, executives, people long into their careers.

Many of them will help out. Some feelings I've been able to identify behind that support:

• What we do is cool, and it resonates with them personally
• They want to be a part of the story and become a part of our network
• They like young people taking initiative
• They want to learn and be kept up to date on what's happening in AI & Robotics

First of all, I would like to thank all the people who have simply believed in us - partners, volunteers, community members, attendees, advisors - without much to offer and with clearly not much experience of running a company. You know who you are and I hope that one day I'll be able to repay this debt.

But there are also some horror stories.

At an event I pitched North Star to someone high up in a similar business and I was told: "Your parents must be rich." Truly, one of the most repulsive things you can hear as a young entrepreneur whose parents, are in fact not rich, right after putting a bunch of my savings into an initiative meant to bring people together.

Another time an exited founder got annoyed because we didn't know who they were - and brought up our non-Belgian origins while at it.

The barrier of not speaking Dutch has also cut us off from some opportunities. This part is understandable, though. Nonetheless I have a bit radical opinions on this - if you're building in tech english is the lingua franca and promotes internationality (Belgium should pride itself as an international hub!! What is going on!), do better.

I hold these memories as something that pushes me forward. It is meant to showcase, that we've had our fair share of struggles. This is also where the name of this series comes from - Inheritors - there's an old world of how things are done, of people who make decisions and hold the power to make or break initiatives. But this old world will fade at some point. I see a future where such initiatives can prosper without having to jump through this many hoops.

A reflection moment

This is a very important part for me, because it's also our strategy for collaborating with people - on which side are you? Will you be remembered as a mentor and supporter?

What kind of a world will you be leaving behind?

I'm nudging towards collaboration here, and while I think it's incredibly important, it's simply impossible to work with everyone. Sometimes it doesn't fit the organization's messaging, more often there just aren't enough resources. And underneath sits a harder question - who will you associate your name with?

Of course I'd love to say - we will support everyone and everything! Bring all you've got! But there is a cost to every association. A community runs on trust, and trust is the one thing you can't rebuild on a deadline. So we choose who we stand next to carefully - and if we ever say no, it's rarely personal.

Now you can flip this, why should a big company work with you?

Lesson learnt the hard way here and a very important piece of advice I got from someone I look up to - create a strong internal sense of value, because otherwise you'll be taken advantage of. Not every company is NVIDIA or OpenAI. You will either vibe with people or not and if you push to be working with the 2nd type then it will not end well for either of you.

Grants

At 25, I am exactly a generation younger than the average Member of the European Parliament, who is 50. Only 4.6% of MPs in Europe's lower chambers are 30 or younger. Yet my generation is not detached from Europe: 43% of young Europeans have already studied, worked, volunteered or participated in an activity in another EU country, and 61% say they are optimistic about the EU's future. We are not yet in charge, but the handover has already begun.

You're either smart or work harder than anyone else, you're probably not as smart as you think - to become smart you need to have gained experience, to gain good experience you need to work hard. There is no free lunch.

Was it a rant?

This is a reflection on a way of living, what drives me and on a way of presenting myself. Which is also a hot topic in our own organization. Because it will attract people and set standards for how we operate, here's a quote I like:

Culture is a thousand things a thousand times.

Founder branding is very important. At this point we can proudly say that we caused communities to pop up and people to further or start their careers in AI or robotics. This means there's a bit of an example we're setting. On a relatively small scale, but nonetheless, I remember each time someone tells me about it (please continue to do so!!! you guys are amazing)

This is the end of this part, it set the stage for what it's like dealing with this old world. Either if you're the inheritor, or the one leaving a legacy - I hope it was something that left you to ponder a bit, about what the future holds and how we can make it a time worth living in. For the next part, I prepared a letter specifically for people in similar situations - young founders, community builders and the people who might feel a bit lost. Read "A path to walk" here.

Inheritors 3/3 - A letter

A path to walk

Filip Nowak · 1 min read

Here's the culmination of this series - a letter to everyone doing their best, especially in this community building space.

Running a community is a journey without a playbook: a group of friends trying to make a bigger group of friends. At some point your ambitions might go beyond one city, or the first 100 people, or you might want to hire some FTEs and of course.

Friction

I dedicate this section to the people who have already left Europe or have made their mind to leave.

This is the right moment about comparisons of US vs EU of Antwerp vs Paris and the list goes on. It is common knowledge that if you'd like to be in tech Sillicon Valley is probably the place to be, or at least to visit. Why is that so? There's a few reasons for this which I outlined in my other braindump The Cost of Connection.

I've heard a few times already that it's sometimes suffocating to be building here. It has caused some people I know to lose all hope and decide to move. I don't know the exact circumstances but either way it's a bit of a shame. I miss you guys!

A stirring flame

I am fortunate enough to be in the middle of European AI & Robotics ecosystem as well as the community building one. It's an incredibly exhilirating time! The continent has been asleep, for quite some time - admin, bureaucracy, fluff - but recently there's an incredible amount of urgency that has spread.

North Star started because there weren't enough hackathons happening in Belgium - we still do hackathons from time to time but nowadays you have something popping up on a monthly basis. On a European level, all these communities are starting to talk with each other and share learnings. You see manifests, speeches and just so much excitement.

I have a saying that I like to repeat to my team, in 50 years I'll be sitting on my wooden reclining chair and telling my grandchildren that back in my 20s I was able to gather and meet some crazy people - and that directly led to your life being better now.

Endgame

Running communities is not a 2 year AI B2B SaaS exit kind of thing, it's a 20/50/100 year play. It's difficult to have tangible ROI on this - I like to say that when you put people with different backgrounds in a room, magic happens. I would advise against talking about "Magic ROI" to your partners, but you will only see this magic pop up when the people who met at your events start the next big thing.

And of course, if you're still aiming to retire your parents early - treat this as a distribution play, help people out and genuinely do your best. My top takeaways from this journey:

• There are no rules, you will talk with humans
• People want to see you win!
• Fortune favors the bold, don't think too much about things.