We’re solving the hardest problem in community: the room.
Community platforms got very good at feeds, courses and payments. They never fixed the moment that actually makes a community — two people in the same room who should know each other, and don’t. GCOAT exists for that moment.
Relationships, not reach.
A community isn’t the size of its list. It’s the number of people in it who would pick up the phone for each other. Every feature we ship has to move that number.
In-person provenance.
Nothing in GCOAT exists without a check-in. No discovery feed, no strangers, no profiles to browse. If two people are connected here, they stood in the same room first.
If you can’t attribute it, it didn’t happen.
Hosts spend budget on events and report attendance. We think they should report relationships — which event made which connection, and what it led to.
Built by a community designer who got tired of name tags and hoping.
GCOAT comes from years of building partner ecosystems — accelerators, economic development groups, investors and founders brought into the same rooms, over and over. The pattern was always the same: the event was great, the follow-up never happened, and nobody could tell leadership what the room had produced. So we stopped designing the event and started designing what happens before and after it.
YJ Lin
YJ calls himself a community mixologist. He spent seven years at Dell, where he built Dell for Startups — growing it to 100+ strategic partners across economic development organizations, accelerators and VCs. That work taught him the thing GCOAT is built on: ecosystems don’t grow from lists, they grow one introduction at a time.
MBA candidate at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business (Swartz Entrepreneurial Fellow). Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach. Has spoken at TechCrunch Disrupt, SXSW and Startup Grind Global.
Not sign-ups. Relationships.
We publish community-level results only with the host’s permission, and we never publish totals we can’t trace to a check-in.
Small team, every person has a say.
We’ve all run events. We’ve all stood by the snacks alone. That’s the whole hiring filter.
Community mixologist. Built Dell for Startups to 100+ partners.
Hover or tap a photo to see name, title and bio.
People who’ve built rooms before us.
Community builders, operators and investors who read the roadmap before we ship it.
Pittsburgh and Austin. We build in both and host in both.
Business schools, chambers of commerce, accelerators and the people who run their gatherings.
Small team, every person has a say in the product. If you’ve ever run an event and wished it had gone better, write to us.
hello@gcoat.ai →