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A Montessori School for the Ambitious

Builders Club is infrastructure for high agency. Here's why Waterloo needs it now.

Jesse Rodgers, September 23, 2026

Builders Club is, by design, a Montessori school for the ambitious.

There's no curriculum and no cohort, because truly high-agency people don't thrive in structured environments. They leave them. So the work isn't in directing anyone. It's in the careful design of the environment: who's in the room, what's within reach, how easy it is to find the person a few steps ahead of you. Get that right and people pick their own work, build their skills by doing it, and pull each other forward.

That makes Builders Club infrastructure, not a program. It's built for high-agency people and for the people who want to become high agency. It's infrastructure in the sense the best infrastructure investors mean it: you build the road every car needs, and you don't bet on which car wins.

I said this out loud for the first time this week, sitting across from a VC partner whose whole thesis is the unglamorous layer underneath everything else. Their team ran telecoms and chip companies. They don't care which app or agent wins. They care about the network everything has to run on. When I described Builders Club in those terms, the conversation changed. They understood it immediately, because it's how they already think.

Agnostic about what gets built

A road doesn't care what drives on it. That's the part people miss when they lump us in with accelerators.

The highest-agency people in this region are often the ones who looked hard at the venture path and chose not to take it. They run consultancies. They lead technical groups. They build specialized shops, small profitable companies, and research that doesn't fit a pitch deck. Some will raise money one day. Many never will. All of them are building.

Our own applications show it. When people apply to Builders Club, we ask what they're working on. Only half describe a startup or product, and that's counting weekend apps. The other half are consultants and agencies, engineers building inside their jobs or on the side, graduate researchers working on things like superconducting devices for quantum computing, civic tech organizers, writers and YouTubers, and people between things, still figuring out what comes next.

Putting those people in the same room as the founders who are raising is the point, not a compromise. A room of only venture-track founders becomes a room of people performing for each other. A mixed room is where the consultant becomes someone's first hire, and a solo builder's side project becomes someone else's wedge. It's where a second-year student sees ten different shapes a career can take and picks the one that fits.

The second half of the definition matters as much as the first. Agency isn't only something you select for. People learn it by spending time around others who already have it. More than a quarter of our applicants are students. More than a third found us because a friend told them to come. Waterloo's co-op system has always taught agency without saying so. We're doing it on purpose.

The numbers we keep not talking about

The Dominion List tracks US companies with Canadian founders. The University of Waterloo accounts for 258 founder spots on it. The University of Toronto, a school with twice the students, accounts for 129.

That's twice the output from half the size. Waterloo founders have built 212 companies that have raised $37 billion, and eleven of them are worth a billion dollars or more, including Databricks, Instacart, Lyft and Faire. Forty-two percent went through Y Combinator. Every one of them is a US company. Not most. All.

Recency is the part that matters. More than half of Waterloo's companies on the list were founded in 2023 or later. This isn't a history of people who left. It's the current cohort, leaving now.

Last year I wrote the Waterloo Thesis. I argued that Waterloo is the talent engine for Canada's builders, and that the challenge is activating that talent, not creating it. I still believe that. But the stakes have changed. Waterloo isn't just where the talent comes from. It's the front line of the competition for it.

The conveyor moves upstream

Earlier this year I wrote about the conveyor: the built infrastructure that pulls Canadian founders south. The Delaware default, the SAFE template, the US fund that won't lead unless you flip. Founders don't drift to the US. They step onto a belt that's already running.

This week the belt reached back past university.

Andreessen Horowitz is launching the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a school for aspiring founders straight out of high school who haven't gone to college. The first class is about 50 students, tuition-free, selected this way:

"Chosen on proof of work: what they have built, shipped, or earned."Horowitz Andreessen Academy FAQ

Ten founding partners, including Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, OpenAI and Stripe, hope to hire its graduates. Students have to live in San Francisco, which puts them inside the startup scene and gives the firm behind the school first look at promising companies.

Read that again with Waterloo in mind. Learning by building. Real employers in the loop. Selection on what you've shipped. That's co-op, rebuilt in San Francisco a year earlier, with the conveyor attached from day one. Shopify's Tobi Lütke is among its individual investors.

This isn't a threat to Waterloo's prestige. It competes directly with what Waterloo is actually useful for.

The game is iteration

The US isn't winning because of any single program. It's winning because it runs a game of constant iteration. Try a structure, keep what works, drop what doesn't, and connect what survives to capital. The academy is one more turn of that crank. There will be another next year.

Canada has a generalized ecosystem layer, and it does real work. Communitech, Velocity, the Accelerator Centre and the hundred-odd nonprofits across the country form talent, host people and keep the lights on for thousands of early builders. I helped build some of it. But that layer is funded against metrics that aren't outcomes, so it can't iterate at the pace of what it's competing with. The pipeline doesn't lead anywhere in particular. The US picks up the best of what we formed and captures the value. We pay for the formation and get little back.

That isn't a criticism of those organizations. It's a description of a missing layer. Nobody built the layer for the high-performing few and it didn't work. Nobody built it at all.

What the layer looks like

Builders Club is built to create the conditions that make iteration possible here. That means repeated proximity to high-quality people. It means rooms where you can try something on Tuesday and hear what's wrong with it by Thursday. It means peers who reset your sense of pace, and early ownership at the stage where ownership actually compounds.

The pattern isn't new. When we took Creative Destruction Lab to Halifax, I watched founders sit at a table of twenty people, some of them billionaires, none of them in tech. Put founders in front of high-quality people often enough and things happen. Builders Club makes that pattern permanent and local.

There are 1,863 people on the Builders Club calendar. 715 of them brought an idea they were actively building in the past year, and a dozen YC alumni are in the network. Barn Ventures, the fund that runs alongside it, writes $50K cheques before there's a deck. It has seventeen LPs, all alumni or people who add value, and no management fee. It's structured as an index on Waterloo. Four investments so far, three into YC. It's either a zero fund or a 10x fund, and I'm fine with that.

The honest win condition

I don't expect everyone to incorporate in Canada. The blockers are real, and they aren't mine to fix.

The win is that we know who these people are early and the connection stays alive. Some will build here. Some will build in San Francisco or New York and come back with expertise, capital and introductions. Faire is the example everyone reaches for. The fact that there's really only one is the problem.

Right now that connection happens by accident and takes effort. Builders Club makes it natural.

Faster, bigger, here

Builders Club is a Montessori school for the ambitious: infrastructure for high agency that doesn't care what gets built on it, in the place that produces more builders per student than anywhere else in the country.

San Francisco just built a school to do what Waterloo does, a year earlier. We shouldn't answer that by complaining or by commissioning a report. We should answer by moving faster and thinking bigger, here, with the people already in the room.

The road is being built. Come drive on it.