No role felt right. Then he came to FYSK.

"It's rare to say a single event changed your career trajectory, but this one did for me."

👉 Our Founders You Should Know Startup Showcase is NEXT WEDNESDAY. If you haven’t reserved your seat yet, RSVP NOW — we only have a few spots left.

Earlier this week, we woke up to a pleasant surprise from a community member. Loren Phillips made our day when he shared his experience with Founders You Should Know online.

“It’s rare to say a single event changed your career trajectory—but this one did for me.”

If you’re an engineer on the fence about attending our next showcase, we recommend reading his new Substack article documenting his 6-month experiment finding the right startup and how Founders You Should Know played a big part in that journey.

Here are three takeaways we loved from his article about finding meaningful work.

1. Ditch the formulas. Go meet people.

Loren spent the first few months of his job search meticulously documenting startup metrics to calculate a “fit score”. Turns out, companies with perfect scores still didn’t feel like a right fit.

Why? Culture can’t be quantified. Raises, product launches, and ARR can’t capture how the team collaborates or whether you’ll want to work with the founder everyday. A quick convo with the team can tell you far more than a perfectly weighted fit score can.

“I had spent six months building a rigorous spreadsheet to evaluate startups, only to discover that finding the right fit required abandoning quantitative analysis and learning to trust qualitative signals—signals you can only get from chatting in person.”

2. Warm intros make all the difference

Loren didn’t actually speak with Coval’s founder at Founders You Should Know. But the event put Brooke on his radar; our curation process gave him a high-quality signal that what she was building was something special. When they met again at a voice‑AI event, Loren felt ready to say hello. That hello led to an interview… and we know how this story ends.

This is a familiar story for many Founders You Should Know attendees: they come to the show, and a founder catches their attention. They might not join the company right away, but months later they spot a role that feels like the right fit, or the founder reaches out to reconnect about something they discussed.

The efficiency of warm introductions compressed what could have been months of evaluation into weeks….When someone I trust says “you should talk to them,” they’re not just making a connection. They’re pre-filtering for values alignment, culture fit, the intangibles that no spreadsheet captures.

3. Focus on calibrating your taste

The more people you meet, the sharper your sense becomes of what you like and what you don’t. That’s why we encourage going to events and connecting with others, even when you’re happy in your current job, especially if you’re curious about what else might be possible.

Taste comes from the practice of meeting people. Which types of founders do you find yourself drawn to most? What spaces capture your attention? And who hosts the events that lead to the richest conversations for you?

Not because you’re “networking” in the gross sense, but because you’re calibrating your instruments. You’re learning what good looks like, what fit feels like, what problems make you lean forward instead of check your phone. You can’t vibe check anything if you don’t know how to pick up on good vibes.

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🌟 Getting FOMO? Want to go to “the most underrated startup event in San Francisco?” RSVP NOW for next week’s startup showcase — full lineup here.