It started with a problem that wouldn't go away.
Dirk Minnebo spent 10 years in go-to-market consulting. He knew hundreds of founders across Europe. Smart people. Ambitious people. People who should know each other. But they didn't.
Networking events were exhausting—loud rooms full of elevator pitches and business card exchanges that led nowhere. LinkedIn messages went unanswered. The founders who actually needed to meet each other kept missing each other.
So one night in June, Dirk opened his laptop and typed a sentence into Anything:
"Make an app that matches founders for dinner."
The Fantasy Football Website
Dirk couldn't code. In high school, he'd tried once—built a fantasy football website for his friends during Champions League season. It was just HTML. No databases. No backend. Friends had to email their teams, and Dirk manually updated their public pages.
It worked, sort of. But it was intimidating enough that he never went further.
When no-code tools like Bubble and Squarespace arrived, he tried again. The most he could manage were marketing landing pages. Building real apps? That wasn't for him. Or so he thought.
Then came AI coding tools. He tried a couple. They either lacked the features he needed or felt designed for technical people. Still too intimidating.
The First Prompt
Then he found Anything.
Within minutes of his first prompt, something shifted. The result was meters better than what he expected—not inches. The mental bar moved.
"It made me very curious," Dirk says. "Could I actually make a complete platform like Founders Table?"
Within a couple of days, the first version was live.
"It feels like I'm in a fusion world of Harry Potter and Apple where the magic just works."
The Build
June turned into July. Dirk built Founders Table between consulting calls.
Google Auth. Done.
Custom matching algorithm to pair six founders per dinner based on carefully crafted questions. Done.
Payment processing. Done.
He launched founderstable.club in August.
Then he kept building.
The Litmus Test
One of Dirk's best friends used to be the CTO of a startup they ran together. Impressing him became the litmus test.
He showed him Founders Table.
His friend was so impressed that some of his programmer friends started worrying about their jobs.
Other friends didn't always believe Dirk had built it himself. They wanted to learn how to do it too.
The Encrypted Chat
One night in early October, after his first successful dinner, Dirk realized something: the founders wanted to keep talking. WhatsApp felt wrong—too casual, too permanent in your personal phone.
He opened Anything at 9 PM.
"Build an encrypted chat app for Founders Table members."
By morning, it was live.
The Dinner Game
The feedback from that first dinner was clear: 100% wanted to come back. But they had one request—some structure to go deeper faster.
Dirk was eating breakfast when the idea hit him.
He opened his laptop. Thirty minutes later, The Dinner Game existed: a database of 100+ questions designed to spark real conversation. The kind that gets founders talking about the actual hard parts of building a company.
"What's the worst advice you ever followed?"
"When did you last change your mind about something fundamental?"
"What do you wish someone had told you three years ago?"
Between bites of toast, Dirk had built a product.
The Bootcamp
A week later, someone asked him how he was building so fast.
Then another person asked.
Then five more.
Dirk realized he was accidentally becoming a teacher.
He needed a way to track student progress. Twenty minutes later, he had a custom Kanban board. Built it while waiting for a consulting call to start.
Four apps. One month. Zero developers.
October 28th
The second Founders Table dinner is tonight.
The waitlist hit fifty people last week. Founders from tech, finance, healthcare, retail—industries that normally stay in their lanes—all signing up to sit at the same table.
Dirk is in his apartment in the Netherlands, making final tweaks to The Dinner Game questions. The chat app is humming quietly in the background. The Kanban board shows three new bootcamp students starting next week.
His phone buzzes. Another signup.
The Shift
"Now we are in super early stage, which is awesome," Dirk says. "The technical part is not so much the challenge or the risk. I know I can make what I need to make, which gives a lot of confidence."
He remembers the version of himself from eight months ago. The one with a drawer full of ideas and no way to execute them. The one who thought "I should find a technical co-founder" every time he saw a problem worth solving.
That person is gone.
Now he's excited about building the community and watching the connections happen in real time.
The Future Is Here, Unevenly Distributed
Right now, somewhere, someone is looking at a problem in their industry and thinking: "Someone should build something for this."
That someone is you.
You don't need permission anymore. You don't need a computer science degree. You don't need to spend six months learning to code. You just need to stop waiting.
Dirk is hosting dinners across Europe. Teaching people to build. Watching software change hands in real-time.
The founders at his tables aren't asking "Can this be built?" anymore.
They're asking "How fast can I ship it?"
The next Founders Table dinner is October 28th, 2025. Join the waitlist at founderstable.club
Want to build like Dirk? Start here.
