- founders
- 18
- M&A discussions held
- 3
- Masuria sailing
- 5 days
- the cohort still meets
- Q × 6
This case is an anonymised composite of three engagements with Series A-C founder cohorts, run on the Masurian Lakes in Poland in 2023 and 2024. The cohort size of 18 founders became our reference number for retreats of this type. Company names and individual financial figures are withheld under NDA; the cohort-engagement and acquisition-discussion metrics are original.
Context
The client
A closed investment network based in Berlin organised the retreat for its Series A-C portfolio cohort. 18 founders, with the typical role being the CEO of a growing EU SaaS startup with ARR between €2m and €35m. The geography was Berlin (6), Warsaw (4), London (3), Stockholm (2), Amsterdam (2) and Tallinn (1). The average age was 37. This was each founder's second or third founder retreat, and every one of them had already been to several typical Y Combinator-style retreats in California or Tuscany.
The pain
The investment network's managing partner framed the pain like this: "we run a retreat every year, but the cohort does not work afterwards. The founders meet once, thank us for the weekend, and disappear for 12 months." That is a typical pain for venture-organised founder retreats: the format is good, but it does not build durable peer relationships. In a post-retreat analysis of the previous programme in Tuscany the managing partner found that only 4 of 14 founders had stayed in active communication after six months — a churn rate that is unacceptable for cohort design.
Why us
Discovery took two weeks — the managing partner was decisive, because the previous Tuscany format had disappointed him. The main constraint was that the format had to be intensive, with no hotels with Wi-Fi in every room (a requirement, to break the "refresh Slack" pattern), and at the same time deliver real value for each founder's business. We proposed Masuria in early September: five days on small lake-cruise Saona 47 yachts, with no hotel overnights, cooking aboard and nightly anchorages in sheltered lake bays. It is a format where nobody can escape to a Wi-Fi zone, and the founders are obliged to stay with the group.
What we did
Stage 1
Brief and route
The route ran through the main part of the Masurian lake system: Mikołajki (base, embarkation) → Lake Tałty → Spychowo → Rydzewo → Giżycko (disembarkation). Distances were short — 8 to 14 km a day under sail — which left time for the daytime programme. Three Saona 47 yachts of 6 people each (4 founders plus 2 facilitators). We grouped the founders onto yachts with an eye to stage overlap (so a Series A founder was not on one yacht with three Series C founders, or he stays silent) and industry mix (no direct competitors).
Stage 2
Logistics
Pre-event accommodation was Hotel Robert's Port in Mikołajki (one night, for founders arriving in Poland early). Post-event accommodation was one final night at Stary Folwark Wojnowo, a historic manor by one of the northern lakes, for the final gathering. Transfers from Warsaw Chopin airport ran as two minibuses, a three-hour drive. A sailing induction for all 18 founders was held on the morning of embarkation — a 90-minute hands-on session in the safe conditions of the harbour. The paperwork was standard sailing waivers and watersports insurance, with no special cases.
Stage 3
Programme afloat and ashore
The programme was built as a cohort format, where each day was devoted to one theme discussed first in a pod (on one yacht) and then in a crossover format (with two yachts rafted together in one bay). Day 1 was "What I do not tell my board." Day 2 was "My hard Q2 decisions." Day 3 was "What is not working in my team." Day 4 was "Where I could use a peer cohort over the next 18 months." The closing day was "Commitments to the cohort" — each founder publicly stated three concrete commitments: a theme they would bring to a quarterly meeting, and a person they were ready to turn to for peer coaching on a specific topic. It is a structured mechanism for cohort engagement that retreats usually skip.
Stage 4
Results and KPIs
Cohort engagement at 18 months: 17 of the 18 founders still meet quarterly over Zoom, plus one annual in-person meeting organised by the investment network. That is a record for the organisation's founder cohorts (the previous retreat gave 4 of 14 after six months). Three possible M&A scenarios between portfolio companies were discussed during the retreat — two went into first-stage discussions through the investment network's partners, and one was signed as a letter of intent seven months after the retreat (the deal eventually did not close for unrelated reasons, but the discussion happened precisely because of the peer trust built on the water).
“I have been to three founder retreats in Tuscany and two in Utah. They were all good, but not one of them turned into a working cohort a year later. Masuria did. I think it is because five days on a small yacht is a format where you cannot hide behind a slide or a conference room.”
Photos from the programme
Lessons
- A cohort size of 18 is not an accident. Smaller (12) is not enough critical mass for a range of industry perspectives. Larger (24) makes it impossible to reach deep peer trust in five days. It is an empirical limit, not a theoretical one.
- The absence of Wi-Fi on the yachts is a feature, not a bug. Founders who arrive hoping to "work in the evenings" leave disappointed. Those who accept the format get the most out of five days. Manage expectations in advance: "you will not be able to answer email for five days, plan for it with your team."
- The structured "Commitments to the cohort" ritual on the final day is the main cohort-engagement mechanism. It is not "a dinner with speeches" but a structured format with each commitment recorded, captured in a shared document and supported by a quarterly reminder system. Without it the retreat stays good but not sticky.
- Masuria is two and a half times cheaper than Tuscany or the Côte d'Azur, but it is even more isolated from tech noise — no other founder tourism, no venture parties nearby. That pristine environment turned out to be critical. A Lake Como with founders on the next yacht would have created a constant signalling field that makes it hard to be vulnerable.
Design choices that worked
A few specific design choices are worth singling out for anyone planning a similar format. First: the facilitators on each yacht were not coaches or therapists but former founders one generation older than the cohort. That builds a peer trust no external coach can match, and at the same time gives the facilitator the internal credentials to push back on the founder rationalisations he recognises from his own experience.
Second — provisioning. Cooking aboard rather than restaurant dining every day is a format that creates a shared work routine (cook, wash, tidy) which levels status outside the structure. A founder with €35m ARR and a founder with €2m ARR peel the same onions on a Saona 47, and that changes the dynamic of the conversations. It is a small detail, but it proved critical to the trust-building that let the cohort discuss M&A scenarios on day three.
Third — the final manor. After five days on small yachts, one final night in a historic Polish manor with a banquet dinner and a local vintage creates a ritual "return to the world." It is not luxury, it is a symbolic transition that helps founders switch back into commercial mode, carrying the cohort connections with them as a durable artefact rather than a dissipating memory.
Financial breakdown
The budget for 18 founders over 5 days was €88,000 excluding flights. Per participant that was €4,900. The high per-participant figure is explained by five days on small yachts (just 4 founders per boat), which gives a high facilitator-to-participant ratio. The split: charter of three Saona 47 yachts — 36 %; accommodation in historic manors — 17 %; catering and provisioning — 16 % (the evening dinners at Stary Folwark and Robert's Port were luxury catering); programme (2 facilitators plus a cohort-engagement designer) — 16 %; logistics — 5 %; insurance and fees — 4 %; contingency — 6 %.
Eighteen months later
The investment network's managing partner wrote us an analysis at 18 months. The cohort is the only one of his network's four portfolio cohorts that stayed active beyond 12 months. Of the 18 founders, 11 collaborated with one another on concrete business projects — joint go-to-market, shared recruiting, technical due diligence on potential acquisitions. That is exactly the category of outcome venture firms spend money on founder cohorts for — peer coaching and knowledge sharing that cannot be bought through consulting.
For us this case became a reference format for every founder retreat engagement that followed. We ran three similar programmes in 2024 and 2025 — two in Masuria for other venture firms and one in Croatia for a private-equity portfolio. The structure (18 founders, 5 days, 3 yachts, a structured cohort-engagement ritual) repeated with minimal changes. It is a methodology, not a one-off experiment.
To close — a lesson for venture partners considering a cohort format for their portfolio. The main success factor here is not the location, the food or the cost, but the managing partner's willingness to sit in the front row and genuinely take part in every session. At the Masuria retreat the managing partner was at every session, missed not a single conversation and publicly committed to quarterly check-ins with the cohort. That is a signal to founders that the venture treats a peer cohort seriously, not as a marketing instrument for the LP newsletter.
A final important point — what did not work. We tried to include one day in Warsaw with a tour of the startup cluster and a meeting with local VCs. The founders saw it as a distraction from the cohort work, and we dropped that element in later retreats. The lesson: a cohort format has to be fully isolated from external networking activities, or the founders perceive the retreat as a conference and switch their communication mode.
