Everyone loves a good founder story. But what about the person who builds the stage, the infrastructure that connects those founders with investors, mentors, and technical validation long before the spotlight hits?
For thousands of early-stage entrepreneurs navigating the chaos of AI startups, that person has quietly been Yuyan Duan.
A product leader by training and a systems thinker at heart, Yuyan isn’t running a VC fund or heading a traditional accelerator. Instead, she’s architecting something far more fundamental: the community layer that actually helps founders succeed. And in a world overflowing with demo days and hype panels, that’s exactly what’s been missing. “Startups didn’t need another list of AI tools,” Yuyan says. “They needed spaces to test ideas, refine their thinking, and build with people who spoke the same technical language.”
That’s the idea behind AI+, the community ecosystem Yuyan founded in the wake of generative AI’s boom. Over the last year, it has hosted more than 150 events, drawn over 2,000 founders and engineers, and helped launch or accelerate multiple startups, some of which have gone on to raise funding from SoftBank Vision Fund, TSVC, and other top-tier investors.
Image: Yuyan addressing a Tech Founder audience in an event
AI+ isn’t an accelerator. It is not a coworking space. And it is not an online Slack group. It is something more deliberately constructed: a platform for structured collisions, where LLM builders meet system architects, where researchers engage with GTM operators, and where early-stage founders can test their ideas against real-world constraints before taking them to market.
The format reflects Yuyan’s product background. Every event is a node in a broader learning system: a panel discussion might lead into a demo day, which then segues into a founder roundtable or investor Q&A. Each theme, whether agent orchestration or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), is curated with the depth of a university syllabus and the urgency of a startup sprint. “We weren’t here to put on a show,” Yuyan explains. “We were here to answer the questions no one else was asking, like how you evaluate agent reliability, or design for user control in generative systems.”
That depth made a difference. At least 10 startups that demoed at AI+ events have since gone on to secure significant funding. Founders routinely credit AI+ not just for exposure, but for helping shape their product-market fit, rethink go-to-market strategy, refine technical messaging, and connect with mentors who actually understood the frontier.
Through the 150+ AI events Yuyan hosted, what she saw missing in the early-stage ecosystem wasn’t passion or talent, it was infrastructure. “The startup journey is filled with noise,” Yuyan says. “What early-stage founders need is a signal; someone to help them stress test their ideas, find the weak points, and connect the dots between research and revenue.”
So she built exactly that. Through AI+ panels at SF Tech Week, collaborations with Plug and Play, and recurring demo sessions throughout the Bay Area, Yuyan created a launchpad for founders who didn’t fit the mold. Founders who were deep on technical substance, but light on insider connections or polished pitch decks. Founders who didn’t need another listicle, they needed someone who understood the architecture of a working company.
The scope of her influence has extended into academic and legal circles as well. Yuyan served as a judge and advisor at Jessup University’s Startup Co-op Program, where she mentored student teams building technical solutions in AI and SaaS. She also judged at the Stanford Law School Hackathon, where her input helped guide projects at the intersection of AI, law, and policy, one of the field’s most urgent frontiers.
And when she saw a gap in educational resources for founders entering the generative AI space, she filled that too. Yuyan authored “AIGC: From 0 to 1,” one of the first book on post-GPT generative systems. The book has since been distributed widely across Asia, cited by founder bootcamps and featured in publications like Tencent News and Springer.
All of this, AI+, the book, the judging roles, the product systems, is built around a single principle: communities are systems, and they need to be designed with the same care as any software product. “You can’t throw smart people into a room and expect results,” Yuyan says. “You need intentionality. You need scaffolding. And you need trust, especially in AI, where the learning curve is brutal and the stakes are high.”
That trust shows. AI+ isn’t a branding exercise, It is a working platform. And as the next generation of AI founders move from demo to deployment, they’re increasingly doing it with guidance, clarity, and community, all built by someone who knows what scalable systems really require.
For Yuyan, AI+ isn’t just a community. It is the missing layer of the startup world. And she’s not waiting for someone else to build it.