The community is only as alive as you make it.
You share because it's the right thing. The returns show up later and they're real, but that is not why you do it.
Our manifesto
Our story
Alice joined maze in 2022 and spent her first months calling people. Analysts at other impact funds, mostly. She had questions she did not want to ask internally, and it turned out they had the same ones.
The calls were good. Keeping up with all of them separately was not. So she made a group chat and put four of them in it, not thinking much more about it.
It stayed alive because people used it. Someone would ask about a term sheet, someone else had seen the same one three months earlier. Someone was hiring, someone was leaving. Four people became forty without anyone deciding it should.
What surprised Alice is how little it takes to keep people generous. Give them a room where nobody is performing seniority and they show up for each other.
Then it got too big for one person to run. Zoé joined as co-founder and Junior Impact VC became lateral.
That is how most good things grow.
Read the longer story
What we're in it for
How we work
You share because it's the right thing. The returns show up later and they're real, but that is not why you do it.
The people you meet as an analyst are the people you'll be doing deals with in ten years. Build the relationship now, when it costs nothing and means more.
Rooms work when people are actually present. Not scrolling, not networking, present.
This works the way impact investing works. Quiet, slow, mostly unmeasurable, worth it.