We launched Boardwave last year with the goal of building the ultimate networking community of leaders in the software industry in Europe.

As we enter 2023, we remain dedicated to continuing the expansion of the Boardwave community, which now has over 600 software leaders from right across Europe, but, more importantly, to build meaningful programmes that deeply engage our members and provide significant value in developing your business and leadership. We have so much to tell you about our new initiatives and hope you're as excited as we are about building a stronger software sector for Europe.

Watch the sneak peek video;

New! Boardwave Connect

New ways to connect and build relationships

Boardwave Connect is a powerful new software platform that enables you to search and filter our membership database, to identify fellow members that meet your specific needs. Whether thats someone with relevant experience to answer an urgent business question right now, or you're looking for you a longer term mentor to support your leadership journey. Or simply want to follow-up with a fellow Boardwave event attendee. If you still can't find who you're looking for we have a new Concierge service to curate connections for you. The available connection options are outlined below::

• Expert Connect: If you have a pressing question or issue and you want to find an expert to help you right now. By searching the Boardwave Connect system for people with relevant skills and experience you can find an expert. If they accept your connection request their contact details will be shared with you, to allow you to set up an initial 30 or 60 minute meeting.
• Mentor Connect: Perhaps you want to develop a longer term mentoring relationship and to find someone who can be your guide and sounding board along your journey as a leader. Find candidate mentors and meet to discuss your needs. Clearly we can't guarantee you'll be right for each other, but we can find mentors who are relevant to your situation. Upon accepting a mentor request, the commitment is to at least meet once to discuss your needs.
• Event Connect: Previewed in 2022, for each Boardwave event we provide the list of all people registered to attend. Pre-event, you can review the list and request an attendee connection, with a view to meeting up in person at the event itself. Our members have already made 100s of meaningful new connections this way. The system is also good for making connections as part of post-event follow-up.
• Boardwave Concierge Connect: An adjacent email and hotline to find or curate a connection for your specific solution. You can contact us direct and we will help you make just the right connections.
• Advisor Connect: Coming later in the year, we hope to make the same facilities available for members to identify Boardwave-approved Investors, Advisors and Partners. Helping you identify the help and support you need from the Boardwave ecosystem.

And theres a centralised Connection Centre, to manage all your Boardwave connections in one place. Showing the status of all your connection requests, status updates and upcoming events.

The platform will be particularly beneficial for those of you who are Members in locations or in countries where Boardwave has not yet run physical events. Allowing you to access the breadth of experience that our community of Members represent and are prepared to share, from anywhere across Europe.

New! Boardwave Breakouts

Supporting your leadership journey

Look out for our new Boardwave Breakouts, a programme that we believe can offer transformational value to you on your leadership journey and to your business.

When volunteering to join a Boardwave Breakout group, you will be joined by a curated group of no more than 8 fellow Founders & CEOS. As an exclusive group of like-minded leaders you come together for a facilitated 3-4 hour offsite workshop to talk about your business and leadership development. Through this approach to peer to peer discussion, you'll get fresh perspectives, insights and ideas based on the experience of your fellow group members. And if the chemistry is right in the first trial session, as a group you agree to meet each quarter for three further workshops. Sessions will be moderated & facilitated by highly respected professional coach.

New! Boardwave Workshops

Engaging with our Partners

Boardwave Workshops are a series of workshops being launched in March this year and run by our network of over 40 partners.

Based on the responses to our Membership Survey in December, our Boardwave Workshops will focus on the topics and issues you told us were important to you, and will be investigated in each Boardwave Workshop in more detail than can be achieved in our Debate @Dinner & @Breakfast series. These will start in March, in conjunction with our Partners, who will have a similar interest or expertise in the topic highlighted for that event.

You can browse our events here - many more events will be published over the next couple of weeks so keep checking in!

Core Networking Events & Boardwave Debate @Dinner or @Breakfast

And of course we continue to run the existing BIG networking events and Boardwave Debates @Dinner or @Breakfast, that many of you have enjoyed in 2H22. We expand our Debate series in include Netherlands, France & Germany in 1H23, with more countries under consideration. In total we anticipate running 10-12 Debate events in 2023. And of course our BIG networking events, in the UK which planned to run twice a year.

Our business model is a bit different.......

As a member of Boardwave you will know that we are proudly independent and not-for-profit. We exist to help European Software Leaders build better businesses, enabling the European Software industry to flourish. Our community is free to join for Founders, CEOs, Chairs and Independent NEDs of software companies in the region. The programme being collectively funded by our Partners, who are either Investors, or organisations that supply our sector. So our business model is a bit different.

You are our stakeholders

Rather than shareholders, we effectively consider ourselves to be responsible to our "stakeholders", which are both our Partners that fund our initiatives, as well as our Members that derive benefit from those programmes throughout the year.

As a Boardwave Stakeholder, we would really value your feedback on the plans we have laid out above, how we’re doing, and anything else you would like to see from the community.

We will keep these updates coming, and we hope you find our progress reports, and your involvement in the Boardwave network more broadly, valuable over the coming weeks and months.

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