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Braeden Furgeson

Co-Founder of Venn Social, Founder of Smash It
Braeden Furgeson
Background

About Braeden Furgeson

Social PlatformsCommunity BuildingBootstrappingProduct DesignEntrepreneurship

Braeden Furgeson is the co-founder of Venn Social, a social platform he built with his wife, Madison. It came out of a multi-year stretch of infertility and miscarriage, when Madison joined roughly 20 Facebook groups looking for one person who actually understood her situation and found exactly one. That gap — between being constantly connected and rarely being understood — became the premise of the company. Venn Social is built for connection rather than attention, and the Furgesons funded it themselves, selling their house rather than taking a dollar of outside capital.

Before Venn Social, Braeden left traditional employment, built the experiential business Smash It, and sold it. Venn Social is his answer to what broad topic groups get wrong: they group people by subject instead of by circumstance. Its Circles system filters users into sub-circles by life stage and situation, so a founder just starting out isn't sitting in the same room as someone actively selling their company. The Venn Code states the conduct expectations on the first screen. An Aura score, visible to everyone and starting at 250 out of 1,000, rewards good participation and restricts users who break the rules.

Braeden and Madison joined George Wright III on The Daily Mastermind for a conversation about rebuilding social media around circumstance instead of topic. They covered why one stranger at the same stage of the same journey helped more than well-meaning support from family; why outside investors eventually push a company to optimize for money over people; and how mentor badges let users who have moved past a life stage keep offering perspective to the people still in it. Venn Social is available on iOS and Google Play.

Featured Conversation

Braeden on The Daily Mastermind Podcast

Revolutionizing Social Media with Venn Social
Jun 23, 2026
Revolutionizing Social Media with Venn Social
Braeden and Madison Furgeson explain how Venn Social uses circles and an Aura score to build real connection instead of attention driven engagement.
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE →
Key Insights

Key takeaways from Braeden

01
Shared circumstance beats shared topic.
Madison joined roughly 20 infertility groups and found one real connection — a woman at the exact same stage. Broad topics put a person seven months in and a person on their eighth child in the same bucket. The overlap is the phase, not the subject.
02
Outside money eventually decides what you optimize for.
Braeden and Madison self-funded Venn Social and sold their house to keep it moving. Their reasoning: investors and shareholders push a company toward money over people. Deciding early how much outside influence you'll accept protects the thing you built it for.
03
Most platforms are no longer social — they're attention machines.
Algorithms that reward outrage train users to expect meanness in the comments and push creators toward negativity to succeed. The result is a paradox: people seeking connection land on platforms where being vulnerable is more dangerous, not less.
04
Culture has to be stated before the first post.
The Venn Code appears on the opening screen — disagreement welcome, personal attacks not. The Aura score makes it enforceable: rule breaking lowers it, reporting raises it, and below 50 you lose posting and messaging until you finish a short course.
05
A transparent algorithm removes the guesswork creators live with.
Venn Social documents exactly what content gets surfaced and why on a settings page, and notifies users whenever the algorithm changes. Creators stop reverse-engineering a black box and start deciding what to make on the merits.
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