One tap and you were connected

Outsome Founder Sprint. November 24, 2025, 5 p.m. A room full of startup founders, three hours to network. The whole point was to connect. To make those connections happen more naturally, zzzarit put an NFC sticker on the back of every name badge.

Outsome and the Founder Sprint

Outsome is a US-Korean startup accelerator founded by Peter Shin (신동엽). With a network of over 20,000 founders and mentorship from YC founders and Silicon Valley VCs, Outsome helps Korean startups build the traction, positioning, and connections they need before entering the US market — no equity, no revenue share.

The Founder Sprint is Outsome's flagship program: a four-week, in-person sprint in Gangnam designed for early-stage founders. The people in the room on November 24 were the kind of founders who'd gone through that program — connected by a shared journey, and ready to build more connections with each other.

The networking problem

Founders are good at building things. Working a room is harder. A networking event moves fast — many new faces, limited time, and the usual friction: reach for a card, hand it over, watch it disappear into a pocket, maybe never to resurface.

Peter Shin's question going in wasn't "how do we get people to talk?" — that part would happen. The question was: how do we make those conversations actually stick? That's the question he brought to zzzarit.

zzzarit's answer: NFC name badges

The answer was a name badge — with one difference. An NFC sticker on the back.

Tap the back of any NFC-enabled smartphone to the badge — no app, no QR scan — and a link appears immediately. It goes directly to that person's company website or digital business card. Same motion as tapping a transit card.

• Paper business cards: exchanged, pocketed, stacked, eventually lost
• QR codes: open camera, scan, tap the link — three steps
• NFC: touch phone to badge — one step, done

How it landed

Founders responded well. The gesture of tapping a phone to a badge was unfamiliar for a second, then immediately intuitive. Instead of reaching into a pocket for a business card, you just reached for someone's badge. That motion itself became a natural way to open a conversation.

And unlike a paper card, the connection didn't disappear into a stack. If a link appeared on your phone, that person's info was actually in your hands — saved in browser history, reachable anytime. The networking continued after the room cleared.

“Just a thin layer of digital on top of something analog. That layer changed the quality of the networking.”

— Outsome Founder Sprint × zzzarit / November 24, 2025