We started Octum with six curated guilds: Real Estate, Education, Private Markets, Public Markets & Macro, Digital Assets, and Infrastructure & Real Assets. They cover a lot of ground.
But not all of it. Not even close.
The most valuable professional communities are often the specific ones. Not “real estate” but student housing developers. Not “private markets” but secondaries in emerging markets. Not “education” but the administrators building AI policy at community colleges. These are the rooms where the sharpest conversations happen, and nobody could design them from the outside.
That’s why Octum lets members build them.
Found your own guild
Any verified member can found a guild. As a founder, you:
- Define the focus. Name the field or interest your guild exists for.
- Set the rules. Decide how members should engage and what belongs in the room.
- Bring your peers in. Invite the people you already trust, and let the guild grow from there.
Founding a guild doesn’t mean building a community from scratch. Octum gives you the home: discussions, questions, polls, shared documents, events, jobs and news, all in one place. You bring the people and the purpose.
Why only verified members can found a guild
A guild’s founder sets its tone. On open platforms, groups get spun up by anyone for any reason: promotion, spam, or worse. Requiring verification means every guild on Octum starts with an accountable person at its center, and every member who joins knows the community was built by someone real.
Who should start one
You might be the right founder if:
- You keep having the same valuable conversation with the same small group, across scattered emails and calls.
- You work in a niche that broader communities treat as a footnote.
- You run a working group, alumni network, committee or peer circle that needs a better home than a group chat.
- You’ve noticed a question in your field that nobody seems to be organizing around.
Some of the best guilds on Octum will be ones we never would have thought to create. We’re counting on it.
Institution guilds: a private home for your campus
Universities and colleges can go a step further with an institution guild: a private guild of their own, open to their students and faculty through verified institution email.
That makes it a trusted space by design. Only people with an institutional email can join, so students and faculty know exactly who they’re talking to.
Institution guilds give a campus a place to:
- Connect students with faculty around the fields they’re studying
- Share course materials, research and reading lists as documents
- Run polls on everything from program interests to event topics
- Post events, opportunities and news for their community
And because institution guild members are also Octum members, students can join the wider curated guilds too, getting early exposure to the professionals and conversations in the fields they hope to enter.
If you’re at a university or college and want a guild for your institution, email us at support@octum.ai.
Build the room you wish existed
Every field has a community waiting to be organized. If yours doesn’t exist on Octum yet, that’s an opportunity, not a gap.
