Photo

Start The adventure of new ventures.

Jonathan Nelson likens the Silicon Valley organization he started, Hackers and Founders, to something he remembers from childhood, when his family moved to the small town of Anoka, Minn., from Central America. (His parents worked for a nongovernmental organization.) The Nelsons received a welcome basket with information about the community, including where the local supermarket, hardware store, post office and auto mechanic were located.

“It said, ‘Welcome to Anoka, Minnesota,’” Mr. Nelson said. “It was lovely, and I thought that everybody did that in the U.S. And then years later, I’m having a meet-up in a bar with other hackers, working on my start-up ideas, and there are all these amazing entrepreneurs from all over the world visiting Silicon Valley, coming up to me to ask: ‘Where is Silicon Valley? Where do I go?’ And I thought, who in the world is here for these people? Why isn’t there a welcome basket for them? So I just decided to become that.”

He took a pretty circuitous route to get there, though. Mr. Nelson had been programming since he was 7 but his father talked him out of studying computer science in college. Instead, he became a nurse, and for 20 years he worked in hospitals. During that time, he dabbled with various interests — art, writing, sculpture, interior design, furniture design, computer animation — until he started taking software engineering classes online.

He also started learning about start-ups. “Instantly, I decided that’s what I wanted to do,” he said. “I wanted to be a start-up founder.” He ran into the oft-quoted statistic that only one of every 10 start-ups succeeds, so he set a goal of starting 10 technology companies in 10 years. “I figured that after 10 years, I’d have one that was quite successful,” he said.

Mr. Nelson and his wife moved from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley, where he got a job working three, 12-hour nights a week as a nursing supervisor at a hospital and spent the other four nights programming. “I worked hacker hours, which I had to do if I wanted to build my own start-up in the software industry,” he said. “I was doing that for six months — I was either at the hospital or sitting in front of my computer — and my wife, Laura, said: ‘Honey, I love you, but you have got to get out of the house. You have to build your network.’”

In 2008, he posted a note on Meetup.com about a gathering at St. John’s Bar & Grill in Sunnyvale, Calif., for anyone who wanted to talk start-ups and programming. Five engineers showed up. “We talked for four hours and loved it,” Mr. Nelson said.

That was the birth of Hackers and Founders, which Mr. Nelson says is now the largest networking group for engineers in the world, with 11,000 members in Silicon Valley. It’s also his fifth company in six years. The first was a “Reddit clone for cute cat pictures.” Then came a Reddit clone for economic and financial news. Then he built a database of hospitals and hospital contacts — to be used as a sales tool — but that wasn’t successful either.

His fourth start-up was a search engine for economic and financial news. This one gained some traction, but by then, Hackers and Founders was growing, too. Mr. Nelson chose to focus on Hackers and Founders. The organization now has 80,000 members in 53 chapters in 22 countries, with many of the overseas chapters founded by engineers who had visited Silicon Valley.

“A lot of engineers are allowed into the U.S. for only a few months and they come visit us,” Mr. Nelson said. “We’re kind of an Ellis Island for entrepreneurs coming to Silicon Valley. And then they go home and build a chapter there.”

(He added, “I’d be willing to say that within three years of passing comprehensive immigration reform, we’d have 30,000 companies started in the U.S. by immigrant entrepreneurs.”)

Hackers and Founders is now organizing up to five events a week in Silicon Valley. Mr. Nelson’s biggest challenge is finding space for gatherings. “We try to find someone to host us, like Microsoft,” he said. “They have a 500-person auditorium, and they often donate space and provide the beer and food. Primarily though, we still hang out in the largest bar we can find.” One, Pedro’s Cantina, near AT&T Park in San Francisco, can hold 350 to 400, he said.

About 70 percent of the members are engineers. Some, Mr. Nelson said, come to events “just to geek out with other people doing really awesome things.” For others, the organization has become an early-C.E.O. support group, which led Mr. Nelson to have conversations with Naval Ravikant, a founder of AngelList, Epinons, Vast and HitForge and an investor in companies like Twitter, Yammer and Uber. Mr. Nelson told Mr. Ravikant he was wondering what to do with his growing organization.

Mr. Ravikant met with representatives of 16 of the 64 companies that Hackers and Founders was then advising. “He told me to drop everything that I was doing and start an incubator with eight companies he had picked as our first class,” Mr. Nelson said. “I was really hesitant to do it, because I was still working as a nurse.”

But Mr. Nelson established Hackers and Founders Co-op, a business incubator he bootstrapped with his wife, three years ago. Of that first class of eight companies, two start-ups failed right away because of conflicts between founders, two have been acquired, one is profitable and the other three have raised significant investment capital. The companies include Tripping, Hiku.us and Boutiika (which we wrote about in October). The Co-op took 2 percent equity from each of the start-ups it advised; last year it sold two-thirds of that equity to angel investors for $300,000. These days, the Co-op works with six companies every four months — and takes 5 percent equity from each.

Mr. Nelson said he was putting that equity into a holding company, splitting ownership into a thousand shares and selling half to investors. The aim is to raise $650,000 that will pay the bills and provide dedicated office space, design help, and sales and marketing assistance. Opened two weeks ago, the fund has commitments for $60,000.

You can follow Eilene Zimmerman on Twitter.