I have shares in a couple of companies on seedinvest, and there are some other companies like this I've seen but not tried. Source: about 1 year ago

Http://seedinvest.com is a crowd-sourced private equity platform. I put $2k into 10 different companies several years ago through their autoinvest feature (you may be noticing a trend), and so far 2 of them have IPO'd at something like 8x the valuation I paid for. Meanwhile, at least one has been restructured like 8 times down to like 0.1% my original investment. The past is not a predictor of the future. ... Source: over 2 years ago

Communities like reddit, ladder.to, slack, Facebook groups, Next Door, etc. Source: about 1 year ago

Also, a random tip: there is a community called Ladder (ladder.to) focused towards professional growth which has proved a little helpful to me. Source: over 2 years ago

In terms of professional development, ive benefitted a lot from being able to read and occasionally aks questions on r/cscareerquestions and r/FinancialCareers , but I haven't made long lasting connections on reddit. I've started to use Ladder to ask questions with professional development and it not be anonymous, but the community is still small which has positives and negatives. LinkedIn imo isn't a place for... Source: almost 3 years ago