Every Thursday afternoon into evening, the Venture Café gathering turns the Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square into the closest thing Boston innovation has to a weekly town square. It’s free and open to anyone, and hundreds show up each week: founders, grad students, investors, researchers, and corporate folks from the neighborhood’s labs and offices.

The programming runs several tracks at once — workshops, panels, pitch sessions, and founder spotlights — plus bookable one-on-one office hours with experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and service professionals. The real engine, though, is the unstructured mingling between sessions, where a hallway conversation can turn into a cofounder, a check, or a job. It suits anyone orbiting the startup world, from idea-stage dreamers to seasoned operators. Show up with a question you’re stuck on; someone in the room has answered it before.