Community is my Superpower, 7 Tenets That Guide Me

…Community leadership is like laughter—authentic laughter is contagious, and others will join in, but a fake laugh is awkward, and no one wants really wants to join in.

I’m flying from SF to Austin on the “nerd bird” to SXSW interactive, I have 2 speeches and 2 AI hackathons to judge, my SXSW schedule here. Ya know, the best events are actually communities, which brings me to what I’ve learned about communities:

The 7 Tenets of Community Leadership I use to lead and serve large communities:

1. Get in Front of a Parade: I anticipated the acceleration of the GenAI topic and got in position in spring 2023, before market demand surged.

2. Servant Leadership. A community leader should consider the ecosystem as a whole, rather than prioritizing their own needs, I like to say “take care of the community and everything will be fine”

3. Offer Sequential Content or Events: Let people know you're thinking ahead by providing a series of related content or events.

4. Enable Real-time and Asynchronous Communication: Offer ways for members to stay in touch, catering to their varied schedules and preferences.

5. Carefully Curate Membership: Select members judiciously to foster a culture that aligns with the community's values and goals. Establish rules to protect members and maintain the community culture.

6. Showcase Community Leaders: For instance, I feature ten founders at no-cost at Llama Lounge who are eager to demo their projects in front of peers and investors, which leads me to:

7. Advance to multi-sided marketplaces: understand how bringing together different cohorts from around the market together can unify the community, for example I focus on founders, but I also bring in many VCs, and service providers who help all parties.

As an investor, community offers a significant advantage that helps me lead, see ahead, and add substantial value to the founders we back, but it’s not new to me.

Community has always been integral to my career, here’s my timeline:

• Early in my career, I was the first full-time community manager at a large tech company, during web2, woah you’re prob thinking I’m old*

• In 2010, I initiated Community Manager Appreciation Day to celebrate community leaders within established organizations. (See Wikipedia entry).

• At Forrester and as a co-founder at my first company, Altimeter Group, I was the first industry analyst in the world to formally include online communities in my research coverage.

• My second company, Crowd Companies (Wired features my launch), during the sharing economy era, was a paid community for corporate executives, with select startups invited to participate at no cost.

• I've been a keynote speaker at community conferences, like CMX, the premier conference for professional community leaders.

• I've led in-real-life (IRL) events in Silicon Valley for twenty years, starting in the Web2 era.

Today, I’m leading a few communities:

Have you heard of the community I lead, Llama Lounge, a large AI event in SF and in Palo Alto with over a thousand in a slack group, I also host events for one hundred VCs, including at the top of the Transamerica Pyramid, and we stay in contact in a private chat group.

I’m passionate about collaborating with my community to identify the next trends, discover who the best founders are, support them, and then rapidly and thoroughly integrate the founders I back into my existing ecosystem.

Community isn’t just a new strategy; it’s been a key element in everything I’ve done throughout my career, it also sets me apart from other investors. Which leaves me to thank YOU for being part of my community.

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*No one calls me young anymore, and I’m at peace with that. I’m a middle-aged business dad who has been around since the dotcom era, but I am brimming with energy. It stems from sweating at 5am CrossFit 3-5 times and being passionate about new technologies. Lastly, CrossFit is a fantastic community too, if you know, you know.