Why I build community
Some community things have been quite good for me. EA Bahamas (a two-week retreat to Bahamas, during peak FTX) was responsible for me becoming friends with a wide swathe of EA folks; Future Forum was responsible for me meeting my wife.
Things that suck about building community
You capture so little of the value you create. Some of the highest value things that come out of running community events are in introducing people to each other. Finding people their spouses, their cofounders, their employees. However, your ability to get paid is nowhere proportional to the value of the things you produce.
As an example, Taco Tuesday, a weekly house dinner I’ve hosted for the last few years, is responsible for two different founders meeting their cofounders: one through YC, one funded by a16z, both valued at $20m+. For this public benefit, the startups have offered to cover the cost of some events.
Why does community building monetize so poorly? Some speculations:
- Events are in high supply, cheap and plentiful. The norm is that events (parties, talks, workshops) are free. Events typically market to individuals, and “free” is too compelling of a price for individuals; this makes it harder to charge. Events also benefit from network effects, so you want to make it cheaper for the first set of people who commit, but it’s harder to convince people to
- Low counterfactuality: perhaps in fact, the people you’ve intro’d would have met in some other context. Or they would have met equally good people in some other context.
- Lack of pricing power: once you’ve made the intro, there’s not much gatekeeping left.
- Anchoring to low apparent costs: Any particular connection made within your community doesn’t appear like it cost a lot to the organizer to create. Community building is super hits-based.
- Community members value their own contributions to a connection highly, and discount the things going on in the background that made the connections possible. (There’s a scene I like from Modern People, where Connell’s mother reminds him to be grateful to his girlfriend Marianne for his job. He’s confused - “Marianne’s friend is the one who hooked me up” - but his mom reminds him that Marianne is the one who introduced them)
- Asking to capture value is gauche; community building doesn’t work if it’s very transactional.
Community building is not very “high-status”. It’s a backstage role, where you’re deliberately putting the limelight on the others coming. It’s almost never the case that someone who builds community gets invited to talk about it on a podcast.
There’s also the problem of “those who can’t do, teach” — that is, the best researchers/engineers/technical folks are busy doing technical work, so the ones left building the community are those who are less good. (You would also expect that the best technical folks are not the the best community builders, just due to the tails coming apart.)
This also leads to an evaporative cooling effect — I’m hesitant to call myself a community builder because I don’t think super highly of the typical example of the reference class.
Q: Why is this less true for a “CEO of a company” vs “builder of a community”?
Community building warps your sense of normal human relationships.
If you have any amount of success at building community, you quickly run into the problem where you now know many more people than you can fit into your head, that would be normal under Dunbar’s number. I often find myself
I imagine these are similar problems to what creators and influencers face wrt parasocial relationships.
How to make community building work?
My favorite example of successful community-building is YC.