Precious on Community

Operators

Sessions

Humans are innately community-seeking. It's why we section off into groups on playgrounds, congregate around political leaders, and build families, biological or otherwise. Communities add value, and membership goes far beyond group identity; it even drives purchasing decisions. From clothing and bottled water to open-source software, community is a powerful tool for company building, and one that no founder should underestimate.

"No two communities are the same," Seedcamp's community manager Precious Oyelade tells us. "Yet there are repeatable steps and actions you can do to make one work." And this is what Seedcamp's newest series, "Precious on Community" seeks to dive into. Over the few episodes, Precious will be interviewing community builders from all walks of life to share findings and document key learnings about how to build an effective community. 

Welcome to Precious on Community.

Shownotes and links:
- Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee
- Precious Oyelade - twitter.com/preciousolade
- Seedcamp - www.seedcamp.com
- Seedcamp's This Much I Know with GORUCK: seedcamp.com/podcasts/this-much-i-know-founder-ceo-of-goruck-jason-mccarthy-on-building-community-and-walking-the-harder-path
- Tribes, Seth Godin - goodreads.com/book/show/3828382-tribes
- How to build a community with people - www.gettogether.world

Introducing Precious on Community: What does community mean?

"If you try to grow too quickly, you miss a really critical opportunity to create the foundation of community and figure out a model that works really well and is repeatable. Don't try to do too much too quickly." David Spinks, Co-Founder @ CMX

A decade ago, the term 'community' didn't strike most as a central component of company-building, even though it was. Fast-forward to today, where the internet has transformed communication in our professional and personal realms, and community managers have become key stakeholders in product, marketing, and business development. David Spinks has been at the forefront of this community revolution. Having launched his first online community at 14 for his favourite video game, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, David now advises community teams at the likes of Google, Udemy, Waze, and Airbnb. He is the co-founder of CMX (acq. by Bevy), where over 20,000 community professionals gather to learn and support each other, and the host of the CMX Summit, the world's largest community conference.

In this episode of Precious on Community, Precious dives into David's background and dissects how founders can use community to grow their businesses. The two community leaders also dig into CMX's SPACES, a model for defining community business value which is further explored in David's recently released book The Business of Belonging.  

One of David's recommendations for early-stage startups? Don't try to do too much too quickly. Focus on one small group and build on top of their loyalty and commitment to the brand.

A few cited examples of community-building in a business-context include:

- Airbnb: www.airbnb.co.uk/d/superhos
- Reddit: www.review.firstround.com/What-to-Learn-from-the-Man-Who-Managed-Reddits-Community-of-Millions
- Skimm-bassador Program: www.theskimm.com/general/skimmbassadors-5er7Uanv5uK6eQYMiOsmaU-post
- Notion Community: www.notion.so/Notion-Community-04f306fbf59a413fae15f42e2a1ab029
- Sephora Beauty Insider: www.glamour.com/story/sephora-beauty-insider-program-updates
- Tech Ladies: www.hiretechladies.com

Links:
Precious Oyelade - www.twitter.com/preciousolade
David Spinks - www.twitter.com/DavidSpinks
Seedcamp - www.seedcamp.com
The Business of Belonging - www.davidspinks.com/book
CMX SPACES - www.cmxhub.com/the-spaces-model
CMX Community - www.cmxhub.com/community
Bevy - www.bevy.com

Precious on Community: The Business of Community

Being a leader is a lonely journey. COOs, due to their incredibly diverse job descriptions, are particularly at-risk of feeling lonely and unable to confide in people within their teams. This is what seasoned COO-turned-CEO Ben Branson-Gateley from Seedcamp portfolio company CharlieHR and Kelsey Traher from Marvel felt. In search of a community that didn't exist, they teamed up to start their own support group. What started as a small pub meet-up in 2015 has now evolved into COO Stories, a London community of over 200 Ops Leaders. From that one community, there is now a collection of different communities across the London & Berlin tech ecosystems that all share the same set of community values, rooted in friendliness, openness, humility, and integrity. 

In this episode of Precious on Community, Precious Oyelade sits down with Ben and Kelsey to discuss how they built COO Stories and what they have learned about building a healthy community during their time together. They dive into the drumbeat of their community, the importance of letting leaders emerge from within, and how the conscious decisions they made on membership criteria, the cadence of events, and platform for communication have shaped COO Stories into a space where members are truly engaged and collaborative. Remember to check out the first and second episodes of Precious on Community in the show notes before diving into this one!

Show notes
Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee
Seedcamp - www.seedcamp.com
Ben Branson-Gateley - twitter.com/gateley
Kelsey Traher - twitter.com/kelsddog
COO Stories - www.coostories.com
CharlieHR - www.charliehr.com
Marvel - www.marvelapp.com
Precious on Community, Ep 1 - https://seedcamp.com/podcasts/seedcamp-sessions-introducing-precious-on-community-what-does-community-mean/
Precious on Community, Ep 2 - https://seedcamp.com/podcasts/seedcamp-sessions-precious-on-community-the-business-of-community/

COO Stories — Building Community through Consistency

The power of community lies in the ability to thrive virtually and scale across borders. Behind these communities, lie powerful and dedicated leaders whose intrinsic motivation to connect and support members creates compounding value.

On the final ‘Precious on Community’ episode, Precious speaks with Erika Batista, VP International at On Deck on managing and growing their communities.

On Deck is an ecosystem of founders, investors and angels providing programmes and creating communities that strengthen each other one after the other. Erika shares her experience of building community through new geographies and finding the ‘North Star’ that resonates with individuals and unites them as a community. She offers advice on striking the balance between doing things that don’t scale, and managing the influx of information that comes when thinking about community as a growing product. Precious and Erika explore the difference between operational failures and experimental failures, and Erika offers some hot tips on how she manages to get her community members always coming back to events. Tune in, it’s a good one.

Show links:
Precious Oyelade - www.twitter.com/preciousOlade
Erika Batista - www.twitter.com/erikabatista
Seedcamp - www.seedcamp.com
OnDeck - www.beondeck.com

Precious on Community: Managing and Growing Community with On Deck

The power of community lies in the ability to thrive virtually and scale across borders. Behind these communities, lie powerful and dedicated leaders whose intrinsic motivation to connect and support members creates compounding value.

On the second-to-last ‘Precious on Community’ episodes, Precious speaks with Hung Lee, Curator at Recruiting Brainfood on managing and growing communities.

Recruiting Brainfood is an industry newsletter for talent professionals that Hung Lee started in 2017 and has grown to 38,000 subscribers. Hung shared a lot of important questions to ask yourself when starting, managing and moderating a community: Have you nailed the community values down by being true to your intrinsic motivation? What does the community member get for showing up? How will you ensure the community doesn’t get corrupted? The age-old question of Platform was raised as Hung shared his preference for newsletters over Slack (naturally), and how setting up a community is as customised an experience as setting up a bar, “you need to go and create a reason for being”. 

Tune in, it's a good one!


Show links:
Precious Oyelade - www.twitter.com/preciousOlade
Hung Lee - www.twitter.com/Hunglee
Seedcamp - www.seedcamp.com
Recruiting Brainfood - www.recruitingbrainfood.com

Precious on Community: Curating a Community Solo with Hung Lee

In this episode we were joined by Josephine Goube, Director of Partnerships & Communications at Migreat. She discussed her background, how she became involved in making immigration easier for companies, discussing Entrepreneur Visa options available to set up a business in the UK.

Listed as one the top 35 women in Business in Britain in 2015 by Management Today, Joséphine currently heads Migreat, the fastest-growing global platform for migrants to get access to information and immigration support. She previously worked at TechStars London and Rainmaking, co-founded the London School of Economics Business Incubator & graduated from the New Entrepreneurs Foundation.

Josephine Goube, Director of Partnerships & Communications at Migreat

In this episode we were joined by Dan Appelquist, Startup ambassador at The Open Data Institute. After discussing his background, Dan talks about Internet of Things, Privacy, and Open Data, giving insights in to how companies should explore data in a new way.

Daniel Appelquist works with the Open Data Institute startup program and the Open Data Incubator for Europe to build bridges with the startup and entrepreneurial community across Europe. Dan is a Mobile and Web industry veteran technologist who has been bringing innovative and disruptive services to market for two decades. He was an early Internet and Web pioneer, and has been a dot-com CTO and later a dot-com refugee. He helped to launch Vodafone Live! in the UK and has been instrumental in the development of industry standards initiatives and ventures such as dotMobi, the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, and device APIs such as the W3C Geolocation browser API. He has been a community instigator, founding MobileMonday London, as well as the Mobile 2.0 conference series in San Francisco and the Over the Air hack days in the UK. He worked as Open Web Advocate for Telefónica Digital and with Mozilla to bring FirefoxOS to market and build the ecosystem around HTML5.


Dan Appelquist, The Open Data Institute

Keith Wallington, Expert in Residence for Seedcamp and ex-Chief Group Officer of Mimecast, joins Carlos for this Podcast to explore key lessons learned from his experience helping operationalise businesses as a mentor, and internally at Mimecast through his multiple C-level roles. Looking at how these processes can be implemented in different organisations for their own benefit.


Keith Wallington, Expert in Residence, Seedcamp

Will Herrmann, Head of Commercial Operations for Hassle.com, joins Seedcamp's Dave Haynes in this podcast which follows Hassle.com's recent exit, having been acquired by Helpling. Following a session with some of our startups, Will discusses everything from scaling company operations following Hassle.com's Series A round to valuations and M&A.

Will Herrmann, Head of Commercial Operations, Hassle.com

Dimitar Stanimiroff, Managing Director of Stack Overflow Developer Insights at Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for programmers with over 4 million members, joins Carlos and Dave for this deep dive into hiring. 

Discussing everything from the hiring process, how to overcome challenges, hiring from within, and how to recruit technical talent if you're not technical.

Dimitar Stanimiroff, Managing Director, Stack Overflow Developer Insights at Stack Overflow

I launched the Seedcamp 'This Much I Know' Podcast back in 2015 with a view to hearing and sharing the exceptional and often unknown stories of many inspirational thought leaders. We've learned about our guests' lives, goals and ambitions as well as their thoughts and first-hand experiences when it comes to building and scaling startups, teams and communities. 

As we near our 150th podcast and following feedback from you, our listeners, we are introducing a new, shorter-form podcast called 'Sessions'. Our Sessions interviews will be hyper-focused on a specific issue, idea or functional area and provide you with digestible content and tangible actions you can take away and apply to your own businesses. 

Naturally, we will continue to do our long-form podcasts for those of you who enjoy the deeper dives and we hope Sessions will be the perfect accompaniment to this. 

So please do tune in and let us know your thoughts along with any 'Session' areas you'd like us to explore or guests you'd like to recommend.

We're thrilled to kickstart Sessions with David Mytton, CEO of Server Density, on why you can't build SaaS without significant funding

In a recent blog post, David argues you can't build a SaaS company in 2018 without significant funding. With increased competition from alternative vendors, investing in product and engineering to differentiate from other solutions is imperative -- and comes at a significant expense. Tune into this informative podcast as David, who received investment from Seedcamp in 2009, explores why bootstrapping a SaaS business in 2018 is no longer viable plus much more. 


Show notes:
Carlos Medium: sdca.mp/2entVR3
Seedcamp: www.seedcamp.com
David's blogpost: https://davidmytton.blog/you-cant-build-a-saas-company-in-2018-without-significant-funding/

Related bio links:
Carlos: linkedin.com/in/carloseduardoespinal / twitter.com/cee
David: www.linkedin.com/in/davidmytton / twitter.com/davidmytton

Seedcamp Sessions: David Mytton on SaaS funding

At $765m Atomico IV is one of the largest venture capital funds ever raised in Europe. But what do Atomico look for in the companies and founders which they choose to back? In this second Seedcamp Sessions podcast, Ben Blume, Principal at Atomico, elaborates on the fund's investment thesis and processes, explaining the high level benchmarks that the firm looks for when investing in entrepreneurs, from technological defensibility to deep domain experience and inherent scalability. Ben describes in more detail the principles which guide's Atomico's decision making process (including 'Now is the Age of the Entrepreneur'), as codified in their manifesto, as well as their appetite for 'visionary and risky bets'.

Show notes:
Carlos Medium: sdca.mp/2entVR3
Seedcamp: www.seedcamp.com
Atomico's Manifesto: http://www.atomico.com/manifesto

Related bio links:
Carlos: linkedin.com/in/carloseduardoespinal / twitter.com/cee
David: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/benblume / https://twitter.com/benblume

Seedcamp Sessions: Ben Blume on what funds like Atomico look for in founders

Rob Moffat joined Balderton Capital in 2009 and was promoted to partner in 2015. He is currently a board director or observer with five portfolio companies: Carwow, Wooga, Nutmeg, Prodigy Finance, and Patients Know Best.  Prior to joining Balderton, Rob worked for Google in London, as a Manager in the European Strategy and Operations team, and for five years in strategy consulting at Bain. In this Seedcamp Sessions podcast, Rob covers the different growth engines which have proven successful for startups -- from paid marketing for companies like Carwow, who need to be rigorous in how they think about acquisition, through to continuous product innovation for companies like Revolut, and partnerships and business development for startups like Zego. Rob also covers how to navigate VC and strategic partnership relations, and how Balderton is thinking about the evolving Insurtech landscape.

Show notes:
Carlos Medium: sdca.mp/2entVR3
Seedcamp: www.seedcamp.com
Balderton: www.balderton.com

Related bio links:
Carlos: linkedin.com/in/carloseduardoespinal / twitter.com/cee
Rob: linkedin.com/in/robmoff / twitter.com/robmoff

Seedcamp Sessions: Balderton's Rob Moffat on startup growth engines

Edward Wray graduated Oxford University to pursue a job at JP Morgan, where he spent 7 years eventually leaving as the VP of Dept Capital Markets & Derivatives. Going on to co-found Betfair in 1999, he was its first Chief Executive until 2003, when he moved to Australia to set up the company’s joint venture. It floated on the stock market in 2010, valued at £1.4 billion and is now one of the world’s largest online sports betting operators, processing more than 5 million transactions a day.

In this Seedcamp session, Ed shares many aspects of his journey, from raising £1m from his family and friends, as no VC was prepared to back him, to important life lessons he learnt through first time mistakes, like trusting your gut instinct. Now Director of Funding Circle, Ed says that when joining as director of a company, it’s imperative that employees live and breathe the business as well as understand that they themselves don’t always have the answers.

Show notes:
Carlos Medium: sdca.mp/2entVR3
Seedcamp: www.seedcamp.com
Funding Circle: https://www.fundingcircle.com/uk/

Related bio links:
Carlos: linkedin.com/in/carloseduardoespinal / twitter.com/cee
Ed Wray: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edward-wray-b25b011/ /  https://twitter.com/edwray21

Edward Wray on scaling up, learning from mistakes and creating liquidity

Hiring and retaining talent is one of the most severe challenges of early-stage companies. Employee stock options are a fair, but often misunderstood tool for aligning interests between early employees. Fortunately, the Director of Talent at Index Ventures, Dominic Jacquesson has combined knowledge from both sides of the Atlantic and created a comprehensive guide called “Rewarding Talent”.

In the podcast, Dominic shares his findings on the differences between European and US startups and gives tips for early-stage founders on building sustainable long-term relationships with its employees. 

“We are very much advocates of giving something to everyone. It might be a small amount, but as you scale, try to make everyone an owner.”

Seedcamp: www.seedcamp.com
Index Ventures: https://www.indexventures.com

Carlos: 
medium.com/@cee
www.linkedin.com/in/carloseduardoespinal
twitter.com/cee

Dominic:
https://medium.com/@domjacquesson
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominicjacquesson/
https://twitter.com/domjacquesson

Rewarding Talent: https://www.indexventures.com/rewardingtalent
Rewarding Talent (online version): https://www.indexventures.com/rewardingtalent/handbook/rewarding-talent
Rewarding Talent (quick guide): https://www.indexventures.com/blog/rewarding-talent-quick-guide

Index Ventures OptionPlan: https://www.indexventures.com/optionplan

Dominic Jacquesson, Director of Talent at Index Ventures, on employee stock options

This Much I Know is the podcast from Seedcamp, Europe’s seed fund.

Tune into hear the inside story from startup founders, investors and leading tech voices: the people who’ve built businesses, scaled globally, failed fantastically and learnt massively.

Seedcamp invests early in world-class founders attacking large, global markets and solving real problems using technology. Seedcamp provides the infrastructure to fast-track a founder’s vision and create value through immediate access to smart capital, a lifelong community of support and a global network built upon a decade’s experience backing exceptional talent.

Precious on Community: Managing and Growing Community with On Deck

The Seedcamp Podcast