I love nerding out with people about community.
Before joining Bolster at the end of 2020, I spent 5+ years building the network and community at Foundry, a venture capital fund based in Boulder, CO that invests in companies as well as other venture funds. My role was to build and strengthen the network and community of CEOs, founders, executives, investing partners and operators at our Partner Funds, as well as represent us in the community and startup ecosystem nationally. As a team of one full time person focused on community, I sought out a network of peers building community at VCs, Accelerators, Nonprofits, and beyond.
I’m lucky that my role at Bolster, leading our partnerships with investors, keeps me connected to this amazing network of community/network/platform building peer groups.
I find myself happily digging into the weeds with these folks on how they manage their community jumping from high-level strategy into the nitty gritty of what platform and tools they are leveraging.
Often, I share resources that I discovered over the years that I wish I had in the early days to help guide and inform my community building strategy. I’ve sent these so many times over email I figured it was time to write them up and share publicly.
Major gratitude and hat tip to the folks that created these resources and communities. Please comment on this post or email/DM me on Twitter/LI if there are other resources you’ve found helpful I’ve missed!
VC Platform/Community/Network:
Here are links to a blog series a VC Platform peer, Cory Bolotsky, wrote laying out different components of platform/community. I highly encourage any current VC platform lead or team member to go through the few question survey to get your honeycomb matrix here to show opportunities/blind spots. He breaks down the components of VC platform strategy in a really digestible and comprehensive (albeit a long form) way. If you’re a VC community builder, you will eat this up.
- A Tool to Build & Benchmark Your VC Platform Strategy
- Ecosystem, Network, and Community. The Strategy Behind Your VC Firm’s Most Important Relationships
- The VC Community Honeycomb: Identifying and Prioritizing Your Firm’s Community
- The Tricks to Building and Engaging Your VC Firm’s Community
The VC Platform Field Guide was created by a group of Platform leaders (largely UK Based) that runs through:
- How VC firms can improve deal flow
- Lead portfolio companies to success
- And contribute to a thriving tech ecosystem
It’s 60 pages filled with insights and strategies contributed by platform leads from VC funds such as Atomico, AngelList, Seedcamp, Entrepreneur First & many others.
Belle Raab from Visible VC wrote a great guide on “VC Portfolio Support Best Practices” you can check out here.
Back in the day, building a tool that sold to just VC firms was not seen as a viable business model. Now VC specific tools are popping up left and right as well as firms using multi-purpose no-code/low-code tools like Airtable, Zapier, and Notion to power their firm on the backend (Will Bricker at Hustle Fund wrote a great piece on their stack here). Check out VC Stack for a directory of tools and resources
VC Platform
A group I highly recommend checking out and joining (if you meet the criteria outlined here) is the VC Platform community (no cost) of 1k+ platform leaders around the globe. This is the VC Platform Megaphone and THE megagroup you should absolutely be part of if you’re doing this kind of work. This community has been solely run by volunteers including Cory Bolotsky mentioned above.
Let’s Talk Ops
If you’re looking for some additional VC Ops community randing from platform to finance and operations at VC firms, Lets Talk Ops led by Kristen Ostro, is for VC Ops leaders and has chapters in SF, Silicon Valley, LA, and NY. It’s a super close knit and awesome community that hosts intimate in-person events, annual summits, mentorship programs, and has an incredibly valuable and active slack group.
General Community Building Resources
David Spinks, CMX, and Business of Belonging Book
Another great follow and leader in the community leader space (not necessarily VC) is David Spinks (also a great follow on twitter) who started CMX (THE community for community builders helping them thrive) and works at Bevy (Community Events Platform). He wrote a book about how to make community your competitive advantage called The Business of Belonging I recently read and have already started recommending to community leaders left and right.
People & Co (acq. by Substack in 2021)
People & Co are the folks behind a book/podcast/company that highlights community leaders and helped me greatly along my commmunity building journey. I found their terminology and framing (Build your community with people, not for them + stages of a community; spark the flame, stoke the fire, pass the torch) as well as their general approach and style spot on!
I’ve enjoyed listening to their podcast, Get Together, and their Get Together book is a community builders bible along with the Business of Belonging I mentioned above. They get into tactical tips of community building after illustrating different communities with short vignettes. Love a good story and they are PRO storytellers
I love this graphic they created that perfectly highlights why Mesh Networks are so powerful and the strong belief in the notion of Metcalfe’s Law – the power of a network increases exponentially with the number of nodes on that network.
As I usually say at the end of my emails sharing some of these above resources “Hope above is helpful and not totally overwhelming. 🤓”
Happy community building, you got this!
Also published on Medium.