I’ve been building communities all my life. In the beginning, it was accidental - I noticed that most groups were willing to do things if someone (anyone!), provided a small amount of direction, “Hey guys, let’s go to the beach and do X, Y, Z,” vs let’s all stand around discussing things we could do for 30 minutes, with everyone politely deferring to everyone else and no decision being made.
After relocating from SF to Singapore in 2018, one of our first tasks after settling the mundane and never-ending tasks of the move was to build community. We had long been spoiled in SF since my wife had grown up in the Bay Area, we’d both gone to undergrad there, and we both worked in technology - we had community built-in. Landing in Singapore, we needed to start from scratch. Making friends later in life is a fun exercise because you know yourself better - we wanted to build a group that we felt invigorated by, where we can learn and grow together.
Communities often organically form around shared experiences, but when you’re new to a place, how do you create a shared experience for strangers? What gives you that right to convene people?
Back to my old bag of tricks - start with a dinner party, add wine, and just offer a place and time to meet. And that’s how we began, I invited 2 people I knew to dinner, told them my goal was to create a dinner of supportive women in tech, and asked them to bring 1 or 2 other folks they thought might be interesting. Over the last 24 months, the group has grown from that initial set of 6 into 30 women who meet monthly in each others’ homes to discuss tech, life, policy and everything else. I wanted to share a few of our learnings so far, and am curious to learn more about how others think about community building!
Relationship strength is built on a number of axes: frequency, intensity and shared values. That’s why so many people make friends at school, work or religious groups. These venues have built in frequency, and often include intense points of connection and shared values. When you’re trying to create something from scratch, you have to create those conditions.
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Frequency (and cadence and predictability) - It’s hard for people to build trust with one another if they don’t have enough consistent touch points. We started with a monthly dinner where the next dinner was scheduled at the end of each prior dinner - this was suboptimal (particularly in pre-COVID times) as folks weren’t able to plan ahead as well. At the start of 2020, I set out the dates for the entire year so people could plan around the dinner if they wanted to attend.
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Intensity & Commitment - If you can ratchet up the intensity of an interaction, you don’t need as much time or frequency; but this is tricky in groups of strangers (or relative strangers, which is where most professional acquaintances begin). In a group setting, I think about how to increase the quality of the interactions each person can have with another person (1:1), but also with the group more broadly. In this scenario, I’ve found that structure is my friend. I set topics for each dinner and use that as a starting prompt to get conversation started. The topic itself is less important than just giving people a place to start and warm-up their conversational muscles. I’ve found it also helps newer members ease into conversations while they are still meeting people. The commitment is pretty accessible - you just have to host dinner in the rotation of folks; this has ramped up during the pandemic as we are limited to groups of 5, which has resulted in having multiple dinners on the same night, rather than one big dinner. Unintentionally, this has also increased intensity as smaller groups are more able to get deeper with each other faster. I notice folks signing up for different hosts to rotate the people they see each month.
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Values - it helps to be explicit about why a community exists, and what are the expected norms for those in the group. This is still a work in progress as I have not explicitly laid it out, instead choosing to shape it through member selection and modeling of desired behaviors. It’s not meant to be a “networking” group, as I don’t want folks to be transactional. I want folks to come with an open mind and a willingness to collaborate and be authentic. This shows up when folks ask for help in the WhatsApp group, and fellow members jump in to assist. We celebrate members’ accomplishments, but have a tacit understanding that the group is not meant for self-promotion.
Composition of members - I set out to get a good mix of founders, senior operators, investors and perhaps more specific to this region, policy makers. I optimize for people with interesting experiences and perspectives. Getting a good variety of folks is part of what makes the interactions fun.
Logistics: Reduce the friction - Relationships as the focus
- Lower the bar - I have 2 kids and a dog. My house is not really up to Architectural Digest standards, which I think made people more comfortable about hosting once they saw that it was really just about providing a space where people can convene. (also, just keep pouring wine!)
- Private - there is no publicity for the group; we don’t tweet or instagram dinners, all members join via word of mouth. My belief is that this helps participants feel safer in sharing authentically
- Separate logistics coordination from conversation (Whatsapp + Google Doc) - we run the group with a combination of WhatsApp (conversation) and a Google Sheet (logistics - dinner dates, addresses)
How do we know if it’s working?
It’s early, but here are some encouraging signs:
- Folks who’ve met in the group are also meeting up outside of the monthly dinners. “This women’s group is pretty awesome. I was in many things in nyc but this is so much more social but also involved and consistent than all the things I did in nyc. The ladies connect and want to connect outside of the dinners also. I would have never thought of these mini-teach in sessions like today would have many participants given how busy people are with family and work.”
- Dinner members are protective of the group, and refer people thoughtfully
- People who had met before are building deeper relationships as a consequence of the dinner: “Btw I don’t think I’ve said this before but wanted to tell you that I really admire your drive & effort in building up this salon community. The irony is, a number of these women I’ve met in passing before but never really got to know properly. A, B, C are good examples of ppl who have been in the ecosystem a long time & we never really connected till now”
What’s next?
We are experimenting with virtual teach-ins, in addition to the dinners, where members share in depth on different topics where they have deep subject matter expertise. Our first one was on Asian Public Equities, led by a member who runs a long-short hedge fund; this was great exposure for a broad swathe of the group that is largely private market focused. Some future talks have been proposed on a wide range of topics: Data-driven policy making, Collecting Art, Talent acceleration, and Coaching.
I am curious about how to spawn more independent groups using the initial membership as a seed - one member moved to Austin, and is meeting up with another who is there for family matters. Can we replicate the same trust and camaraderie for people who’ve never met?
My dream is for this group of women to be a strong and trusted professional group where folks help one another in the manner of a professional sorority - where the knowledge that someone is part of the community is enough verification that there are shared values.