Scaling Community, Code, Contributors by Brittany Laughlin

awesome so I'm very excited to introduce you guys to Brittany she is a partner at lattice ventures she's an investor and an entrepreneur Brittany I've already forgotten the name of the talk because I'm totally disorganized decoding community so I'm pretty excited about community I'm excited to hear what Brittany has to say about community and then just as a reminder after Purdy's talk we're gonna have our first official break you all set all right cool please join me in welcoming Brittany yeah all right well I know I'm between talks and a break so hopefully this can be a little fun I actually wanted to start my talk talking about Drake so when I got into Berlin I got in the taxi and the taxi drivers trying to talk to me kind of asking me questions where I'm from when I'm up to and between like my terrible German and his not so good English like we really didn't have a lot to talk about so he put on like us a local station and they're playing like German house music and we're kind of you know dancing along in the cab but then this Drake song came on I don't know if you guys have heard of it it's called in my feelings like most people I think anywhere in the world you go and you start saying Kiki and in your head I love it yeah I was gonna actually see if everyone would get involved but you know making sure people like so let's try it again Kiki you awesome so of course the driver here's the song come on and immediately gets so excited he's turning around not looking at the road and starts dancing it's putting the heart out he really wanted to connect over the song and of course I've heard it a million times I've seen this tons of videos about it so it made the connection so this whole thing started because a friend of Drake's made a video of him doing a silly dance to this song and that really caught on in social media and other people actually started contributing to they didn't make any money on this there wasn't sort of a contest people just went out of their way to contribute to something that they believed in it got so out of hand that Will Smith even got a drone to film him doing this dance on a rooftop like this was more than just a song this became a movement so this is great for Drake but like what does this have to do with you and building a blockchain well the path that they took is the same path you should take when thinking about building community so the first step is building awareness like have you heard of Drake before the song maybe maybe not but just hearing that name the next was doing some investigation maybe you've heard the song maybe you saw a video and then the third step is really where community comes in and that is in contributing going out of your way to film a video to do this now this is the same path that you guys can take because community is all about connection and contribution so I know this because I was an investor in a number of companies that have had millions of contributors and is out of billions of dollars of value because of that so how many of you here have contributed to one of these platforms in some way whether it's a tweet planning a meet-up maybe you've backed a Kickstarter maybe you've used Stack Overflow maybe you've answered some questions there these platforms do not exist without contributors that is the key thing that keeps them going they're code you could replicate it if it were a block chain you could fork it but the value really relies on the fact that contributors keep showing up to these networks contributors are very powerful and we know this in blockchain there's hundreds of projects that are looking for contributors and I know many of you are working on either daps or protocols or services that need contributors I knew this is a controversial slide but they just look pretty so blockchain needs contributors and we know this and it's not just in one way it's actually a lot of ways we need people who can be peers we need people who can write code we need feedback we need the content and we need compute all of these things are essential so here I'm gonna talk about where to start and building your community to get these things so the first step is a clear message now I know that there's a lot of fancy ways to talk about your technology but if it's not clear from an average user you're probably not gonna get very far so I learned this lesson when I was at Union Square Ventures I was with the team for just over three years and we did a lot of stuff we invested in companies we have prolific bloggers like Wilson we did a lot in the community itself but what we learned is that we really needed to simplify what we were saying in the market and to do that we turned our entire investment thesis into a single tweet and I challenge anyone building a project in here to be able to communicate your message in 140 characters or less not the 240 that they now allow but the 140 or less because this message is the thing that we repeated in every entrepreneur meeting it's what we said to new hires it's what we said to people who are curious about what we did it made it really easy so if you're attracting community members and you can't explain your project and one sentence you need to start here and you can start doing that by distributing on some of these channels that you see here that's telegram medium YouTube discord Twitter so this is where a lot of projects point to when they say they have a community they say oh look how many followers I have I look how many telegram users this is only the top of the funnel this is not defined what your community is those are a little bit vanity metrics that just tell you like where you're starting but there's a bunch more in the process it so needs to happen so the next step is about a path forward so the example of a path forward is actually a about a few friends of mine we were sitting down to hack on a blockchain project to really test things out and we started with the Steam Network has anyone contributed to Steam here have people heard of Steam ok yeah so steams been around for a number of years so we thought we'd start there so we had an engineer we had a data scientist like I've been reading lots of white papers so together we spent about six hours just reading everything that was available from the github to documentation to articles just to understand what we were supposed to do and all of those led us to the same pathway which was we needed to sign up for an account so in steam when you want to sign up for an account you can actually sign up for free but it takes two weeks to get down that path so they'll get back to you when it's ready the other alternative is that you can actually use aetherium that you can buy steam then you can use that steam to get into the network immediately so we went through that very painful process mainly because we had already spent six hours learning about the project so we're like alright let's get to this let's keep going so building that kind of flow for your team is important what do you want people to do after they read a white paper do you want them to go somewhere do you want them to sign up should they get emails from you is there more that they can do besides just like joining a telegram channel and so some of the content that you usually seen a path forward this is learning getting deeper maybe it's a white paper a blue paper a yellow paper a gray paper a red paper whatever color paper you want to have but making sure that you can maybe track some of these people is a key thing that a lot of people miss so you may have hundreds of people coming and reading your white paper but you may need like never know who they are where they came from what they're looking for so go beyond just Google Analytics to tell you how many people are coming maybe you could have them sign up for a newsletter or drip campaign to let them know about more once things are launching so the third one I think is the most important so I have a lot of examples but it's about open dialog so for this example actually needs your participation in this it'll take 30 seconds or less and it comes in two parts so the first part is I need you to turn to one of your neighbors and just tell them your name introduce yourself tell them your name that's it all right okay awesome alright now we have the second part some of you may be jumping ahead all right love this okay so the next step is we're gonna ask a question and now this one you have to be brief so I want you in five words or less to tell the person next to you why you came to eat Berlin is it to learn is it to meet people is that to make money okay awesome job so you guys are all all-stars at this and you're actually exemplifying the exact magic of community so the exact magic of community is actually dialogue it's not just sending out information into the world it's actually having that back and forth so like this is what dialogue looks like back and forth it's talking to the people it's connecting with the people around you it usually has a place like here it was taking place in a physical space it's usually between two parties at least it may be more people but this is like the key part of community and I think a lot of people miss that so this is an example of a telegram group that I'm in that has thousands of people they have all the vanity metrics but there is no dialogue literally it's just hundreds of people joining and then the occasional hi hi hi hi hi this is not a community this is not very engaging the good news is is that someone noticed this and they decided to do something about it they actually started telling dad jokes as of means to get people to react and of course with everything blockchain there has to be Drake memes in there but this is actually successful community because people are actually engaging like there's a reason that they came back and that they open this app and they type something in that is a really high friction point like think of the number of places you go on the web in a day and you do nothing but just sit there and look at the screen you don't up oh you don't like you don't comment you just sit there so getting people actually to cross that chasm it's great even if it is with silly things like dad jokes so there are other places besides just chat that you can have conversations I think github provides a really great place for conversations so sorry this quality so bad but basically commits or like conversations right someone says something someone submits something someone submits something back you can like it you can mint on it github is a great place especially if your technical now github is also a place that you can host other types of dialogue so the etherium core devs have a call on a regular basis and they document everything in github which is great so if you want to actually get on the phone and ask a question using your voice you can do that using github and so maybe this could apply to your project maybe you have update calls like I know live pier which is live streaming this they have a regular call every week so people can have those dialogues even a platform like medium which is longer form is a place that people are having that dialogue some people you know with the early crypto Kitty's days there was controversy over who owned the kitty and with that there was actually blog post going back and forth of in defense of this here's my response to that so people are having those really long conversations in a digital platform - so don't disregard medium even though it's a longer form dialogue so this is the formula to get you from people just knowing what your project is called - what it does to actually contributing to your project but there is one key thing that is really missing in this but first I will show you this I just took this an D cred so aetherium does a great job of engaging the community but I just came across D creds website I'm not an investor I just thought what they did was really helpful so check out their website if he if you can this shows the path so this tour will help you get started they tell you what D cred does they ask you to join the community they give you a very clear path of how to get there and then they lead you right to their forum so you can click through and get to a place where you can actually ask questions and learn more about D card if you want so if you're looking for like hints I think they do a really good job I've looked at lots of websites most companies will put up their telegram link but won't tell you what you're supposed to do there so the missing component of this equation is about the why why people come why you come to eat Berlin why you buy into something now a lot of crypto investors will tell you that's because of these three things oh well people want to contribute to a network because they want to make money or like that's all they care about but like I don't really think that's true and I and I haven't seen that in any of the other platforms I've worked with so I think there's a lot of reasons why people are involved but if you can understand why people are coming to your project what thing they're serving you're gonna keep them for a lot longer if they just come for money they're gonna go leave whenever there's a better place to make money if they're coming because of the people that's really strong if they're coming because of the curiosity of what they can do that's really great even Lane here has said publicly why he's involved in a community so people are public about why so if you're building a project maybe you have two people who've downloaded it that's fine ask them why what did they come for what are they looking for for Lane he said it's about ownership it's about being part of something larger that is a really great way and that's a really great path to get through why why are you going through and setting up a really hard theory and wallet to do this why are you reading white papers that are really boring and poorly written why are you putting up with decentralized services that are not as good as centralized services the why of something bigger is the only way that we're gonna get through this and the only way you're gonna get people on your side the good news is that usually this is a flywheel though once people got started so you're not repeating the path every time once people kind of get in they get sold in the network they keep coming back so different than if maybe read about aetherium maybe bought some aetherium maybe you decided to apply to come to eat Berlin maybe you're gonna hack on something you continue to show up learn more about the product and they go deeper and deeper and deeper so overall community is about contribution and connection that involves people and content we saw the flow and I know that we have a lot of work to do in the blockchain space we need all the contributors we can get so anything you can do to help us realize the vision of a decentralized future is great and I'm encouraged because I know some of these communities already exist there's a lot of tribalism whether you're a maximalist 1/8 head a ripple gang or any other cool name you can think of this is what the future looks like so I appreciate your time thank you say hello Twitter I'm happy to keep the dialogue going [Applause]