Building and Scaling Resistant Cultures, with Caterina Fake and Reid Hoffman
Ideas, Thoughts and Quotes pulled from…
Model Behavior, Caterina Fake and Reid Hoffman – Masters of Scale #16
Community Building, from the Ground up
The tone you set is the tone you gonna keep. Your first users and their tone will set the norm for the entire civilization.
Reid Hoffman [00:05:50]
Platform, market place, commerce site with reviews, content site with comments, social media – those are all online communities, as Reid says.
What you can control, however, is the climate in which [the] community evolves. You can make it hospitable for good behavior of for or bad behavior.
Reid Hoffman [00:06:55]
Whatever you are when you’re small, get’s amplified when you’re big.
Reid Hoffman [00:07:19]
One of the jobs of paramount importance of founders – think long-term revenue. Once you set up the breeding ground, i.e. the culture, right in the beginning, desired effects will carry on by itself and problems will mainly resolve themselves. But, keep on reading!
Two Hidden Keys to Flickr’s Success
1. Timing – Response to larger societal and cultural movements
Caterina Fake [00:15:00]
Caterina goes on and elaborates on the problem and growing customer demand Flickr saw building up on the market and their solution and business idea to wrap around it. She takes us to the year 2003, where 50% of all digital cameras where shipped with phones, but nobody had any idea where to put these photographs – the idea of Flickr was born.
2. Cultivating a Community – Shape the conversation, greet each and every new user personally
You are the person who actually everyone is taking the lead from – whatever values, whatever the morals are of the platform, of the community.
Caterina Fake [00:16:01]
These early interactions set the tone for everything that will follow. In every kind of community, from a company to an online photo sharing community, culture transmits very quickly. It’s critical to get in front of it.
Reid Hoffman [00:16:24]
Culture sticks. It’s hard to appreciate just how much it sticks.
Reid Hoffman [00:17:22]
Again, investing your time, personally as a founder, in the initial phase of the formation process of the community will be invaluable in the future. Forgetting or failing at it in the beginning, there is little you can do to recoup from it later on.
Standing Your Ground
You’re building a civilization. You have to lead by example. But it will only take you so far. Sometimes you have to assert your values at the risk of losing users.
Reid Hoffman [00:18:25]
You have to know who you are, who you’re for and what you you stand for.
Reid Hoffman [00:19:55]
It isn’t that anyone decision is the right decision. […] But you have to decide. […] Every founder of an online community must grapple with it daily. If you’re not grappling with it, you’re living with a false sense of neutrality. You’re actually allowing your most extreme users to make the decision for you. Because in these cases, a non-decision is also a decision.
Reid Hoffman [00:20:46]
As emphysized by Ryan Holiday on Tom Bilyeu’s Impact Theory, in the process of Filtering Feedback it is important to “remember what you were trying to do” and to know your values, to evaluate for yourself: is the resistance or “this person’s advice getting me closer to where I want to get, or further away from where I wanna get”. From this perspective you make decisions.
TAM
Handmade goods is the opposite of scale. […] Once you get to a network connected world, the […] TAM, Total Addressable Market, isn’t significantly higher than you think.
Reid Hoffman [00:27:50]
Reid reviews and explains his thoughts on why he didn’t took the chance to angel invest into Etsy, not recognizing its latent potential to in fact be scaleable and to getting close to accessing the TAM. For him it was like creating a corner book store or a gourmet chocolatier which are unable to be scaled in their value proposition like Amazon, or Godiva or Nestle respectively. He didn’t saw the possibility of, like with a corner book store or gourmet chocolate store from one city, Etsy going online and suddenly reaching and being available at every city, like having stores in multiple cities, each different, and as an investor, you get a piece of it, i.e. “each of them”.
Creating a Unique Culture
Counter cultural movement that places their value on [something] that [you] can get in front of.
Reid Hoffman [00:30:18]
[Position] yourself as outside of something or as counter to something. It gives you a stronger sense of identify. I stand for this and I’m not that.
Caterina Fake [00:30:32]
In the case of Etsy that meant not being big box retail, not being Walmart or Target, but “I’m soap handmade by grandma in …”.
Scaling
Include the community in decision making. Passionately devoted community members, who have a real stake at what happens in their civilization. […] It’s critical to recognize the difference between members who care about the health of the community and those who only care about themselves. When you see these members, you see the early signs of scale and comes back to the theory – what you are when you’re small, gets amplified when you grow. […] Including the community into key decisions and fostering the connection between them. In the early days, these decisions will help […] to stay true to the homespun culture.
Reid Hoffman [00:31:50]
Steering
Your moral compass [for building an online community], the things that you believe, should [not] encompass all. […]
What you tolerate, is what you are.
Caterina Fake [00:37:06]
Where to strike the balance between editorial anarchy and Orwellian control.
Caterina Fake [00:39:46]
Building up Endogenous Resistance
How to organically invigorate good behavior so that it drowns out the ugly behavior? Joi Eto (MIT Media Lab) suggest imitating bacteria cultures: Let good cultures overrun the bad culture, instead of taking antibiotics/ fighting bad with control or distractive forces. In the process, the system will build up its own resistance, which is important, given that the battle – against malicious intruders into its cultural system – will go on for ever and thus, you’ll be prepared for future “infections”. Even if it means having to take some setbacks at time to build up this resistance.
Joi Eto [00:40:33]
Links to follow up on
Books
